Taste and value

There have been here, several pieces over the years about taste  including this one from nearly ten years ago. 

I was reminded of this theme again tonight, listening to one of Atahualpa's most famous songs - Los Ejes de mi carreta (My cart's axles).  

Diversion: there are a number of songs about carters in the Americas. Guillermo Portabales is one of my favourite singer/guitaists.  A Cuban who settled (and died) in Puerto Rico during the twentieth century he is noted for his guajiras.  A guajiro/a is someone who works in the country.  Whereas "peasant" has negative connotations in English, it doesn't seem to in Spanish - rather, the opposite.  So these are songs about country life.  His El Carretero (lyrics in English and Spanish) compares country life to Eden.  

Lyrics in Latin America often have ideas that repeat themselves across songs.  One of these, found in El Carretero is "A caballo vamos pa'l monte, a caballo vamos pa'l monte" ("let's go / we are going to the mountain on horseback").  The phrase is repeated again and again through songs in different genres.  It's in the son track by Morena son. It's in the mesmeric modern guajira by Orquesta Akokán. It's in the modern folk song Me voy al monte by the Colombian Katie James and in the light hearted number El Mochilon by the Cuban band Sonora Matancera - and many more.

The inimitable 1971 eponymous song by the Puerto Rican / American Grammy award winning pianist, bandleader and composer, Eddie Palmieri, begins with drums imitating the galloping of a horse.  Often the idea of going to the mountain is symbolic as much as literal: the idea of escaping trouble, urban life, or returning to one's homeland, a simpler, cleaner, more natural way of living, perhaps in tune with ancestors, with the spiritual world.  Or it could be a return to community, or to a refuge, to a generally more wholesome, less corrupted way of living.

Atahualpa's carter knows what he likes, he has his reasons and he doesn't care what other people think.  He has independence and strength of mind. 

Porque no engraso los ejes

Because I don't grease the axles

Me llaman abandona'o

They call me abandoned (They disparage me for not greasing them)

Si a mi me gusta que suenen

If I like the sound

¿Pa qué los quiero engrasaos ?

Why do I want them greased?

E demasiado aburrido

It's too boring

Seguir y seguir la huella

To follow and follow the trail

Demasiado largo el camino

The road is too long

Sin nada que me entretenga

With nothing to entertain me

No necesito silencio

I don't need silence

Yo no tengo en qué pensar

I have nothing to think about

Tenía, pero hace tiempo

I had, but a long time ago

Ahora ya no pienso mas

Now I don't think anymore

Los ejes de mi carreta

The axles of my cart

Nunca los voy a engrasar

I'm never going to grease them

We think we know what we like, and we do know, to an extent, but our preferences, especially our publicly avowed preferences are inordinately influenced by the herd.  To know  the truth of this, consider the people you know with much skill or knowledge who are not valued, all those roses blushing unseen.  I know a man of many talents and much knowledge who lives in material poverty because he just doesn't seem to fit in. He should be valued and he isn't, at least, commercially because he doesn't fit the world's mould.  We all know people like this.  It is uncomfortable because their existence exposes the hypocrisy and shallowness of what we value, very often just because other people do.

And there are so many others with so much less talent or skill or knowledge who are paid vast sums because a herd decides they are "in". 

As just one example from the tango world, there are many tango DJs, ostensibly valued for the music they play but actually, question the people who are valuing them and their knowledge of music is as limited as a hobbled horse. So these DJs are actually valued for other reasons that have nothing to do with music.  Sometimes it is because they are cool or charismatic or often because they are good self-publicists, or good dancers.  Many DJs are in fact good dancers but not all good dancers are good DJs! 

In the worst cases they are valued merely because other people seem to value them.  There is a "general consensus" or tradition of valuing them. There are some catastrophically bad (volume, tanda structure, set structure, set balance, track choice, ego) but long-standing very poor DJs who are "valued" as DJs for these weakest of "reasons" which are actually not reasons at all.

On being sceptical because the majority, the herd, likes or values something - I know I have said the opposite about tango music.  I have said that music that fills the floor with dancers is likely "good" because it passes the test of a lot of people wanting to dance to it.  What is that if not herd instinct?  But music is different to avowals that that book, that lecturer, that restaurant, that teacher, even that DJ is "good".  Because the human response to the music playing is instinctive, it comes from the body and can be better trusted. Whereas many our other avowals of taste, our judgements of value come from elsewhere.  As such it is valid to question why we like such and such, especially where it does not come from a physical response, and to ask how influenced we are about liking something to fit in rather than as a genuine response to the thing in itself.

But speaking of things in themselves let's throw a spanner in the works and leave the final word to the late Daniel Dennett, philosopher, who died last week.  He thought it was a great mistake to define your terms and talk about the essences (aka "things in themselves") the way Aristotle did and people still do.  "Forget about essences, learn about all the variations and the details and the penumbral cases and then afterwards you'll know what you're talking about." 

Grey is always the interesting area. It's much harder to be at ease with grey than simplistic black and white.

Unbalanced sets

At a recent milonga there was "enough" good music.  There was plenty to dance. The main issue was that orchestras were repeated at the expense of others who weren't played at all.  This is a common problem and one that is so easy to see and so easy to fix that it is a wonder that it exists at all.  It even happens with DJs who can put together, for the most part, reliably good tandas, making it all the more puzzling.   

Repeating orchestras in a short milonga  - "mishorta" - (from correspondence) is especially hard to understand. I love Rodriguez - the plangency of the lyrics juxtaposed by those jaunty melodies, the troubled bandoneon and the responsive, companionable piano.  But in a mishorta of two and a half hours where is the justification for playing two Rodriguez tandas and Rodriguez vals or two Biagi tandas but no tangos by other of the main orchestras that have not yet been played?

Duds

Chatting with the DJ about the set, I said I liked the Demare tanda apart from El Pescante [lyrics].  

- What was wrong with it? 

- It makes me silently beg for the tanda to end. 

Perhaps he thought I was being melodramatic but he had asked and it is torture to be on the floor for that time. When your dance is wholly dependent on knowing and loving the music, when you are caught and stuck in a tanda with a dud track, dance becomes mere mechanics because the music just isn't there to support it. I feel like a fraud at these times.  I am a fraud!  Because I'm pretending to dance. My real dance isn't there because the good music that it comes from isn't there either.

Perhaps it's just me.  

"Bad" music or personal prejudice?

Recently I was in M&S, commiserating, so I thought with a cashier.  We talk to each other still, in Scotland. I had lamented, perhaps gauchely, that while there were no windows by the checkout there was at least a bucket of tulips by her elbow to enjoy.  I had lasted two weeks working in M&S as a student.  Admittedly, the shop was a building site at the time.  It was the dust, the boredom, the lack of natural light.

She glanced at me warily.  No, I've never missed a window, she said, categorically.  This brought me up short. Had she even noticed the tulips?  I have always felt the deepest sympathy for anyone I have encountered in a windowless working environment. I had assumed the difficulty in enduring this most depressing circumstance was a universal feeling - like being cold and wet for a long time -  and that people trapped in windowless worlds were just profoundly unfortunate.  The lesson here is that no matter how instinctive your conviction, other people just may not share them.  Tolerance or even awareness seems to be highly contextual. 

So it is with classic tracks.  Most people seem to like them, but most is not all.  It is perfectly possible to recognise tracks as widely appreciated and popular yet acknowledge your own personal prejudices against them.  

I have these against some Di Sarli, Rodriguez vals, a few classic Donato tracks and only want to hear OTV sparingly. 

When you ask people what they don't like about certain classic tracks, they often say it is because they are annoying.  I find this with some Donato milongas, or with Gato (1937), for instance.  I enjoy it as a satirical piece, just not so much to dance. 

Some classic tracks are nonetheless so grating I wonder if they have become classics by accident. Did they just work their way into the unwritten canon by pure chance, like some insistently affectionate, mangy dog you can't bring yourself to turf out. OTV's Cacareando (1933), mentioned recently might be such a contender. There is a clue there: including in tangos animal noises, combined with whiny singers could be chancy.  Cacareando somehow seems to be compulsive enough to have pulled it off for decades.

What makes music "good"?

How much good music in a milonga is "enough"?

Enough that you can dance when opportunities arise.  A set is failing when a dancer is seeking another but one of them doesn't like the music and so can't dance.

What do you mean, "can't" dance? Don't you mean "won't". 

No, "can't".  Granted, this problem seems to afflict a vanishingly small minority.  Most people will dance anyway because for them the dance is movement, not music.  Movement, albeit to a beat with more or less any accompanying melody within the generically familiar sound of "tango". 

Often, the reason the music isn't "good enough" is  because it fails the "tried and tested" benchmark.  They are not the classic dance numbers, they are not well-loved.  

How do you know the music isn't good?  Doesn't it all just come down to personal preference? 

Of course individual taste in music is personal preference.  Taste is how you feel about something. That may be informed by education, by critical thought, but ultimately, we prefer colours, music, art, literature, environment, people because we just do, because of how we feel and who is to guess at the reasons for that. It isn't obvious.  Science is only just beginning to enter that territory.  

You can't dictate taste.  Some might try to make themselves like such and such.  As an eight or nine year old, I can remember thinking it would be convenient, appropriate, polite to like cucumber and eventually trained myself to tolerate it.  No sooner had I achieved this lofty goal than a neighbour served cucumber mousse at a barbecue and I was sick. It was a stark lesson that trying to coerce taste  in yourself or others is unlikely to end well.  At best you may end up feeling conflicted and uncomfortable. 

Sometimes of course, you grow out of some things and into others.  As a beginner I liked electrotango before I came to appreciate traditional tango dance music.  Some of us grow into coffee, olives and artichokes.  And children brought up in households where fish fingers, spaghetti hoops and soda is normal might never learn to like much more.  

So what makes something good? 

Good in the collective mind?  In art it's probably down to market value which means economics has utterly screwed aesthetic value in that area. 

Good in music?

Good in music is surely what individuals buy or what groups of people want to listen to, to dance to. And the longer those pieces of music are played and loved the better the piece might be, at least as judged by ordinary people rather than technical specialists.

So, good music in the milongas?

 Just what has been played, loved and danced for decades. The numbers you hear a lot, the numbers that inevitably get people on to the floor.

Politics II

Another city also has problems.  A new DJ complained that they'd been barred from DJing at a local practica.

Well, I said, laughing, with perhaps less sympathy than he had hoped for ...if you mix up vals and tango in a tanda you can't be that surprised. 

He'd fixed that, apparently.  It wasn't the issue. 

In central Scotland this is not quite the gross faux pas it would be in most other places.  The "best" DJ in the rival city regularly skips milonga tandas, plays tandas of varying numbers of tracks, plays two tandas of the same orchestra, plays with variable volume, according to whether they are dancing or not. Almost anything goes around here - or did until people started  dropping away from that event, presumably leading to the cuts just mentioned.

Crikey, if that wasn't the issue, how much worse can it be?

Apparently, the tracks hadn't been traditional enough.

I snorted.  But it isn't a traditional practica. 

One of the the organiser's dance partners plays the least traditional music I have ever heard - so alternative I stopped going to their, separate, event years ago.  And that is why the new DJ had played some alternative music. He claimed people said they liked that.  I can believe it. They always have liked alternative music.  But someone complained.  

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 

Complaints are a damaging thing in a small community where everyone more or less knows one another.  Alternatively, one can put up with it or walk away.  

I have never heard a fully traditional set there. They are wholly mixed.  Some of DJs play wildly alternative music. The most traditional DJ I can think of also plays an assortment of obscure tracks. 

I asked if the newly "traditional" practica was advertised as such?  Apparently not.

I asked if everyone who goes knew about the new approach. Again, apparently not.  Lots of people there like a mix, which is why he had played to that demand.

This problem is twofold.  One, advertising.  Two, understanding.  

If an event advertises the kind of music they play then everything should be clear to the DJ and to the dancers.  This event has not ever, as far as I know advertised the kind of music that is played. I guess they assume people like what there is or don't care that much and it isn't worth advertising it for visitors.  So the music could be anything - and often is.  It has been like that as long as I can remember, not just there but everywhere in that city.  That puts off most good dancers  and those are the two main reasons I don't often go - the music and the dancing.  These often track each other: alternative music /  poor dancing; traditional music /  better dancing.  I laughed ruefully when he said the tango trousers of my favourite dancer there had apparently been eaten by moths. I could understand why.

Second,  most people, and particularly in that city, think "traditional" tango means "old" tango, pre 1960, say.  It doesn't. Traditional means the music people have traditionally, in Argentina, danced to - and that is a subset of "old".  

Given there is confusion about what "traditional" means and there is no advertising of "traditional tango" anyway, there is apparently a mismatch of expectation between the organisers and, in this case, the shipwrecked DJ. Clarity is what is needed, all round.

If, for instance an event started to be advertised as traditional and did what it said on the tin, maybe more people would become interested.

Similarly, if someone like Cacu Lucero appeared and started to run his exploratory tango events, to a mix of music in the way that I saw him do that, again I would be interested.  They are entirely different creatures and I am interested in both. 

But the "discontinued" DJ's nose was out of joint.  That eventually tends to lead to people dropping out or going elsewhere.

Politics I

 Politics has put paid to many a dance. 

 For nearly a year I hosted a lovely little practica that grew in numbers.  I ran it, DJd, booked the room, hosted, brought on new people.  We lost the venue because of a problem with the building, I went into a collaboration instead, that I didn't enjoy, that was endlessly problematic but that attracted a lot of people.  Soon enough the jackals were circling, allying. It was easier to leave them to it.

Unfortunately two other cities near me are suffering from politics too.

The main milonga in Edinburgh has just announced they are cutting the hours of the Sunday milonga from 4 hours to 2.5.  Since it is an hour away that makes it no longer viable.  I don't go to the Tuesday version because I find the music and the atmosphere too loud and too brash. 

Because of longstanding DJ issues I hadn't been to the Sunday session either for a while.  I did go recently before the cuts and was amazed.  There were very few good or experienced dancers left.  One corner was taken up with new dancers brought along by a long-established teacher, who danced with them.  That was nice to see. But I had never seen that happen before.  Was it to prop up the milonga because if it wasn't viable it's less reason to start tango lessons?  Was it a new business strategy? Was it for fun? 

I asked a long-standing dancer what had happened? He thought the better dancers had decamped to Tuesday.  Over the next few weeks  I heard people had moved to a practica run by another host that had been growing in popularity over recent years. It was known for attracting an older crowd with less accomplished dancers. "Friendly" is the common euphemism.

But I had fun on the Sunday.  I chatted, danced, met a newish dancer who asked me repeatedly to come back the next week. I said "probably" and I did.  

That dancer wasn't there. I stayed about two hours, til 2130.  For most of the time there were 8 people present.  It crept up to 12 and then eventually 16.  This is in a near perfect venue, that has hosted dances for over 200 years, in a city of over half a million with a tango tradition stretching back well over two decades. There was no-one I wanted to dance with so I didn't dance.  I travelled for two hours and spent over £40 on transport, a meal, the cheap entry and a drink. It isn't worth it. So that is, in all probability, the end of my dancing in that venue where I went to my first milongas.

I will get back eventually to the practica to see how it is these days.  Just about everyone treats it as a social dance. I would like to use it as a practica if I could find experienced guys I can learn from who are willing to do likewise. 

I think though that most of the good dancers have left off going to the milongas and just not been replaced. With no examples to dance with and learn from, and people travelling less since COVID and the price hikes the newer dancers promise to be very different.

What makes a good tango number?

Someone put this question to me the other day.  It is an obvious question but a good one.  I remember asking it myself about ten years ago.

Then, although I felt what a good track was - and this has not changed - I lacked confidence in responding to the same question.  I am not sure why.  Maybe just lack of enough experience to back up the belief. Maybe because in music and dance the brain catches up later with what the body feels much earlier.

Why does the question even matter?  It matters to anyone who is interested in the music, who cares about the music, who reflects upon it.  Although, actually, to know what makes a good tango track you don't need to reflect.  You just need to listen, to in fact turn off thinking.  A great track is one that demands to be danced, the body wants to move to it, the floor fills to it. 

A good track brooks no opposition.  Mi vieja linda is an example.  Nothing else by Emilio Pellejero's orquesta, that I can think of, has survived to be danced in the milongas.  So that is an inconvenient track to place in a tanda, but do we ditch it? Of course, not because it's a superlatively good number.  Instead, we find two good friends for it so we can play it.

More cerebrally, there are at least a couple of other clues to what makes a good tango number.  There are a surprising number of good  - if not really good - dancers, who lack discrimination in music.  Like maybe, 80%, maybe 90% of people (depending on the milonga and the country) they will dance to almost anything. I guess they just have a lot of dance experience instead.   But there are tracks or eras (the 1920s) that some good dancers deliberately won't dance and that is a clue to what makes good tango music for dancing.  The clue is more in what good dancers don't dance.  Of course, motivation is hard to guess. Maybe it's just that they can't find the right partner? Do their feet hurt? Are they too hot?  

The very best dancers, for me, are all about music.  They dance the music, the pauses.  Steps, figures are really not that important to them and  don't feature significantly in their conversation about dance. 

The other hint is simply to know which are the tracks that are popular, that have survived to be danced across 90 years.  But really, it's a case of if you don't feel it you ain't gonna know.

There are popular electro trango tracks of course at alternative milonga.  If you like your music thumping easy, slutty, then by all means.  It's the difference between going to a fairground versus an art gallery or a good restaurant.  Classic tango dance music has a complexity and a finesse that, happily, attracts some and repels others.    

The attendees in the traditional milongas of Buenos Aires were the most discriminating dancers I have met regarding music.  They rarely seemed to not want to dance a track but then the tracks at the milongas were were nearly always good.

The modern group Orquesta Típica Andariega has been around for a while.  "Andariega" means wandering, roaming, nomadic, from "andar" to move or walk. Their vals Gira Gira and Buenasera are good but then there are other orchestras (Firpo) who have done vals that are markedly better than their undanceable tangos. Is Gira Gira good enough for the milonga?  I don't know because I haven't heard it there.  It is not at all the same to listen to outside of the milonga and think it might be good for dancing and to be in the milonga and know.  That is the real and only test: does it pull you out of you seat?

I have only once that I remember put modern orchestras into a setlist. They were:

Mi Vieja Linda  - Emilio Pellejero

Cacareando (Sexteto Cristal).  The original (1933) is a classic, also somewhat annoying, so if I heard the modern version in the milongas more I might come to prefer it.

Papas Calientes (Ariel Ramirez).  The good original is by Donato, in 1937. 

I also can't remember mixing a tanda with such a huge gap of years but this was an experiment in a practica with mostly new dancers, not a milonga. Sexteto Cristal has covered Mi Vieja Linda but it isn't as good as the original and if it isn't the very best it isn't worth playing. This is a surprisingly controversial idea.

These apart, and La Juan D'Arienzo live, I can't remember dancing a modern orchestra in the last ten years.  Suggestions welcome! 

I heard a salsa DJ yesterday play a few good tracks that got everyone up and dancing and a good half that were just dregs, fillers.  I chatted to him, indicating a few tracks and orchestras I knew from his display.  Ah, but I can't play just well known tracks he said otherwise we would be down to a limited selection.  This guy has been dancing since the mid 1990s but I know this rubbish because there are hundreds if not thousands of great salsa tracks, far more I am sure than there are great traditional tango tracks that number in the many hundreds. 

As my dad's health as declined over recent months I have taken more food to them for the freezer. Now, have it during the week! I urge ...and I will bring some more.  But dad would put it away and save it for weeks.  For what? I would say, frustrated.  For best? 

Carpe diem! It is not worth playing indifferent dance numbers just to save the really danceable ones "for best".