Drinking and ruffians

If I associate tango and the milonga with a drink, for no good reason that I can think of, it's red wine. But the photo is of white wine. Well, we're out of red wine, sherry, port...

Killing time today in the serpentine Post Office queue I looked for the lyrics for El encopao (The Drunk) by Enrique Rodriguez which happened to be playing on my headphones.

I've heard it said that the sound of Rodriguez' orchestra is happy.  Michael Lavocah's chapter on Rodriguez in his book Tango Stories: Musical secrets is subtitled "cheerful tango" but I don't find Rodriguez cheerful or happy. Vendrás alguna vez? I think sounds unambiguously happy.  There's something happy about Déjame ser asi and Adiós, muchachos but also something that isn't.  I find more happy tracks in Fresedo or Canaro. Donato (Lavocah: "get happy") for me has muted playfulness rather than happiness.  The Rodriguez foxtrots are jaunty, for sure, the vals are upbeat, but track after track of the tangos is sombre in tone. Suerte loca, El huérfano, Son cosas del bandeoneon, Cómo has cambiado pebeta, Cómo se pianta la vida and many others all have it, even if the rhythm sometimes belies the tone. I've often wondered what it is that conveys that special kind of Rodriguez melancholy. His bandoneons seem to have a particular tone, it comes, too, from his singer, Moreno. His pianist is as identifiable as Biagi.

"What good is melody? What good is music, if it ain't possessing something sweet? Now it ain't the melody and it ain't the music...there's something else that makes this tune complete" sings Louis Armstrong in It Don't Mean a Thing (if it ain't got that swing).  It's a better way of saying that trying to write about music, as has been said eloquently before, is like dancing about architecture, singing about economics, a perversion of the subject but any way you care to phrase it, a fool's errand.

The tango translation database is a resource I can't recommend enough; that and the new service from Michael Krugman through Tango Decoder which lets you learn the music, learn what the words mean and improve your Spanish all by watching a 3 minute film with subtitles in English & Spanish. Please do like, share or otherwise support these initiatives, especially the new one. I find them among the most useful tango-related resources on the internet. The first track with bilingual subtitles is Di Sarli's Patotero Sentimental (Romantic Ruffian).

This particular link in the database took me to another useful and well-known resource - the Tango And Chaos site. In the notes below the lyrics for El encopao I was surprised to read that few people drink in the milongas in Buenos Aires. Surprised, because I'd heard just about everyone drinks. So which is it? I don't know but guess that as with most things some do and some don't.

I've wondered for a long time what the words mean. The song is so sad and the lyrics prove it:

Me dicen "El Encopao"...
los que no saben
lo que me ha pasa'o.
Y me ven hecho un cualquiera...
que digan lo que digan.
¡Que ya no me hacen mella!

They say I’m the "Man of the Bottle"...
those who don’t know
what happened to me.
They look at me like I’m nobody...
but they can say what they say.
It doesn’t matter to me!

I prefer to know these things, not least since reading a North American DJ, Dan Boccia, on the subject:

I still remember watching a couple of Argentines chuckle as one couple went bounding gleefully across the floor, all smiles and upbeat to "Verdemar", which is a wholly thoughtful song, both in it's arrangement (the Di Sarli/Rufino version) and the fact that it's dealing withsomeone's lover who has just drowned.

Amazing what you can do in the Post Office these days.