Tango Archive

This admittedly somewhat grainy picture is actually quite revealing in the sense, that we get a rare close-up of at least most members of Rodolfo Biagi’s orchestra in the very important years he worked together with Jorge Ortiz. Biagi is shown seated at the piano, and Ortiz (young face, with a moustache) is standing next to him, to the right. If you recognize anyone else, please let me know in the comments.

Today’s dance music is defined only by the recordings we have, and those recordings are only a part of what constituted tango music in the Golden Age. The picture below shows us a relatively important orchestra leader, Ciriaco Ortiz (left), who has no consistent output as far as recordings are concerned, perhaps apart from Orquesta Típica Los Provincianos in the early 1930s. Apparently, at some point in the early 40s he was working together with Alberto Amor, better known to modern-day dancers as one of Biagi’s singers. This combination may have led to interesting dance music, but like in many cases, no recordings mean we will most likely never know.

Tango wasn’t just hard work and fierce competition. Sometimes you also had to relax a bit and apparently set a good example for the dance audience, like Donato or D’Arienzo. However, if we should really believe this image below (no, actually you shouldn’t), sometimes there were no women around and the second best option was ”tango queer” before anyone ever invented that term. Also, who ever knew that Firpo was a ukelele expert? These guys were simply multi-talented!

This picture shows us Ricardo Tanturi chatting with a woman called Carmen del Moral, a singer of ”tango canción” (tango music focused on the singer, not the dancer, like in the case of Carlos Gardel) before both will presumably go their own way into a different radio session. There are actually some recordings by this singer, so if you are interested in hearing her voice, just look up the name.

The intention of this website is to not just show the most famous and important figures from the tango world, but also some who are more hidden in the depths of history yet still played a now invisible contributing role in the development of Golden Age tango music. In that most important era of tango music, recording contracts were far and few between and that means we miss out on so much material, even from primary orchestras like Troilo (until 1941). Some people only started recording in the late 40s or even 50s and I always wonder how their earlier music would have sounded like. We will never know.

This picture shows us José Tinelli (most likely the man on the left), who left just a few recordings, but relatively interesting ones. The most famous recording, Amor que se hace llanto, also includes the voice of the singer, Horacio Acosta, shown on this picture.

It’s time for one of those mystery orchestras: Enrique Lomuto, brother of Francisco Lomuto, recorded only three songs but other than this meagre amount suggests, he seems to have been quite active for several years. There is only one tango he recorded (in 1938), No me preguntes nada, and the orchestra’s style sounds like a blend of Canaro and Lomuto and perhaps something else too…. We now miss out on what was presumably a lot of interesting material because brother Enrique never got the right contracts, like quite some other musicians from the best years of tango music. However, at least you now have a picture of this physically similar Lomuto brother (right) together with Roberto Torres, who also stars in the one recorded tango mentioned above.

Oh, what song would the men below have been rehearsing? One of those classic, floor-filling, fast valses like Dichas que viví? Or other, similarly popular tangos like Griseta and Cielo? Whenever I think of Falgás, one of the three singers of Biagi’s early and best years, I always hear him sing the following words (from: La Chacarera, a song not referring to the dance but to a prostitute with a nickname):

”Chacarera, chacarera,
stop making me suffer…
If you really love life so much
why don’t you love me a little bit too?”

Being a tango musician wasn’t just hard work and fierce competition: sometimes, you also got to serve some booze or keep the ladies happy. There were also some who knew how to care for their inner child, like the three mischievous directors who are seen sliding down the stairs below. ”O tempora…o mores”, like Cicero once said. In any case, this is quite the different sight from the more usual posed, sometimes haughty portraits you’d see of key people in tango history.

Between 1935 and 1939, Juan D’Arienzo’s rhythm revolution produced a staggering amount of tango recordings that were truly designed for dancers, a veritable outburst of tango creativity we still very much profit from today. Especially during the ”crown year” 1938, the team below, including pianist Rodolfo Biagi (moustache, below – that same year, Biagi went on to form his own orchestra) and Alberto Echagüe (second row, between two men in dark suits), left us a number of unforgettable classics that can really never go wrong on any dance floor.

Some important tango singers remain somewhat of a mystery, and Juan Carlos Miranda, in my opinion Demare’s best singer in what are also Demare’s best years, is definitely one of those relatively anonymous ones. Here, you see probably the first available picture of him (on the left) together with Lucio Demare. The only already available picture of Miranda shows us a much older man than in this case, and it is interesting to know how young he actually was when he was working with Demare. That’s also perhaps why I could never recognize him on photos of Demare’s orchestra.