Tango: Sex and Rhythm of the City PDF
Preview Tango: Sex and Rhythm of the City
TANGO The Reverb series looks at the connections between music, artists and performers, musical cultures and places. It explores how our cultural and historical understanding of times and places may help us to appreciate a wide variety of music, and vice versa. reverb-series.co.uk Series editor: John Scanlan Already published The Beatles in Hamburg Ian Inglis Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock’n’Roll John Scanlan Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa and Rap David Treece Tango: Sex and Rhythm of the City Mike Gonzales and Marianella Yanes TANGO SEX AND RHYTHM OF THE CITY MIKE GONZALEZ AND MARIANELLA YANES reaktion books With thanks to Antonio, my father, who loved Gardel; Elena and Candelario for the tangos that you sang; Benito Velasco, for his tango club in Caracas. Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2013 Copyright © Mike Gonzalez and Marianella Yanes 2013 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 9 781 78023 107 5 CONTENTS PROLOGUES 7 1 STRANGERS IN THE CITY 11 2 A CITY DIVIDED 36 3 TANGO GOES TO PARIS 59 4 TANGO FINDS ITS VOICE 81 5 GARDEL AND THE GOLDEN AGE 105 6 THE DYING OF THE LIGHT 134 7 ASTOR PIAZZOLA AND TANGO NUEVO 151 8 THE LONG ROAD HOME 169 Chronology 189 References 198 Select Bibliography 204 Discography and Filmography 207 Acknowledgements 209 Copyright Acknowledgements 210 Index 211 PROLOGUES tango mine: marianella’s story My home in Caracas was a place of peace at a turbulent political time, perhaps because it was a temple of women, to which men were invited at weekends. My sisters and I, the spoiled children of my nine aunts who shared our weekends and its endless meals, mimicked in our small way the steps and the lyrics that emerged from the vinyl records spinning on the record player. The music was a mix of popular ballads, rancheras, son and mambos – all very usefulwhen the time came to polish the floor in preparation for an evening’s dancing. In those days the floors were polished with hot wax dissolved in paraffin, a process so dangerous that the children had to be kept out of the room until the concrete floor tiles were covered. Then we were allowed in to help with the polishing by dancing on spongy rags tied to our feet – floor polishers were an unimaginable luxury. The job was done only when those coloured floors were glassy enough to reflect our faces in them. And we all sang while we danced. We could guess the mood of my mother, my grandmother, our neighbours and our wonderful aunts who accom- panied us throughout our childhood, from the rhythm of the music. Disappointment in love, betrayal and rejection found some consola- tiononly in the tango, the rancheras and the popular ballads. And that became even more intense and interesting when the television was turned on to watch the Dark Skinned Boy From Abasto, dear Carlos Gardel, in those melodramatic performances with which he graced Argentine cinema in the early Thirties. My aunts wept, my 7 tango mother sighed – she was never one for tears, like my grandmother, whose hard exterior softened only with that seductive suffering look that Gardel wore when he sang ‘Her eyes closed’. And my grandmother would say, ‘How sad, the poor man, alone without his mother – and men without mothers always suffer!’ It was a hint directed at my mother because she couldn’t cook and had divorced and because her second marriage, from which my sisters were born, had not been blessed in church. My grandmother’s criticisms were merciless, even though the situation was common to most working-class Latin American families. In general, couples got together without the approval of the Church or the civil registry; my grandmother herself was an example, with her three couplings, each of which had produced a child. Still, she did not expect her children to repeat her life story and the tango songs offered faithful portraits of her world. But the big event of the weekend began after lunch, when the lovers appeared with their guitars to sing their passionate serenades, just like the lovers in Mexican films who sang beneath the balconies of their beloveds. The songs – tangos, boleros and rancheras – sounded authentic in their mouths, turning their dramatic lyrics into declarations of love that in that feminine space fertilized the unions and the separations of the future. There were the sisters in love with the same man, the men seducing several of the sisters, the bedroom secrets, the unexpected pregnancies, the jealousies, flirtations and rejections that only alcohol or new secret passions could assuage. There, surrounded by the seductive dances and the melodious strumming of guitars, I learned the melodramatic visions that each tango contained. I absorbed them so well that their tragic vision of the world became words in the dialogues between the actors in the soap operas that I wrote for Venezuelan television. Tango is more than a tuneful entertainment: it is a portrait of poor men and women, it is a sharp prick of hunger and thirst, it is a desolate road to homes overwhelmed by need. But at the same 8
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