Purpose
One of Project Tango’s goals is to “Promote and develop the live music scene locally and nationally”. To that end, we encourage live music both at the weekly milonga at Cellspace, at Project Tango events, and Projet Tango sponsored events.
Of primary importance is understanding what tango dancers really like to dance to. Deconstructing and analyzing the best Golden Age recordings is one way to do this. While we will never be able to fully recreate the style of the traditional recordings we can come close emulating it. From there, we can make new arrangements, and ultimately new compositions, of this work that will be enjoyed by contemporary social dancers for years to come!
This is a long term project that currently involves promoting existing tango bands. This includes everything from solo ensembles to larger groupings that play in a more traditional or more alternative style and repertoire. It also includes hosting guest musicians who guide musician workshops in the art of traditional (for social dancing) compositions and arrangements.
While our CELLspace alternative milonga is quite flexible with the range of music we play for our dance audience we are trying to ensure a high level of quality (both from the dj’s and any musicians that may play for us). To this extent we have created a check list for interested musicians and groups. As mentioned above this includes getting a sample of your music to assess it’s ‘dance-ability’ and also a requested playlist with sample traditional and alternative songs (if you have them in your repertoire).
Our future intentions are to help develop new and sustainable resources for live tango music. This will include highly danceable compositions with lyrics in multiple languages. We believe that the ultimate gateway to this mission is the development of local and large community orchestras! As mentioned earlier, in order to get there, we need to first support smaller groups of musicians (solos, trios, quartets, sextets, etc) by giving them a venue to play at (CELLspace) and encouraging them to develop “danceable music”.
Live Music Committe
The live music committee will be a group of people (not just board members) who are experienced with music and passionate about the growth of live music. A majority vote will decide yes/no for a future music endeavor. You can reach the committee by this email address: project-tango-live-music-committee@googlegroups.com.
Project Tango “band”
Project Tango will not have a “CELLspace house band” but we will be fostering and promoting a local orchestra.
Requirements for Performance
Thank you so much for the offer to play during Project Tango’s Wednesday night alternative milonga at Cellspace! In order to maintain a high level Here are the requirements for the performance:
- We need to hear / see examples of what you would perform. Those will be in audio files or videos (like YouTube).
- A playlist of tandas, alternating between alternative and traditional (see note below)
- Group consensus from the Project Tango Live Music Committe group on accepting to play.
NOTE: What is traditional tango? For the purposes of this milonga, alternative is anything outside of the Golden Era of tango. The DJ handout from Dan Boccia (one of the top US DJs) has a number of Golden Age suggestions. That includes orchestras like D’Arienzo, Di Sarli, Canaro, Calo, Biagi, Rodriguez, D’Agostino, Donato, Fresedo, Lomuto, OTV, early Pugliese and Troilo. Usually this music is before 1955, but I have heard things from the 30′s that I would consider past this era, and I have some 1960 Calo that fits this idea. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but works 95% of the time.
Before the performance
Two weeks and a week before your performance, you will receive email reminders. This is part of our standard process to make sure that people know when they are volunteering / performing.
Promotion
We will showcase the performance in http://tangomango.org/ and put in a special note on the PT Cellspace calendar.