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CD Tango: Building a library (1)
Here is the first of three articles about how to create a private library of tango music written by Mike Lavocah (Links) and published in 2000 in El Once (Links)
Whilst tango music never really went away, the first major programme to re-issue the classic material of tango’s golden age began only in 1989, very fortunately coinciding with the birth of the compact disc. Ten years on, the catalogue stands at over a thousand discs. Whilst new discs continue to be issued, the present trend is for a deepening rather than a broadening: there are very few artists who have not been re-issued, and the new issues are concentrating on presenting familiar combinations in greater depth.
Now, therefore, seems a good moment to step back from just keeping up with the new releases and spend some time reviewing the whole catalogue. Today I begin a three part series on building a library. In this first part I talk about the whole business of re-issuing old material and the various labels. In part two I’ll briefly review the orchestras, and in part three I’ll give you my own recommendations.
Don’t forget that I approach the music not from the point of view of a musician or a historian but that of a dancer.
Re-issues
Although there is some new music, the vast majority is taken from old recordings from the golden age, and in this case there are four factors intervening between the original recording and the compact disc that ends up in your living room.
The first factor is the fidelity of the source material that the record company has used for the transfers. In many cases the original masters have been lost and the transfers are made from 78s or LPs in libraries and private collections. If the record is warped or worn it doesn’t matter how much attention is paid to the later stages of the process - the results will not be worthwhile. Moreover, even with records in mint condition, the actual pressings themselves vary considerably in quality.
The second factor is the transfer process itself - playing and recording the old disc. Care at this stage is really important to get the best possible results. The disc will be cleaned. The choice of needle can also make a difference, depending on the pattern of wear within the groove. It may too be surprising to learn that the speed of the record can be difficult to get right: 78 rpm can mean anything from 68 rpm to 88 rpm. Old gramophones had a lever to adjust the speed and hence the pitch, which the listener would be able to judge from live performances.
The third factor is any processing that is applied to try and reduce the noise and distortions. Records have always suffered from surface noise. Today there are some very sophisticated signal processing systems available for noise reduction, but if these are not available the best approach by far is to just leave the transfer just as it sounds, because the human ear is very good at ignoring analogue noise. It’s a disaster when the engineer resorts to filtering off the noise because this wrecks the sound balance. Vocals suffer particularly badly; it’s as if the feeling is filtered off along with the noise, and even the best material can leave one unmoved. Be careful, though: a little amount of filtering can sound “good” on first listening because it gives the illusion that the disc is clean.
The fourth factor is the programming - the selection of tracks that the series editor chooses to put on the disc. This is not simply choosing the twenty ‘best’ tracks - ideally the disc has to be interesting in its entirety, something you could listen to all the way through without getting bored. In this regard the much longer length of the CD format is a mixed blessing. CDs can contain up to 74 minutes of material, a number chosen by the engineers at Philips to accommodate the longest of the Beethoven symphonies. On discs of this type we generally get 20 tracks and the disc plays for about an hour (the 78 was limited to a little over three minutes, which imposed its own constraints on the music of its day - but that’s another story). Now suppose I gave you two CDs - one with twelve great tracks, and the other with those same twelve tracks but padded out to twenty with eight tracks of less interesting filler, which would you prefer? Most say they would choose the second one - but what happens is that you don’t play it as often as the shorter disc.
DJs and collectors don’t mind so much about the programming: they just want access to the material. For many tangueros, though, this can be one of the most important factors when evaluating a disc.
In a moment we’ll be looking at the different labels and series and we’ll find that they fare very differently in these four areas.
Packaging
Tango music is largely enjoyed something enjoyed by enthusiasts rather than consumed by a mass public. This means that the whole business of packaging and marketing falls by the wayside. Argentinian labels seem to take a particular pride in poor graphic design (although Argentina being what it is taste has never sunk to the level found in Brazil, where popular music is sold, presumably even into the most sophisticated households, simply by sticking a bum on the cover). Nor is it uncommon to get no sleeve notes whatsoever. This can be really frustrating: well written sleeve notes afford a window into a fascinating past which we have few opportunities to observe. All the same, this should only ever be a secondary consideration when choosing a disc. What matters is the music.
Variety
You’ll probably want your library to include waltz and milonga as well as tango. Most discs have at most one or two waltzes and you’ll have to take a little care to get a good representation. As for milongas, any disc older than 1933 won’t have any at all because it hadn’t been invented yet.
Taste
The most annoying thing about taste is not that yours is different from other people’s - after all, you’re buying for yourself - but that your own taste evolves over time. For many, if not most tangueros, initially it is the rhythmic and the dramatic which draws our attention. After a while, though, drama gives way to subtlety and rhythm to melody. In this respect I feel that we should pay more attention to the preferences of the Argentinians.
The home library
By its nature, the music we hear in a milonga is that most suited for dancing. However, tango is much more than just a kind of dance music - it is also music for listening to in its own right. There is a lot of tango music that was never intended for dancing, the work of Carlos Gardel being the most obvious example, but the dance music deserves to be appreciated from the same perspective. What I’m talking about, of course, is the lyrics.
The lyrics
Music creates a mood, but it is the lyric which tells the story. If you don’t listen to the lyric, a great deal of what is going on is passing you by. Listening to tango at home allows you to pay much more attention to the lyric than is possible at a milonga. If you don’t speak Spanish, don’t just sit there feeling disenfranchised! Learn it - it’s much easier than you think, and will enrich your experience of tango no end.
Informing your guesses
Very often you’ll see a disc you don’t know that interests you. Is it worth a gamble? There are a number of things you can do to increase your knowledge and hence your chances of coming away with something you’ll like.
First of all, take time to find out not just which orchestras you like but which periods. A number of orchestras carried on recording well into the 1950s and some - notably Pugliese, De Angelis and D’Arienzo - much later than that. Most of these bands ‘peaked’ in the early 1940s and you could end up with a lemon. Argentinian discs often say something like © 1939 EMI. This only means that the oldest recording on the disc was cut in 1939 - the others could be much later.
The commonest situation is that no dates are given, but even then there are clues. The most reliable is the singer. Typically, a singer remained with an orchestra for four or five years, after which he might move to another, hopefully more prestigious one or even (if he was particularly successful) go solo.
The presence of a famous tango can be misleading: for instance, suppose you want D’Arienzo’s recording of La Cumparsita. You may not get what you expect, for he recorded it at least four times, in 1924, 1937, 1951 and again in 1968. (In case you’re wondering, it’s the 1951 recording which is really famous). A less popular tango is a more reliable guide.
You’ll find that there are ‘families’ of artists, grouped by style. For instance, if you like Caló, you will probably also like Demare and De Angelis; if you like Canaro, try Donato and Lomuto; if you like D’Arienzo, try Tanturi and Biagi. Some other artists stand alone, for instance, if you like Pugliese, or Di Sarli, there is no other orchestra that sounds anything like them, or to be more accurate that achieves anything like the same effect.
The original recordings
Today, recording music is an everyday occurrence, something you can do in your living room. This was certainly not the case when Angel Villoldo and Alfredo Gobbi arrived in Paris in 1907 with the chief purpose of making recordings. Very soon the record companies were setting up facilities in all the major cities of the world, and Vicente Greco was able to make the first recordings in Argentina on the Columbia label in 1911, although the matrixes (as the masters were known) still had to be sent abroad to be pressed.
The fascinating story of the growth of recording is really beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that the market in Argentina was dominated by two firms: the Odeón company, based in Brazil, and the Victor company. Victor were swallowed up by the Recording Company of America (RCA) who are now owned by the German Bertlesmann Group (BMG). Odeón were acquired by EMI in the early 70s. These two are huge multinationals with worldwide operations, but it does not make the discs easy to get: they are manufactured by their Argentinian subsidiaries, BMG Ariola Argentina and EMI Odeón Argentina, and you can’t order these discs except through specialist importers.
One would think that BMG and EMI would have a big advantage over the other players, with access to huge vaults lined with the original masters. Sadly this is not the case: many of the original masters are lost or missing. All the same, the Argentinian labels seem to have the best access to good original pressings.
The labels
One of the things you’ll notice as we look at the re-issue programmes of the various labels is how much of the early work was not done by the Argentinians but by enthusiasts in Europe and Japan. It was only at the end of the 1990s that the Argentinian output can finally be said to have outstripped that from abroad. We’ll look through the labels in date order, beginning with the great pioneers of tango on CD, El Bandoneon.
El Bandoneon
El Bandoneon is just one of a family of labels based in Barcelona engaged in the re-issuing of classic material in many genres. The labels are owned by Fresh Sounds Records, a company headed up by a man with a very Catalan sounding name (Jordi Pujol) but actually based in Dublin, whilst the discs are made in Switzerland.
El Bandoneon were the very first label to begin a major re-issue programme on compact disc. They have done a fantastic job in increasing our knowledge of tango music and, by extension, promoting the whole revival. Their catalogue is the broadest of all, covering all the major artists of tango, whether singers, orchestras, or composers, almost without exception. This is all the more remarkable considering that they were the first to enter this field at a time when it was very difficult to find out anything about recordings from that period.
The breath of the catalogue does however leave the catalogue a little weak on the more important dance orchestras, and certainly reading the sleeve notes one gets the impression that the series editor, Roberto Daus, is not a dancer.
The discs are all well programmed and always include interesting and informative sleeve notes. The drawback is the quality of the source material, which in many cases is quite poor. On top of this, they have occasionally compounded the problem by applying filtering, with particularly unpleasant results. My intuition is that these discs are largely drawn from a single private collection.
Some of the discs are so bad that it’s very difficult to appreciate the qualities of the artists, to the point where one might ignore them. The list of those so affected has some great names: Di Sarli, Tanturi.
As a rule, better discs are now available for many of the dance orchestras but there are notable exceptions: Caló, De Angelis, Canaro’s Quniteto Pirincho. On top of this, El Bandoneon’s re-issues of the great singers of the 1930s, including a magnificent re-issue of the complete work of Carlos Gardel over 21 discs, remains without parallel.
FM Tango
The mostly defunct FM Tango label was the first Argentinian label to begin a major program of releases. Beginning in 1991 they released about thirty discs targeted at an Argentinian audience and as such it’s very interesting to note which artists were released: Troilo, D’Arienzo, D’Agostino/Vargas, Tanturi, Gobbi, Pugliese, Di Sarli, Hugo del Carril, Goyeneche, Susana Rinaldi. The transfers and the programming are both very good, but there are no sleeve notes.
The FM Tango catalogue has not been particularly well supported by BMG and, whilst not officially deleted, the majority of these discs are unobtainable today. However there are a few survivors, for which we should be grateful, for two of these discs will be in our library.
Disco Latina
For the rich, this Japanese label was an interesting choice. About twenty discs of the highest quality, lovingly remastered, but twice the price of anything else. For a long time, theirs was the best disc of orchestras such as Tanturi, Fresedo and Lomuto as well as the great female singers Ada Falcón, Mercedes Simone and Libertad Lamarque. This material is now available more cheaply elsewhere but the catalogue still has some unique material: Enrique Mora and Juan Cambereri. These are the real gems of the catalogue. Production has stopped due to copyright issues, so if you can afford the price of admission buy these discs now.
Harlequin
A small UK label based in East Sussex, Harlequin concentrates on re-issuing Latin American music from the 1930s. Whilst there are some fantastic Cuban titles, the tango releases contain far too much that is of historical rather than musical interest and hence are rather disappointing, despite Simon Collier’s excellent sleeve notes. The great exception are the three Tango Ladies discs.
Tango Maestros
After the end of the FM Tango series, BMG’s next foray into the world of tango re-issues was this short-lived label, which appeared in the mid 1990s. Although again an Argentinian release, at least some of the discs in this series were remastered at the Victor studios in Japan.
Tango Argentino (20 temas)
In 1996 BMG finally got their act together and begin a major re-issue programme with the Tango Argentino label. The releases are oriented towards the major dance orchestras. The transfers are very good indeed and by and large the discs are well programmed too. This has made them the label of choice for D’Arienzo, Di Sarli, D’Agostino/Vargas, Troilo and Tanturi, all of whom have been covered in some depth.
Reliquias (EMI)
EMI’s answer to BMG was the Reliquias label, whose growing catalogue stands at sixty titles. Reliquias are showing a strong preference towards the romantic orchestras and singers. The transfers are generally (but not always) superb but the weak point of the series is the programming, which tends to confine each disc to a narrow combination of orchestra, singer and rhythm, regardless of the overall picture. Nevertheless, there are some really good discs of Biagi and their series of six Pugliese discs is the best currently available. And don’t get me started on the covers.
Blue Moon
A sister label of El Bandoneon, Blue Moon have a much smaller catalogue. They began with two short series: one of 17 discs, picking up where El Bandoneon left off (around 1945), and a second of just four discs of much later work (Piazzola, Goyeneche, Susana Rinaldi). They also made some compilations covering the entire Blue Moon/El Bandoneon catalogue: one of four discs, and a second, in the digipack format (which includes material that can be read on CD-ROM), of just two discs. Just recently they have brought out a set of five discs themed by decade which does contain the odd track of new material.
Last year Blue Moon brought out a small series called las grandes orquestas del tango. Each of these is a two CD set with forty tracks and a very handsomely designed cover. There are just twelve titles: Canaro, De Angelis, Pugliese, De Caro, Caló, Di Sarli, Fresedo, Troilo, Firpo, D’Arienzo, Piazzola and Francini/Pontier. Whilst it’s nice to see some good graphic design on a tango CD, my fear is that the fidelity is not going to be any better than it has been on the El Bandoneon catalogue - in other words, variable.
La Union De Tangueros
This is an organisation of enthusiasts and collectors spearheaded by Remi Kooij in the Netherlands who are putting out their own CDs and MDs. No sleeve notes, minimal packaging, but very good value for money - the organisation is run on a non-profit basis - and the sound quality is very competitive on the early material. The tracks are presented in chronological order which I find by far the best way of doing it since it mixes up songs with instrumentals without sudden changes of mood. The catalogue stands at over 100 discs and is particularly strong on waltzes and milongas, which are issued separately.
However, caveat emptor: Remi does not have access to a CD factory, and therefore the discs are made on recordable CDs (CD-R). These discs sometimes won’t play on hi-fi systems. MDs are no problem.
Next time: the orchestras. In one 3,000 word column I take you through your choices for all the most important orchestras. God help me!!
See you!
Mike
