A conversation with tango singer Claudio Ortega
At a recent milonga at the ‘Hidden City Ballroom’ on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, I listened to Claudio Ortega performing a number of traditional tango songs, ‘canciones’. It was a rare opportunity to hear live tango singing outside of Argentina where vocals are an integral part of most tango orchestras. That evening in the small town of Point Reyes Station, however, Claudio Ortega did not perform with a live orchestra, but to recorded music.
The orchestral playback arrangement seemed a bit precarious at first and I wondered if it would create an interchangeable karaoke-like effect, diminishing the unique powerful message of sung tango. But Mr Ortega quickly proved that the recorded orchestral music did not dilute his performance at all. As he later told me, the music had been transposed and arranged specifically for his base baritone – a distinctive different range of voice in tango where most songs are written for tenors. Music and vocals matched beautifully and Mr Ortega’s velvety baritone presented a number of mostly familiar canciones firmly and convincingly. The seemingly easy and direct way in which he connected with his audience and how he captivated people showed how much he cares about keeping the best-known music of his homeland alive.
I complimented him later on his natural talent as a performer, but he was quick to explain that it took a lot of work to achieve his current level. Even though singing had always been part of his life, starting at a young age as an altar boy, he began singing tango only when he was in his late forties. “I felt the need for my training after I started singing. When I listened to what I was singing… I realized, oh, this is not good.”
For a while he took formal voice lessons with teachers from different musical genres, among them a jazz and an opera singer from the Bay Area. He summarized this experience in a few words: “There is a lot to singing, there are a lot of things that you need to learn and they have to come as second nature,” he said with an unmistakable Spanish accent. “You have to master a technical layer and then you have to rise above it. Otherwise you cannot communicate right because people are just cringing at your mistakes!”
We both laughed at his remark, and his refreshing sense of humor struck me as a surprising difference from his more serious tango persona on stage. What is the biggest challenge for him as a tango singer, I wanted to know. And he promptly replied: “The lyrics!” He recalled how at the beginning of his career he was very nervous about forgetting the lyrics. “And you cannot connect if you’re nervous. I mean you project that fear and people cringe at that.”
Back to the biggest challenges of singing: “So there are two things: forgetting the lyrics and not knowing how to connect.” After giving it some more thought he added: “And the third thing that I needed to learn was to take compliments. That was something that you need to learn. I remember in my first show there was a lady who came to me and said something good about my performance. And I kind of dismissed her. I don’t remember what I said, but she got offended. Because I basically said something like: ‘No, no, it can’t be like that, I’m not that good.’ You should never do that. I learned my lesson the first night because I was putting her in doubt about her ability to judge, right? Okay, who am I to tell you if you like me or not?
Mr Ortega has also released two albums: ‘Del Norte al Sur’ with his first group, ‘Trío Corazón al Sur’, and ‘Sombras’ with composer and guitarist Hugo Wainzinger. I asked him how he chooses the songs from the vast body of tango music for his performances. While most social dancers, like myself, are familiar with only a relatively small number of tunes – the most danceable ones – the choices for a musician or a singer can be overwhelming.
He said that his most important prerequisite is: “I have to like the song a lot. Otherwise I don’t do it.” Even more than his personal taste, he sometimes follows his feelings when choosing his repertoire: “Certain tangos make me cry,” he admitted with a smile. “And when that happens, I know it’s going to be good for me.”
Not having an education in music – Mr Ortega is a software engineer and says about himself: “I know the basics, like the minimum amount of knowledge that you need in order to communicate with the musician.” – he has developed his own learning process. Once he sets his mind on a new piece, he said, he listens to it as many as twenty times before starting to learn the melody perfectly. That means memorizing it note-by-note until the melody is firmly embedded in his memory.
“And then comes the most challenging part, which is getting the lyrics completely nailed in your brain. Because you cannot think, you cannot have a doubt, because if you have a doubt you transmit that to the audience. You have to convince them of what you are.”
But how do you convince an English-speaking audience of a Spanish song, I wanted to know. Isn’t that a problem at most places where he performs?
At which point Mr Ortega turned the table and asked me why I got so excited about it. But he immediately went on to answer the question himself: “It is the way I’m singing it. … I know Beatles songs even though I don’t know them. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand one word. I could tell you maybe two or three words in one song, but it was exciting anyway. And it would have been the same if there were no lyrics there for sure … or when you are listening to an opera in Italian. I get it emotionally, but I don’t understand everything they’re saying.”
He explained that a singer has to project emotion in order to gain his audience and to convey the emotion: “You need to do something outstanding with your lyrics. That implies that you vocalize properly.”
Yet there is another tool which he said he uses. He described it with these words: “You are like at an arm’s distance when I’m singing. That’s what I’m thinking when I’m singing to the audience.”
I was interested to talk about another, darker topic, the COVID pandemic and how it affected him as a performer and his attitude to tango. Many tango professionals are still struggling for a comeback and the tango community in general seems to have undergone a transformation.
For Mr Ortega personally it all began to fall apart shortly before the pandemic was officially declared. He recalled how he had a performance scheduled with Alex Roitman and his ‘Tangonero’ orchestra. Both collaborated successfully between 2010 and 2019 and Mr Ortega is still full of praise for Mr Roitman’s contribution to the tango music of the Bay Area. But “the beginning of the pandemic ended it,” he said. “I remember that very, very well because it was so painful. It was what was going to be the last show of the year. It was the end of November in 2019.”
“And then I couldn’t sing. I had a bug and laryngitis. And it was terrible for me. I showed up the night of the show and told people I couldn’t perform. My friend Alex Zeyliger was there, and we asked him to sub for me.” A few weeks later “the pandemic hit and it was terrible. There was nothing happening, of course.” He pauses. “I started again. With my old formation, Trío Corazon al Sur, we had some shows for a few months.”
What changed for him during the times of lockdowns and isolation, I wanted to know. He said: “I had a lot of time to think of what’s going to be next. As a first step for me I started looking like crazy into YouTube for groups.”
While Mr Ortega had become an expert in traditional tango music, he knew little about contemporary tango and how much it is alive in Buenos Aires where he grew up. He told me about the surprising discoveries of groups he had never heard of before: “There is a staggering number of – I don’t know, probably like a hundred groups or something like that in Buenos Aires, right? And young, young people. Young, young musicians. Super young. One example is the ‘Romantica Milongera’. Have you heard about them? Their music is amazing. I mean, that’s only one example. I decided to take an important step, and collaborated with an excellent musician from Buenos Aires, Yazmina Raies. The project was to produce arrangements for tangos that I love, basically famous classic pieces, and also to record those same arrangements for me.”
The time of lockdowns and isolation was also an opportunity for him to learn and he has in some ways benefited from his long absence from the stage. However, he deeply regrets the losses that the pandemic has inflicted on the San Francisco tango community. “Tango was dismantled and why? Because Alex [Roitman] moved out. He was the Tangonero lynchpin. Charles Gorczynski and his ‘Redwood Tango Ensemble’, disappeared too. Because Charles moved to Minnesota.” So he started performing with [Alex] Zeyliger on some formations.
The music world of the Bay Area is small, he said, maybe twenty to thirty performers. Everyone knows everyone and musicians work in subsets. Every loss is therefore tangible. These days Mr Ortega performs with renowned bandoneonists Seth Arsanow and occasionally with Adrian Jost from ‘Trío Garufa’, which has also ceased to exist since the pandemic. Whenever Charles Gorczysnki pops up in the Bay Area a few times per year, he enjoys performing with him and his band.
As much as Claudio Ortega enjoys performing with live orchestras, he also finds it challenging. “It is not on the performing side as in the preparation… The repertoire that an orchestra can provide comes from a certain set of songs for which it is easy to find the arrangement… Some of these arrangements can be sung by me, others not.” In many cases there are no arrangements available, and sometimes the tunes need to be newly arranged or transposed for Mr Ortega’s vocal range. “So that’s the challenge. The challenge is to fit into the repertoire.”
Is this added layer of preparation the reason why he is not more on the scene, I wanted to know. He said that it was a big part, yes. But then there is another reason which he wasn’t comfortable talking about. He thinks that singers are not very popular with musicians. Cautiously avoiding a controversial statement, he quoted a comment from ‘a very good musician in this area’ who once told him: “If we got a singer then the audience does not pay attention to the musicians. They pay attention to the singer.” And if you hire dancers on stage, he concluded: “then the attention shifts again from the singer to the dancers, but still away from the musicians. So [the musicians] just want to play without singers.”
He ended by saying that he thinks there is not more live tango music at milongas because musicians don’t feel enough appreciated by the social dancers. In the end, it is the decision of the hosts, who know their customers tastes, to decide whether live or recorded music will be played. “But”, Mr Ortega said, “I think that the taste for music is something that is acquired. Taste that you build.”
All photos courtesy of Claudio Ortega.