2723  Musica Presentation

Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 15:02:56 -0400
From: Keith Elshaw <keith@TOTANGO.NET>
Subject: Musica Presentation

Greetings all;

Some of you may know that I have spent the last 3 years devoted to cleaning,
restoring and helping sonically over 1100 tango recordings (thus far) from
pre-1960.

In the restoration process, you spend a lot of time inside one song, of
course. First comes selection through listening to everything the artist has
recorded - in as many versions as you can collect. In the next hours of
work, one becomes very familiar with the recording, the orchestra's sound
and the musicians' intentions.

A fascinating aspect of this is to hear and "see" the development of the
orchestra as you go through their recordings as consecutively recorded. You
hear so clearly the big change which occurs when a musician arrives or
departs ( Biagi leaves D'Arienzo; Piazzolla begins doing the Troilo
orquesta's charts).

You hear the arrival of a new orchestra heavily influencing the styles the
others (the most obvious example of this is how every orchestra ramped-up
their arrangements when D'Arienzo exploded onto the scene; how Tanturi
copies other' styles until he finds himself).

Using various references (including a heavy reliance upon Horacio Ferrer's
1967 2 volume
"Historia del Tango"), I follow with interest the career paths of musicians,
composers and authors. It caused me to highlight the careers of several
"unknown" (to us) figures such as Elvino Vardaro, Anselmo Aieta, Domingo
Federico and Julian Plaza - and quite a few others - on my web site.

All this to say that I have a live presentation about the music which
follows the major of these progressions on a flow which gathers itself from
the main tributaries. These include the Big 8, of course, but starts with
earlier work; playing some of the oldest recordings so it is easy to hear
what happened "after" Canaro; "after" De Caro, etc.

The time-line runs up to the early 50's Salgan - roughly coinciding with the
(mostly) final times in which Piazzolla played or arranged tango tango.

This presentation takes 62 hours.

Just kidding!

Well, it could. But as with every presentation, how long it is depends on
how much time there is to deliver it. My career has been as an editor and
producer of sound in broadcast bits to-time - so I can cover a lot of
territory in a couple of hours.

A major feature of the presentation is listening to samples of the music as
it is currently released on CD and listening to the same cuts after they
have been restored. There is so much more to hear and feel in all the music.

I see it over and over: the better dancers know the music very well.

Anyone interested in making this kind of presentation a part of their
organizing thoughts I would be delighted to hear from.

Well, I thought this ("Musica" of a couple of weeks ago) was a good thread.

I have just uploaded many new before-and-after examples of my restoration
work to my web site for you to hear.

Best regards,

Keith Elshaw

https://ToTANGO.net