Andres Minetzky’s – Vale Tango Live at La Viruta (CD, Winter and Winter)

It’s mainly tourists who meet up at the big expensive tango clubs in Buenos Aires, to watch a spot-lit stage with an extravagantly staged spectacle that would be more appropriate for a Broadway theatre in New York. Real tango dancers (tanguera and tanguero) meet up in Buenos Aires at milongas, to dance there, and there of course the melodies from the early days and the Golden Age around 1920 still have their place, even today. In the milongas of the “barrios” (city precincts) in which the tango arose at the end of the 19th century, this music is a way of life. In the milongas there’s no division – here the artists on the stage, there the audience in the auditorium. One meets, knowing the melodies and rhythms, so as to dance. A night like this, where simple, moving music is made, is no concert. You rarely get to hear “Tango Nuevo” there. “Tango Nuevo” is more at home in the concert halls and performance spaces. After a European Piazzolla concert – in the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, for example – culture consumers dressed in black are in the habit of arguing about whether what they just heard was an avant-garde concert. But in Buenos Aires it’s quite different: it’s about the people in a precinct, their feeling for life, and about songs that were always their songs, and still are, however ambitious they may be. Tango is living nostalgia. The latter term derives from the Greek words ‘nostos’ (return, going home, past) and ‘algos’ (pain), and in no other tango is this more movingly and convincingly turned into music than in “Volver”, from 1935. But there are always new tango songs. Andrés Linetzky is one of the rising tango composers. He leads Vale Tango, and it’s around Vale Tango that this album »Live at La Viruta« revolves.