Development of tango?

http://www.gardelweb.com/tango_history_paul_vernon.htm

I wonder if Piazzola ended up remaking tango to fit his more European image of it?

I watched a program once about tango in finland where apparently its quite a popular folk-type music. I remember reading abt a cpl of scandinavians that try to update it by using tango like sounds w/electronics and so on. I think Kagel has written works for accordion but prob not so much w/tango in my mind and I've read an interview w/him where he once said something like "i'm not here to write aboriginal tangos using wrong chords".

Piazolla ws taught in a conservatory and I thought that his conception of tango involved a reading of its raw folk-form through his conservatory training coupled w/ some sort of improvisational impulse (something that is inherent in rooted forms to a degree, as oposed to classical where this impulse has been said to have been conciously suppressed from time to time).

I don't like the nervousness of the rhythm. I'm already nervous. I guess that could work the opposite way: I could like it because it mirrors my nervousness/anxiety, but that's not how it turns out. (It's also maybe just too close to European classical music, especially for something I'm expected to dance to.)

(It looks like I mis-spelled Piazzolla, but so did you.)

well there's the older tango which has this specific rhythm that you could dance to, but maybe its the forceful nature of its playing that might be the source of the nervous-ness rather than how close it might be to european music.

http://www.bajofondotangoclub.com/

I never found out the truth of the story, but Tango is certainly big in Finland.

Thompson has written about African and Latin music. I saw him speak on a panel in DC and he was very entertaining. He's a character.

"there I met Lampazo. Lampazo's a dance nickname, it means literally "Sweepy." I pricked up my ears, because that's also a hip-hop dance name – guys who know how to sweep the competition, or sweep, glide, on the floor. Sweepy. Sweepy Molina to this day is still one of the best b-boy dancers on the planet. And that interested me, that I was already beginning to hear little overlaps, little cultural cognations with hip-hop. And when Lampazo taught me, he said, "Well, to begin with, you've gotta know what a corte and a quebrada is." Corte means stop, freeze. I thought, "oh, that's interesting, because you have the freeze in hip-hop." And then, he said, a quebrada is, you break your hips, you bend your knees, and then you go down. I thought, "Well, this is very familiar." So those are the two innermost African-influenced steps of the tango. Then there's a hell of a lot of western influence here. There's what they call tango liso, the smoothed-out tango. Then there's the erect, the straight-like-a-ruler back, of flamenco, but also western court dancing since the Renaissance. That's in salsa and tango. But the earliest tango, around 1900, the one that Lampazo taught me, taught me to recognize, although I'm a junior varsity dancer and I'm not really good at it yet – give me a decade – was canyengue..."

"To get back to your question: it was seeing so many mirrors of so many other African-influenced things. And then when I learned that tango came from milonga, and the beat of milonga was bang-ki-ging-ging, bang-ki-ging-ging, suddenly that opened up whole halls of mirrors, reverberations of tango's connection. I realized: this is transnational, long before the term was coined. "

"First of all, there are about two to three thousand Afro-Argentines – a cadre – lost in this sea of 8 million white faces. But there are also Cape Verdeans , and there are a couple of African Americans in the North. Statistically, Argentina seems to be white, to such an extent that once I was writing a chapter on a table of a restaurant in Buenos Aires, the waiter came by and saw I had a photograph of two of my black friends who danced tango, and he said, "¿De cuál país son ellos?" -- What country are they from? And at that moment tango was playing on a loudspeaker. I said, "They are not only as Argentine as you are, but Mr. Posadas is the great-grandnephew of Carlos Posadas," who wrote one of the first tangos. And he was amazed."

So when I interviewed Kip Hanrahan recently, he said he'd come to hate tango, but he had enjoyed working with Astor Piazzola.

Maria, I can see how tango could threaten a relationship, but I guess that's true for most types of partner dancing. However, I see more people saying about tango that they wouldn't want their significant other dancing it with someone else, than about any other dance (although I suppose reggaeton's perreo is becoming a close second).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7562848.stm