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Si Sos Brujo: A Tango Story
A film by Caroline Neal--Highly Recommended:
“A magnificent and moving film about how to save an ancient art and keep it alive.”
Special Mention of the Jury, Toulouse Film Festival.
“You have to learn to play music on the bandstand,” says jazz-great, Wynton Marsalis. “The first row isn’t close enough.” But what’s a young tango musician to do when all the great players have long-ago retired or even died?
Frustrated by his attempts to transcribe the Golden Age tango orchestras of the 1940s off scratchy records found in old bookstores, double bass player Ignacio Varchausky sets out to create the Tango Orchestra School in Buenos Aires. The task is daunting: no funding, no teachers, and certainly no curriculum.
In this clip, Wynton Marsalis talks about the Tango Orchestra School
“You’d have to be a magician, a brujo, to make that happen,” everyone tells him. Ignacio finally convinces the legendary and much-loved 82-year-old musician, composer and orchestra leader, Emilio Balcarce to help. But life imitates art: almost 50 years earlier Balcarce had written a tango called “Si Sos Brujo” (“If you’re a wizard”).
From the very conception of the Tango Orchestra School, film director Caroline Neal was present, recording the rehearsals, the first performance in a small neighborhood tango club, the international debut in Paris, and the triumphant night in the fabled Colón Theater. Her film creates a portrait of oral transmission from one generation to another, between Emilio Balcarce and the young students, in a magical journey through the tango tradition.
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TangoTales website and podcast
If you are curious about the modern tango music, cinema and dance, visit Tango Tales. You can find the podcast, pages and pages of recommendations and the sampler of alternative tango music.
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This is the Tango (audio)
The three part radio series This is the Tango about the history of the Argentine tango produced for CBC in 1999. Guadalupe Jolicoeur, a native of Argentina, weaves the story of her own family into the story of her country and its most famous cultural product – tango.
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Tags: tango history
