Tango Archive

I guess it wasn’t just Tanturi, Troilo and Lomuto who were loved by the ladies. To be honest, I know a lot of tangueras who are crazy about Biagi’s irresistible music and it’s no surprise this picture below shows him with in the sweet company of a female singer, Chola Luna, shortly before a performance on the radio, either together or separately (the caption is not clear about this).

One of the biggest tragedies in tango music is that we don’t have any recorded music of Juan Polito when he was an important orchestra director, in the early 1940s, accompanied by Juan D’Arienzo’s previous musicians and singer Alberto Echagüe.

However, the interview below is a small step into uncharted territory, with topics like Polito’s early career and the tremendous work(load) of leading an orchestra. For those who don’t understand Spanish: I will try to summarize a few important points from the text.

• Polito started his career in the orchestras of Juan Maglio Pacho (1925), Anselmo Aieta and ultimately D’Arienzo in 1927, for a year, until he decided to form his own band, which lasted until 1938, when he rejoined D’Arienzo’s team.
• Polito mentions that while playing with Aieta, the bohemian nights of Buenos Aires and the approval by the tango dancers inspired his own compositions.
• Polito is now working for Radio Argentina, with a very popular Alberto Echagüe. His daily routine comes down to composing music and rehearsing with the orchestra. The radio performances have to be prepared with a lot of hard work, and also a lot of dedication, because it’s tango. Polito says that as a tango musician, you need to ”feel” the music, and ”love” it.
• His favourite tangos are his recent hits like ”La bruja” and ”Entre sueños”.
• Polito considers organizing a serious tour through the rest of Argentina, which is another sign that the tango orchestras were not permanently based in Buenos Aires.

Was the reach of tango music limited to two somewhat distant, isolated countries down south, or did it also appeal to wider audiences? We do know that some tango artists managed to pull off tours through a number of Latin American countries and beyond. But much remains vague.

According to this “article”, at some point an American company acquired publishing/printing rights, for the first time ever, for a tango song. This was the vals ”Salud, dinero y amor” (Health, money and love) that was apparently very succesful in Argentina at the time, and is still loved by dancers nowadays, in three different recorded versions.

The article also mentions that this sudden success may have been caused by a New York trip of Agustin Irustá, a nowadays not-so famous singer who apparently also performed this vals there.

Lastly, tango musicians, like Francisco Canaro seemed to have been enthusiastic about this news, hoping for a breakthrough in the rest of the Western world. However, it is hard to pin down what ultimately actually did happen after the American company gained the publishing rights.

The following picture shows us a ‘popular’ Roberto Maida (striped suit, tie; standing between two bandoneonists) with his own orchestra, after four years of a (musically) fantastic partnership with Francisco Canaro and a bitter breakup caused by Maida’s jealousy in 1939, when Canaro hired two other singers. The caption under this photo informs us of Maida’s return to Buenos Aires after a succesful tour in the vast countryside of Argentina. I guess they were too busy travelling around to actually record something, because this is just another band whose sound we shall never be able to hear.

Here’s another rare picture of Rodolfo Biagi, this time with one of his lesser-known singers, Alberto Lago, who left us 4 tangos in 1941 and 1942 for a very enjoyable tanda, and a slow vals.

If someone in the tango world deserves an army of idolaters, it’s Di Sarli with his treasure of beautiful dance recordings. From this picture we may conclude that he indeed had his admirers (and perhaps, Roberto Rufino too), and when we think of his many lyrical, atmospheric songs, this should be a surprise to no one.

The following picture shows us José Garcia (centre) with his main singer Alfredo Rojas and the lesser-known Nida Wilson, who also shows up in a few recordings, and who was already featured before here at Tango Archive. I bet this is the first picture you see of Alfredo Rojas, and I hope that although only a part of his head is shown, you might now associate his voice with a specific face.

Tango wasn’t just hard work and fierce competition, sometimes you also had to celebrate something. This picture shows us a crowded birthday party of Julio de Caro and a few well-known guests, mapped for you on a seperate picture below.

In the present, Firpo is a relatively forgotten orchestra and perhaps even more so in Buenos Aires, but like in several other cases, that doesn’t mean he was unsuccessful in the Buenos Aires tango world at its heyday.

Today’s picture shows us Roberto Firpo’s team of the early 40s in the studios of Radio Belgrano. The famous tango veteran Firpo can be recognized as the second man on the left in the upper row and his son Firpo jr., dark suit, is standing right next to him.

His main singers of that era, Alberto Diale and Ignacio Murillo, are more difficult to identify individually, due to the nearly entire lack of available pictures. However, it’s safe to say that as a duo, we can refer to the smiling young men above the two bandoneonists on the right on the first row. And as a very cautious conclusion, on the basis of just two available pictures, one very vague, I’d say that the big fellow with the biggest smile (left) is Murillo, and that the somewhat taller, thinner person next to him, looking in the same direction, would be Diale.

For musicians, a lot of (hidden) preparation goes into a single performance. This picture shows us the solitary side of a tango director like Troilo, who also had to spend a lot of time composing personal arrangements for existing music or simply authoring new songs. Here, we can see him writing something like that at home, accompanied by his famous bandoneon on the table.