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Juan, first of all I'd like to thank you for having accepted this interview,
it's a pleasure to have you here.
Actually I am grateful for being called and to represent in some way
the generation that was dancing in the clubs around '50 to '65.
Please remind us of your age.
I am 76.
I started dancing when I was 13, in a neighborhood club of course, like it used to be in those times.
I describe myself as an observer of the period customs and manners, of the places, the characters,
the neighborhood clubs, the great orchestras and the dancers from the period 1945 to 1960.
It was a glorious period in which the tango salón was born.
Shortly we'll come to that period, but before that, I'd like to talk a bit more about
your own beginnings. What is your first memory of tango?
My first memory was in our home's patio, where my brother,
who was ten years older than me, was teaching his buddies, his neighborhood friends, to dance.
I was playing the music, on an old Victrola phonograph.
That's my first tango memory and where the excitement begins. And I tell you an anecdote.
The classes that my brother gave to his friends ended and they all left.
I was alone arranging the chairs, the records and everything that we had prepared for the practice.
That was about one or two years after my brother started those practices at home,
so I must have been ten or twelve years old. I played a Canaro recording,
I remember it as if it were today, the tango by Aróztegui, "Champagne Tango" by Canaro,
and I began dancing alone. I never had practised before.
Because of what you had seen in the practice.
Seeing my brother and making the movements of the steps that they had been making, I began to improvise.
And something magical happened.
In that moment I felt like carried away to another galaxy and
I was floating on air to the rhythm of the music of Canaro's orchestra.
When the tango ended, I awoke to the reality and landed again in the patio.
From that day on I remain under this spell and it moves me to tell you about it because
I think I haven't told it many times in my life.
Well, thanks for sharing it!
I understand that you're quietly playing a very active role in the tango.
I know that you have taught dancing, that you have a very important collection of tango music,
that you also wrote some lyrics, that you're an observer of -- because you say
that you don't use the word "codes" but -- manners and customs...
I don't use the word "code" because I find it too much juridical.
Codes are the civil code, the legal code, the penal code, the code of the Mafia.
We representatives in some way of the tango circuit we aren't that much into codes.
Ours actually are manners and period customs.
Especially the material that you have collected, I know that you brought,
and that's why that music equipment is here, a treasure that you generously want to share.
When we first met I told you about this relic that, I think, very few people in the world have.
Those to whom I gave it, have kept it and hided it like a treasure, and I think that's a mistake.
Because what exists in the world for the culture, for the mind, for the soul, must be spread, not hided.
Therefore I bring it with a lot of sympathy and desiring that it be spread and be known.
This is a treasure that was recorded in 1947 from a radio concert directed by presenter Tito Martínez Del Box.
That program was called "La Voz de las Américas" ("The Voice of the Americas").
The idea was to transmit our national music all over America,
from South America, Central America and North America.
Maestro Di Sarli was the invited artist of the month
and he got the idea to carry the interest in the tango of Buenos Aires to the United States
and especially to New York, to see if it could catch on there.
To that end he proposed the following, what we will hear in his own voice in the recording:
to record his tango "Nido Gaucho", with the first part sung in Spanish by Jorge Durán
and the second part in English by a member of the orchestra of Maestro Di Sarli, a mulatto who sang in English.
So, what we will hear now is a first part sung in Spanish and the second part in English.
Do you want to hear it?
I'm eager to hear it.
Presenter: My friends, shortly we'll continue with our rhythmic music from Buenos Aires.
But first we'll take a break in the Ronda Musical de las Américas
to invite you to savour a delicious...
What's the matter, maestro Di Sarli, you're looking worried?
Di Sarli: Nothing important.
I always believed that the tango would have spread even more in the world
if all people could have understood exactly the meaning of its lyrics.
Presenter: And that problem is difficult to solve?
Di Sarli: Who knows?
For now I intend to do an experiment in honour of all the audiences of the Continent,
and you will decide if it's suitable or not.
Presenter: What is it about?
Di Sarli: I'll tell you: I will direct the orchestra in one of my most popular tangos, "Nido Gaucho".
Presenter: And to do the experiment Di Sarli is speaking about,
he brought along his singers Jorge Durán and Bob Toledo. Attention!
Presenter: And so we heard for the first time a tango played by an Argentinian orchestra
and sung in another language in addition to ours: that was the surprise that Carlos Di Sarli had for us.
Let's forget the imperfections, don't forget that this is the year 1947, recorded live.
How did you get that recording? Because you were born in '38...
I began collecting records when I was about 15
and I always had contacts with very good people in the collector's community.
On one occasion talking with a fan... I consider myself as fan number one in the world of Di Sarli
and I have nearly everything by him.
I was lucky to meet very nice people in the community that gave me this recording
that I first had copied on a Geloso reel-to-reel recorder
and later in 1972 transferred to a cassette, that I kept.
I gave away lots of copies but I never heard it on the radio.
When you got that recording on the first recording system, how old were you?
Then I was around 20.
At that time the orchestras still performed on the radios with a public.
Yes, there is a very famous program that everybody was listening to at 8 of the evening,
the "Glostora Tango Club" with De Angelis.
It already was the last period of De Angelis with Dante, later came Oscar Larroca,
and then the singers who followed him.
There still were live performances on the radios, Vargas
was performing with his own orchestra, not with that of D'Agostino. All of them,
... Pugliese. Di Sarli was performing on Sundays and the host was Antonio Carrizo.
The concert was at noon every Sunday on radio Belgrano.
How were those concerts?
Were they open to the public, but I imagine that their capacity was limited...
Of course, those were large studios, not like the television studios today.
They were large halls with all the transmission equipment, the presenter
with a classic microphone on a stand, big, nickeled, everything a microphone.
It was intimidating, because when someone without much personality was standing before the lectern,
the microphone absorbed him, made him feel ill-at-ease, didn't allow him to relax.
But it was very beautiful! The orchestra was playing live as if it were in a dance or on a stage.
I was asking because I don't know anything about that subject.
Was the public seated in the same hall?
Yes.
Ah! They weren't apart, I mean with the environmental sounds...
In radio concerts there always was a lamp covered with something red.
When the light came on, you had to be absolutely silent.
And people were very respectful.
It wasn't like today. People went and accepted the rules of the game.
When the red light came on people got quiet and listened to the orchestra.
Afterwards, it went out, applause, shouts, whatever you want.
But when the light came on, you had to respect the procedures.
What clubs did you frequent and what orchestras performed there?
Generally every neighborhood had several clubs. In Flores, which essentially is my zone,
the most central and frequented places were: Social Rivadavia and Palacio Rivadavia.
Going south from the avenida Rivadavia, you found clubs that still exist, like Pedro Echagüe and América del Sur.
But within that zone, approximately twenty blocks around, you also had
the Sociedad de Fomento Mariano Acosta, known today as La Tierrita, and also Flores Sur and La Estrellita.
All of them were neighborhood clubs that hardly had live orchestras.
There also were emblematic clubs like Club Comunicaciones.
Every year, that club was organizing a very important meeting, called the "Dance of the Presenters".
I'm talking about the years '55, '56, '57, with distinguished figures like Antonio Carrizo,
Cacho Fontana, Fito Salinas, and the female presenters of those years whose names I don't remember.
They had founded an association and were organizing a yearly dance called "Dance of the Presenters",
and they engaged don Carlos Di Sarli in the Club Comunicaciones.
The club had a floor of 20 or 30 basket courts in the open air, surrounded by trees, flowers and gardens.
On that floor we were lucky to have watched maestro Di Sarli to make ten thousand people dance. Marvellous!
On one night?
On that night. A Saturday night.
Talking about the neighborhood clubs I especially have to mention a club that was the club par excellence,
the "Club Esportivo Buenos Aires", on the corner of the former Parral and Gaona streets.
Today Parral is called Honorio Pueyrredón, where the Cid Campeador monument stands.
On that corner, every Sunday, the club gathered between 4 to 5 thousand people dancing in the open air.
They were dancing a marvelous style now called tango salón, with that close embrace.
I was lucky to have known Esportivo Buenos Aires perhaps by a bet that I made in the neighborhood
when I was about 19 or 20, when we already had visited all the clubs in the neighborhood.
One day I had the idea to announce to my group of friends:
"Next Sunday I'll go dancing at the club Buenos Aires".
Some older ones, and also some of my own age said: "No, Juan!
Why should you go to the Buenos Aires? There are guys who are going there for four years and
they couldn't dance even one tango! Because it was so selective.
The women were dancing marvelously, they were dressed like the beautiful actresses of the fifties.
Don't forget that up to that day we all were fanatic fans of the D'Arienzo style dance,
"picadito" (rhythmic), fast, light, a turn to one side, a turn to the other side.
When I entered the door of the Buenos Aires I was amazed, first by the glamour on the floor, the dresses,
the perfume, the mint sweets, and then by the desire to dance embraced and transmit things dancing.
And by fate or luck, the tango that was played when I entered,
the dream par excellence of every neighborhood guy, was Di Sarli with Durán, "Porteño y Bailarín",
"you made me, tango, into what I am: romantic and sensual". When I saw this I said to myself:
"Man, what were you dancing up till now, in those last 6 or 7 years? This is tango dancing!"
It was discovering a new world.
I discovered Di Sarli! I already knew him, but I preferred to dance to D'Arienzo.
However, when I saw the scene on the floor...
They seemed in love, it seemed as if they were floating on air when they danced Di Sarli!
Juan, to finish, if you had to define the tango with one word, which would you use?
... Passion.
Thank you very much!
You're welcome.