Authors: Mike Gonzalez
Gardel and Razzano were well known in the theatres of Buenos Aires. The duo lasted until 1925, but Gardel had already moved long before that into singing tango. His recording of âMi noche triste' in 1917 was a huge and instant success â it sold 100,000 copies. He had first sung it in Montevideo, after its composer Pascual Contursi approached Gardel at a concert. Razzano was sceptical in the beginning, but Gardel began increasingly to perform tangos, and by 1920 he and Razzano had more or less abandoned their old repertoire in favour of this immensely popular new form.
This was also the beginning of the age of radio. His partner's recurring throat problems left Gardel to take centre stage, which he did not just in Argentina. His recordings were popular in Spain
in particular, and in the early Twenties he made a series of tours there. He was prolific; in a relatively short career he recorded over 500 tangos, many of them his own compositions with lyrics by his constant collaborator, the journalist Alfredo Le Pera. But these came later. More importantly, he was the interpreter and performer of the iconic tangos of Contursi, Celedonio Flores and others. Gardel was the voice of the Golden Age of Tango.
The
Guardia Nueva
had taken tango from the dance floor to the stage, the theatre and the cabaret circuit, with Gardel at its head. Musically, it was perhaps a more adventurous time, as the opportunities for solo performance multiplied in this new context. Tango was certainly becoming smoother, more sophisticated, less tied to the rhythm of dance. Its dramatic narrative became increasingly important and the bandoneon not simply its background, but a companion to the words, almost a commentator on the relationship between the past and the present of tango.
The bandoneon is impossible to play without involvement; it engages the whole body, and not just the fingers and the arms. The drama of the song is somehow enacted, and the singer and the player exchange regular glances of complicity.
THE BANDONEON PLAYER: GERARDO'S STORY
I'm a student of the bandoneon and I respect the history of the instrument. It's a diatonic aerophone, that is, it has a different range opening and closing. The arrangement of buttons is quite illogical because instead of notes being next to one another, they're all over the place. There are half a dozen buttons at each side that give you a chord opening and a fifth closing. That was logical when it was invented in Germany with a harmonic relationship between them. But when it arrived in Argentina, musicians kept asking for notes to be added, so they were
apparently randomly added around those central buttons. But it's only apparently illogical because having two notes next to each other an octave apart probably makes it easier to play a tango. And some people say that because of that arrangement, it's the only keyboard for playing tango.
The tango is its own music, even though it is related to classical music and Argentine folk music too. It has harmonics, cadences, passages between the bass notes, so the structure of tango music is binary, verse and choruses repeated twice, though sometimes it has three parts. The harmonic richness is huge. That happened when tango musicians began to study music because the first generation played by ear. The early bandoneon players didn't know the instruments and didn't read music so they learned by ear. That was the Guardia Vieja.
They played in the brothels. That's a good story because the bandoneon was invented in Germany to be played in churches instead of the harmonium. But it never really became popular there and ended up in the brothels of Buenos Aires. When it arrived, tangos were played on guitars and flutes and later the piano. By 1900, the bandoneon was the dominant instrument in tango. Then around 1915 came the Guardia Nueva with De Caro and Arolas, a phenomenal composer.
The bandoneon has its own vocabulary and it would be good for someone to collect all those terms that musicians used. âLa mugre', for example (literally, âthe muck') â musicians would say âput in some muck' and you know it means adding a semitone above or below the main note. Of course, that doesn't appear in the written score and if musicians come from other traditions, they play what they read and it isn't tango. There's a big difference between the way it's written and the way it's played. And I think that's closely linked to the singer. If you want to learn how to phrase tango, you have to listen to the singers. It's like the way
the bagpipes are played in the north of Scotland â they follow the singers.
A tango musician will add to the phrasing. And before the Golden Age of tango, the orchestras were working orchestras â they had to compose and arrange their own music. That's the origin of the âyeites', the way in which the player moves chromatically between one note and another instead of going directly. They're dramatic runs, I suppose. Rock musicians still use the term in Argentina â though the word comes from tango.
It isn't the same as jazz because tango musicians tended not to improvise. The music was written and the musicians had to stick to the composition and the arrangement. These orchestras were playing for dance. AnÃbal Troilo, for example, composed some wonderful pieces and there was no one to equal his bandoneon playing. But he was a working musician and he didn't stray from the music. Troilo felt his music, he spoke as he wrote and he had tango in his soul. You can see on the videos that he had a connection with the instrument. I play other instruments and all the people I know who have taken up bandoneon after playing another instrument agree that the relationship you have with the bandoneon is completely different from any other instrument. He was very professional and when Astor Piazzola worked with him, he said, âLook don't decorate, just play the music.'
Your relationship with your instrument is physical. Your fingers don't produce the sound of the bandoneon; they just press buttons. The different articulations and attacks can be compared to the piano. It has a shorter range, of course â five and a half octaves. Like the cello, you can sustain notes forever, opening and closing. But all the sound comes from moving keys, from moving the bellows â so it is very physical.
I'm a bit mystical about the bandoneon. I'm a percussionist and I have my favourite drums but I never talked to any of
them. But I do talk to my bandoneon, though it doesn't usually answer.
Why did I take up bandoneon? I grew up under the last military government and tango wasn't popular. As far as young people were concerned, tango was like a closed sect. You never saw people out and about doing tango. It just wasn't cool â and it was miserable too. And yet tango was a backcloth to my growing up â I listened to it on the radio, my parents played tango in the house, and I liked it. But tango was the music of old people, and the bandoneon was a kind of secret instrument. People said you had to start learning when you were five or six. That's because tango was the rock and roll of its time and parents would buy their kids a bandoneon like today's parents will buy their kids an electric guitar.
That's why they started so young because in their day the bandoneon was music. It is very difficult â some people say it's the most difficult instrument to learn. You can't see the keyboard, so you have to learn where the notes are, and you have to learn four keyboards â right and left closing and opening. If you make it through the first six months, that's it. You're in love. Lots of people give up. But I started late and I took it up knowing I wouldn't ever tame it â and I know I never will dominate it. Because the bandoneon has a memory, music inside, tastes and smells. I don't know the history of my instrument, but I know it has a history of its own. It's had two previous owners, it has seen the world. The bandoneon has its secrets and it will never give them up. You have to draw them out, playing, practising. And if someone else plays my instrument, it will sound completely different. It is so personal that everything you do influences the sound. I've never felt such frustration, such ecstasy, such love.
Â
Â
The tone of the tango-song of the 1920s is nostalgic, plangent (just like the bandoneon), evoking a lost world within living memory. For the most part, the story is told from the margins of the barrio, its voice predominantly male and complaining of betrayal and misunderstanding, of lost love and despair. Its moral universe is conservative and masculine. The likely history of its implied narrator â obviously a recently retired
compadrito
â the romantic story of love and devotion misunderstood and rejected cannot hide the fact that it was the woman who was the breadwinner and he its beneficiary. The setting for this drama is urban; the light cast by the yellow street lights over the singer waiting, hopelessly, for his ex-lover to pass by, though she has deserted him for a rich man who will keep her, as long as she is young and beautiful. And when it becomes clear that he can never win her back, then all that remains is the long slide into oblivion recounted in one of Gardel's most popular tangos âCuesta abajo' (Downhill).
Era, para mÃ, la vida entera
,
como un sol de primavera
,
mi esperanza y mi pasión
.
SabÃa que en el mundo no cabÃa
toda la humilde alegrÃa
de mi pobre corazón
.
Ahora, cuesta abajo en mi rodada
,
las ilusiones pasadas
yo no las puedo arrancar
.
Sueño con el pasado que añoro
,
el tiempo viejo que lloro
y que nunca volverá
.
Por seguir tras de su huella
yo bebà incansablemente
en mi copa de dolor
,
pero nadie comprendÃa
que, si todo yo lo daba
en cada vuelta dejaba
pedazos de corazón
.
Ahora, triste, en la pendiente
,
solitario y ya vencido
yo me quiero confesar:
si aquella boca mentÃa
el amor que me ofrecÃa
,
por aquellos ojos brujos
yo habrÃa dado siempre más
.
She was my whole life / Like spring sunshine / My hope and my passion. / She knew that the world wasn't big enough / For the humble joy I felt / In my heart. / Now, sliding downhill / I can't get rid of / Those illusions of the past / that past / I dream of, long for / The old times I weep for /That will never return
.
Because I followed her trail / I drank relentlessly / From my glass of pain / But no-one understood / That if I gave everything / I left pieces of myself behind / At every turn. / Now, sad and in decline / Alone and defeated / I want to confess. / If that mouth lied / When it offered me love / I would have given anything / For those bewitching eyes
.
(
âCuesta abajo', Downhill â Alfredo Le Pera, 1934
)
But beauty fades and fate brings the arrogant mistress back to the reality of ageing and poverty. It is as if the man who sings is claiming for himself a kind of moral superiority, though he too has been the victim of passions and blind desire that led him in so many tangos to leave behind the lodestar of a moral life â the mother who is home, stability and selfless love. Many tangos evoke the place of innocence, of childhood, its location indeterminate but its role in the drama clear. It is the time
before corruption, a rural Eden overseen by a caring, undemanding mother who seems to be in an endless posture of waiting for the son or daughter to acknowledge the error of their ways and return, laden with guilt, to âla casita de mis viejos', to quote a famous tango by Juan Carlos Cobián, âthe home of my parents'. The âsienes plateadas', the silver temples, are a conceit repeated in many tangos, to mark both the passing of time and the burden of experience; only the ailing mother can offer absolution, in the absence of any religious personnel, and the unconditional love whose absence in the urban underworld is so often recalled.
Carlos Gardel, however, largely because of the flawless beauty of his voice, lifted tango from its dangerous closeness to sentimentality and invested words and music with a passionate intensity. Gardel was more than simply a singer, the
zorzal
, or thrush, he was named after; he was also
el morocho del Abasto
, âthe dark-skinned boy from the Abasto district', the embodiment of the tango story. All these things prepared the ground for superstardom of a new kind â in and beyond Argentina, and in the new medium of film.
There is a suggestion that he was first approached by Paramount during a hugely successful tour in Paris in 1928â9 (70,000 records were sold in three months while he was there).
3
His first appearance on celluloid (other than bit parts in two much earlier silent films) was in late 1930, in ten short films of his best-known tangos filmed in Paris and directed by Eduardo Morera. Paramount did eventually get their man a year later, when he filmed
Luces de Buenos Aires
(
Lights of Buenos Aires
), directed by Adelqui Millar, which included his famous line âTomo y obligo' (âI drink and I buy rounds'). Paramount was desperately seeking to enter the Latin American market, and in 1932 contracted Gardel for three more films, to be directed by Louis Garnier. It was Garnier who introduced Gardel to Alfredo Le Pera in Paris in 1932 (though
they had met briefly before) and set in motion the intensely creative but short-lived collaboration between the singer and the lyricist. Le Pera was a journalist and theatre critic who was employed by Paramount to write the scripts for Gardel's films and the lyrics of the songs they included. In 1934, produced by Western Electric and distributed by Paramount, Gardel made three more films, all filmed in New York:
Cuesta abajo
(
Downhill
),
El tango en Broadway
and
El dÃa que me quieras
(
The day you love me
), which included two of Gardel's most loved (and most beautifully written) tangos â âEl dÃa que me quieras' and the glorious âVolver'. Le Pera's contribution to Gardel's career, and his posthumous fame, is not often recognized. But Le Pera's brief was to write for Gardel in a language that would resonate throughout Latin America, and tell a story that was universal. For Paramount, Gardel was the centre of its planned conquest of the Latin American market. Indeed, their ambitions were grander still, for they envisaged a future for him as an English-language star (one of the passengers killed with him in the crash that ended his life was José Playa, his English tutor). Unfortunately, Gardel's command of English proved disappointingly tenuous. Instead he embarked on a tour of a Latin America, where he played everywhere to adoring crowds. His brief visit to Venezuela is commemorated in a popular and frequently performed play
El dÃa que me quieras
by José Ignacio Cabrujas, in which his arrival provokes a crisis between the members of a bourgeois family. Elvira, the jilted spinster daughter, reports excitedly on Gardel's arrival in Caracas.