TangoTrain: Friday in El Cielo

The DJing on this day was shared between hosts Age and Sebastian.

I was warmly welcomed.  Not wanting this time to be stuck without a table and dazzled by lights on the back row I was there early. 

A: At the start, there was a sort of double Di Sarli tanda that just kept going.

B: I know some DJs do this kind of think deliberately. They think they should be free to delay the 'proper' start until e.g. a certain number of dancers have arrived.  

A: It was quiet. But they seemed to be still in the middle of getting things organised and the DJ station was manned only some of the time. 

The tracks started with the kind of Di Sarli that many like but I can skip.  Then the tanda moved towards the more rhythmic kind I do like.  There was a quiet, composed looking girl across from me who looked as though she might dance but, not knowing what the music was going to do I did not invite just then. 

The guy from Brussels was there too. After a while he walked over to the piano in a corner of the salon. He started to play his own tunes against the Di Sarli that was playing to the people who, while not numerous were nonetheless present.  I guess the people who counted for him hadn't arrived yet. For a while I sat in disbelief first that this was happening and then that it was being allowed to continue.  I left this mangled noise to sit the cafe and await some change.  After a while I saw Age ask the guy to stop, the tanda changed to Caló and I invited the girl sitting on the other side of the room. 

The middle of the Caló tanda turned out to be dodgy. When we got to what felt like possibly a fifth track, the girl and I looked at one another in some confusion.  We decided the tanda had gone past what was normal but decided to dance one more so I suppose the tracks must have improved by then.

Most of the tracks in that set were good for me but still, I have a note that there was dramatic Maderna though I don't associate Maderna with drama, and that there was Francini-Pontier.  Even in the more maintsream tandas I couldn’t shake the worry about what B or C-side might be about to ambush me mid-tanda. This double DJing was easily the weakest day of the three I attended at this milonga.

I also have a note that there was Mintieron tus labios which I had not heard before.  Tango.info tells me it could only have been the Canaro with Famá of 1941, but if I do not hear more than one per tanda I have a high tolerance for even those rhythmic Canaro of that era that I do not know.  Apologies for the poor sound of that link.  

I know I am one of those people who in conversation are rather like someone who pulls you off the main route to explore some side-street and then goes further in and forgets where they were heading.  My mother is the same.  I think it is a product more likely of genes than upbringing.  Excuses down, I like Canaro with Famá.  Many of these tangos are upbeat and happy and can reliably change one's mood.  There are many:  Toda mi vida, No me pregunten por qué, the wonderful Algún día te diré.   Here's a young couple having fun with that last one.  It is very typical of what I think of as "young European" dancing.  This sleek, self-conscious, athletic dancing is what you can see in many milongas with younger dancers right across Europe though in more toned down fashion for social dancing. I feel it is more about movement than embrace and connection, or rather the connection strikes me - who has felt both and recently - as more to facilitate movement than for a deeper connection between two souls.  No judgement is implied. It is just an observation on a type of dancing that one would very likely expect in people in their twenties and thirties. And certainly by no means all or even necessarily most people in their twenties and thirties seem to prefer this, it just depends.

Others of those upbeat Canaro/Famá  tracks are;  Te quiero todavia, Lo pasao pasó, Al subir, al bajar, and there are others which are softer and more romantic.  The one I don't much like from this time is Chirusa, which starts off too manic for me as though someone has had too much coffee though it improves.  My version besides has sound distortion that really spoils the track though I think it is rather better in that link.  

In El Cielo I remember there was that lovely upbeat track by Di Sarli & Rufino Volver a soñar (1940) and Fresedo's 1941 Vamos, corazón with Ruiz, which is for me just this side of okay before Fresedo goes all wrong after that year.  There was an old-fashioned, French-sounding Donato vals I hear rarely and that is probably a good thing:  La shunca (1941) Sweet though it is I imagine it would soon turn saccharine and I would rather watch it than dance.  It was in a tanda with the even more French-sounding Volveras pero cuando also with Horacio Lagos, Romeo Gavioli and Lita Morales.  I have a note too of  the instrumental El vals de los recuerdos (1935) with the unfashionable singer Hugo del Carril but which is worth hearing if only for the bandoneon solo and of - warning, terrible sound -  Luna (1940) with the same three singers but I do not remember that the vals in this set were generally in fours. It was an interesting tanda to hear if not one I would necessarily dance.

Wil arrived and since the atmosphere was very like the day before and because there was plenty of good music to get up to she and I danced a lot together.  Guys seemed to decide to leave us to it.  In fact the guy I was introduced to that evening and to whom I apologised for not acknowledging his cabeceo said not to worry, he had understood we were dancing together. In general I had the disconcerting if not altogether surprising sense that we had been seen as a couple, not that I cared a fig. 

There was a man in the salon dancing very attractively, always waiting for his partner to complete her movement. After gathering my things to leave I went over to him and his partner to ask how he had learned to dance like that. They seemed surprised but laughed.  It turned out they were from southern Germany. Oh! I said surprised, then, impetuously: You dance like a Latin - meaning, though I did not say, that he had an understanding of women which a lot of good guy dancing seems to be about.  They laughed again.

He struck me as very relaxed, shrewd, observant and good-humoured.

Why have you come here? I asked. They liked the Tango Train concept.  They also liked just the general package the Netherlands offered and especially how laid back the people are. They have friends there. They liked it better than Italy, confirming my intuition that the dancing there, not unlike many of my experiences of that culture more generally, was liable to be strongly based on image and show. 

They attended and liked encuentros including the mandatory registration aspect believing that dancers need to be hand-picked for these type of events - presumably because of the many different ways people dance tango socially in Europe. 

But about how he learned to dance the way he did, he said:

Number one: from women. 

Number two: from women

Number three: by dancing.

I learned more by just dancing than in all the years before.

You mean when you did classes? I asked

Yes, he said.  And all the time that I was thinking and dancing.