demos
Ástor Piazzolla (1921-1992) creates the nuevo tango from the music of the brothels of Buenos Aires grafted with 1000 years of european music.
From absence, from distance, from hopelessness, from all of that Piazzolla's music speaks. An Atlantic separates the argentinian settlers from their cradle. From the nostalgia of the land that was once their home to the reality of the land that is now their home, comtemplating, not the aridity of the pampas, but the underworld of the city, tango appears.
But if tango is "sad", its sadness never slides into a reassuring romantic self-pity. It whispers in our ears grave things while it charms us: we submit to the dictatorship of rhythm, our limbs feel the calling for motion.
From Argentina to the world; from the speakeasys and brothels to the world; from the unwholesome trollop's room in a vacant building in Buenos Aires tango came to the world.
Piazzolla said:
Yo creo que cuanto mas se pinta a la aldea, mas se pinta el mundo.
I believe that the more you paint the village, the more you paint the world.
Carlos Paredes (1925-2004) wrote in 1963 a music that would become a portuguese ex-libris par excellence. Far away from the furore espressivo of fado singers, Paredes creates a music that shows the idiosyncrasy of the Portuguese Guitar and how expressive it is beyond the common place of the
narrow streets and low life's fado.
This music not only inaugurated a new era in the urban popular music panorama, but it's also a theme music of a film that turned portuguese cinema inside out. By the time mostly languishing in a sterile landscape.
Os Verdes Anos (1963) by Paulo Rocha show us a Lisbon, already then, a permanent construction site, with the Avenidas Novas (New Avenues) and its bourgoises, with little country girls as maids, that then rushed towards the capital of the empire. And the nephews of the shoemaker uncles that flirted with the maids, consumating in the city that which before was consumated in the country.
But, in this apparently bucolic scenery, darkness peeps, and good fellas are sometimes the worst fellas.
In Paredes music that unquietness is felt, that movement of the soul, or the lack of a soul. And if there's a music that defines the portuguese singularity, it's this. Being portuguese, with all the good and bad that ensue, this music glues to my skin: one scratches but the itch continues.
