1724 Notes from Buenos Aires 23
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 13:03:31 -0500
From: Rick McGarrey <RICKMCG@FLASH.NET>
Subject: Notes from Buenos Aires 23
Notes, corrections:
I know what's about to happen. My friend Huck is
going to jump on me again for the bad grammar and
typos. Sorry, Huck. I really do have a high school
degree. It's not that I don't know the difference
between 'whose' and 'who's' or 'laying' and 'lying'.
I'm writing these reports in Microsoft Wordpad, with
no spell or grammar checking (I know, that's still no
excuse). I read them through before I send them, but
I'm just a bad proofreader. Alejandra catches more
mistakes than I do, and English is her second
language. It seems like we always spot the biggest
mistakes right after I hit the send button. Please
ignore them if you can. If I post them on the website
later I'll try to clean them up.
In the last report I dumped all over Iguazu Falls, and
now Alejandra has jumped all over me. She says, yes
it's over commercialized, but it is also one of the
wonders of the world, and most people love it. All
true.
I mentioned Jose Razzano in the last report. I admit
I hadn't heard of him before, but by coincidence right
after I sent the report, we were listening
to 'D'Agostino Vargas 100 Anos' CD, and there is a
song on it called 'El Morocho y El Oriental'. It's
about Gardel (El Morocho) and Razzano (El Oriental)
singing together on a BsAs street in 1911. I would
have missed all of this without Alejandra's help.
I said in an earlier post that it hasn't been that
long since knives were used to settle disputes in
milongas, and that this was done within the lives and
memories of people that are currently dancing. This
came from a source that has been in the milongas
forever, but who also sometimes tends to embellish. I
asked a more reliable source about this, Nestor Serra,
who has been dancing in some rough places since the
50s, and he said he has seen some shoving at times,
but never a knife fight.
El Pial
(Part 1 of 2)
We went to this neighborhood club in Flores mostly
because it happens to be just two blocks down the
street from where Alejandra lived as a child. The
milonga at El Pial is advertised to start at 10pm, so
we walked around her old barrio for awhile and she
showed me the places she used to ride her bike when
she was a little girl. At 10:15 we went to the club
for our early clean air start. They were finishing up
a class, but then they began playing all kinds of
stuff like salsa, and pop music, and Gotan Project.
We sat and listened, and watched people wander in.
Everyone was very friendly- Horacio the organizer came
by and talked to us for awhile, and we saw some people
from downtown, but for some reason they just didn't
want to start the music. Finally, more than an hour
later they started tango, but the music they started
with was so bad I didn't want to dance. They began
with some jumpy Troilo without Florentino, and then
followed it with something worse I couldn't identify,
where the orchestra kept sitting back and letting the
singer wander all over the place with his voice.
People were wandering all over the floor as well,
trying to stay with the music. Maybe I just have
different taste, but it seemed to me that this was bad
DJing. Fringe stuff is okay sometimes, but why start
the milonga with it? All the guy had to do is go
downtown and buy a CD from Daniel or Natu and the
night would have started out just fine. By then it
was after 1130 and the air was getting bad, so we
left. As we were walking out, we ran into 'El
Gallego'. I had been wanting to film him ever since I
saw him dancing in Gricel, and we made a date to meet
him and his novia Gilda at Glorias Argentinas the next
night.
Pugliese v. Todaro
The next night we went to Mataderros to meet El
Gallego in Glorias Argentinas. If you haven't been to
BsAs these names won't mean much to you, but like
Avellaneda to the south of town, these western suburbs
are drenched in tango history. Flores and Floresta,
where Alejandra grew up, are next to Mataderros. This
is the barrio named after the large building (which
is still there) on the edge of the city where all of
the cattle were brought into BsAs from La Pampa (the
fertile sea of grass that surrounds BsAs and gives
Argentina much of it's wealth). This means Gauchos,
Compadritos, and, finally tango. Legend has it that
tango began in and around the corrales, among the
knife carrying people that worked the cattle.
El Gallego and his novia Gilda are great people. 'El
Gallego' refers to Jorge's Spanish origins, and it may
be a bit of a joke, because for Argentines, people
from this part of Spain are considered a bit low and
brutish, and Jorge is the most elegant guy in the
milongas. We got a table with some champagne, and our
friend Carlitos showed up and joined us. We know
Carlitos from downtown. He is a professional tango
singer, and it turns out he was there to perform.
Before Carlitos, they introduced the lady sitting
alone at the table next to us, and it was Beba
Pugliese, Osvaldo's daughter. So when Carlitos was
singing people kept coming by to pay respects to
Beba. It wasn't really Beba's fault, but finally
Alejandra told them to quiet down. Before he sang,
Carlitos seemed a little down, but after he was
pumped, and he came back to the table, put his hands
on our shoulders and said, 'We have friends, music,
dancing, drink, what more could there be?' Exactly!
And it was a great night. Jorge (El Gallego) and I
got to be friends, and I was able to film him
dancing. He has to be the best dancer of milonga in
the world. He's a very elegant lean man in his
sixties, who moves like he's twenty years old. His
posture is perfect, and when he and Gilda dance, his
feet move so fast that you can barely see them. He
has the smooth, quick style of Fred Astaire- he really
does look that good. He said he has been dancing
tango for 54 years, since he was 8 years old!
(End of part 1. Part 2 continues in report #24)
