Posted on:Last updated on:Written by:andreaCategorized in:Tango music
Puertos, the latest tango-jazz album by pianist and composer Emilio Solla
Emilio Solla is a very busy man; trying to schedule an interview with him feels like chasing after a hurricane. One day he’s performing on the West Coast, the next time in a tiny town in upstate New York, then he’s recording a new album, performing with his own group – the Trio Solla-Cheek-Labro – or he’s working on a video as part of a fundraising campaign for his next project. And then there’s so much more: teaching, composing a musical, promoting, and creating new possibilities; this Argentine-born pianist and composer seems like a creative volcano.
Posted on:Last updated on:Written by:andreaCategorized in:Tango music
Composer Débora Simcovich with Orquestra Victoria and singer Noelia Moncada
Most people associate tango music with a form of dance. That’s not necessarily so. Tango music can be a pure musical pleasure, an exciting listening experience, but hard to dance to.
Take for example Débora Simcovich’s compositions. If you happened to catch one of her concerts last summer in the Bay Area, performed by the acclaimed Orquesta Victoria from Buenos Aires, you will have noticed that a lot of her songs were not very danceable. They do not speak of love and broken hearts — in contrast to most of the popular tango music that we hear at dance halls and clubs, usually from a male perspective and delivered by a male singer. In her music she speaks of her own reflections on life, and she addresses issues of social or political nature. “My music has content,” she says. Her focus is on the message and she delivers it with a punch — a skill which she learned in her younger years by writing jingles for ad agencies — and she delivers the punch regardless of whether the music is danceable or not. So it’s not surprising that Simcovich’s tango music is more popular among classical concert audiences than in the world of dancers.
