Well... sadly enough they are hardly new. Newly released, and not that newly either. Newly noticed by me, more like. The wonderful Myriam Pincen, who danced and taught with Ricardo in the last years of his life has posted some clips of a workshop in the old Porteño y Bailarín venue in 2004, taught by Ricardo, Myriam and Osvaldo Cartery, on her YouTube channel. The clips are all dated November 24. The sequence begins with a demo by Myriam and Ricardo. The video quality of these clips is analogue, and the light level is low. I find this quite appealing, a kind of raw, fiery colour, but unfortun ..read more

Tango and Chaos! On the off-chance I searched for it this morning, and there it is again. Wonderful to see it back. However it might not display properly on Firefox which moreover blocks the Adobe Flash Player by default. I don't know my way round all that, but on the Edge browser the site is as good as ever, and the videos always wonderful. Many thanks to Rick! I can claim from personal experience that his site, and especially the clips on it, is inspiring. As he says, if you can't see it you can't dance it, and there's plenty to see here, so plenty to dance ..read more

I wondered again recently if I could listen through, chronologically, to all the Troilo recordings I have. On the surface that’s far from impossible but I failed of course. After a while, fewer tracks really stand out, but it’s still an ambition to get a sense of the span of an extraordinary career from start to finish. The start is easy enough. Comme il faut/Tinta Verde of 1938 was Troilo’s first 78 with his own newly-formed orquesta. He was 24. It seems a stupendously confident start. Right from the first note it sounds like Troilo. In fact, the very first chord of Comme il Faut seems disco ..read more

About a month ago I remembered a clip I’d seen on Rick McGarry’s great Tango and Chaos blog, which I hadn’t visited for a few years. I found the site – but the clips were no longer there. I was using my mobile and I assumed this was because of some software incompatibility. However, when I went back to the site a few days later, on February 22, I found a message saying that the site ownership had expired and that it was available for purchase. Currently, if you search for it, you don’t get anywhere or you get a message asking you to try again later. I’m not sure when McGarry set it up, but fre ..read more

I commented briefly on Gavito dancing Pugliese above, and found several links to statements he made about tango. I also found a link to a book, also available as a download and translated into English a few years ago, based on his recollections and on taped conversations in his final years. He died in 2005. Of course the book is his recollections, his version, but it gave me something of a new perspective. I always thought he grew up with tango, but it seems clear that this was only partly true. Tango was something he grew into. Most of the ‘older generation’ were born around 1935, turning 13 ..read more

I’ve edited the earlier post on Alberto Dassieu, changing the embedded video for another I preferred. And soon after I wrote it I discovered that several of the videos I linked to were unavailable in France. I hope some clips Alberto and Paulina are available there: it’s most likely a copyright issue with Pugliese’s music. Fortunately that’s not a problem here. In any case, that post was incomplete. I started writing about dancing to Pugliese and found myself writing about Alberto. But Alberto didn’t only dance Pugliese, and of course he wasn’t the only person of his generation to dance Pugli ..read more

Monica Paz is one of a few Buenos Aires-based tango teachers whose aim is to teach people to dance tango - rather than to teach a lot of tango steps. It's not necessarily the same thing. In fact it's probably a whole lot easier to teach steps since that's mechanical learning, learning by rote. Monica has spent much time in the milongas for many years, and has learned by dancing with a great many older-generation dancers, many of whom she's interviewed on her website. She also speaks good English! Not to be missed. SEPTEMBER 2017: London, Bristol, Saarbrücken, Antwerp, Hamburg. United Kingdo ..read more

It's so rare that something sounds too good to be true and is neverthless true. From February 2018 the Norwegian budget airline is starting scheduled non-stop flights by Dreamliner from London to Buenos Aires. It will take about 13 hours, which is amazing. Even more amazing - outside peak holiday times the cost is under £600...  Just be aware it'll cost another £25 to put a bag in the hold, and you still won't get anything to eat, but it's still much faster and cheaper than anything else that flies. Booking is already open ..read more

Pugliese isn’t easy. It's often more complex than other tango, and we don't hear it so much. One tanda a night if you’re lucky. Late Pugliese was composed and played more for listening than for dancing. He had a long career: he was just 19 when he had a hit with Recuerdo in 1925, and he was invited to perform at the Colon Opera House after the fall of the military in December 1985. I was dancing Pugliese with a friend recently, and we started talking. ‘I remember a visit to one of the milongas in Buenos Aires’ she said, ‘and I danced to Pugliese with a local guy. It was incredible. We hardly ..read more

’It’s so crowded tonight’ said my partner. I glanced around. At a guess there was room for twice as many couples. ‘Not really crowded’ I replied. ‘It’s just that many people use a lot of space.’ I remembered dancing – trying to dance – on a heaving floor at Cachirulo in El Beso, when it was underground-like and really hard to move at all. Likewise at Salon Canning, a larger floor that could be very densely packed with dancers. Then I remembered the garage photo, a milonga in someone’s garage in Buenos Aires! I don’t know how many couples, shoulder to shoulder, happily moving to the music. But ..read more