Sampling Gardel

By Juan Data (originalmente publicado en la revista Batanga de Estados Unidos en 2003)

Gotan Project, from Paris, is the avant-garde of tango’s latest reincarnation. They bring tango out of the nostalgic coffer and take back it to its original place: the dance floors.

In the inner city of Buenos Aires more than a century ago, an authentic expression found in the streets gave birth to tango and with it a whole cultural movement. This movement not only involved music but language, poetry, dance, fashion, literature, cinema… As time passed, tango evolved and influenced others around the world achieving respect as a cultivated form by the classic music connoisseurs.
However, in some indefinable moment of Argentine history, that evolutionary chain was broken. There were still countless performers covering the classic melodies, but the new generations of musicians chose other rhythms to express themselves and left tango behind as a music genre from the past.
That was exactly what motivated Eduardo Makaroff –an Argentine tango musician living in Paris for the past 13 years- to join the talents of electronica producers Philippe Cohen Solal and Christoph Muller and create Gotan Project. He wanted to bring tango back to life as a new music, fresh, contemporary and, more than ever, alive. Give tango its deserved revenge.

- As an Argentine tanguero, ¿how do you feel when you see that this tango new revolution makes its first steps in France instead of Argentina?
- As Argentine, I feel very proud. Paris is the second capital of tango. An important amount of Argentine tangueros lived in Paris, for a time and kept developing tango. It is not a coincidence. In reality, tangos first triumph was in Paris, before becoming popularly accepted in Argentina. Then, the evolution continued in Argentina. All the greatest poets in tango, like Cadícamo or Homero Expósito wrote from Paris. Even Gardel did a couple of movies in Paris. Piazzolla lived in Paris. The connection has always been there.

- We’ve assisted during the past years to the revival of certain rhythms, like jazz or bossa nova, that were embraced by electronica music in Europe. Do you think that the success that Gotan Project has achieved could be generating a new movement of electronic tango?
- I wish. I love tango in all its shapes. Tango deserves to have its place in the contemporary music universe. It deserves to regain the space it used to possess. I don’t like analyzing it in terms of a market place, and wouldn’t know what to say. I am a musician I approach it as art. I don’t see it as a marketing formula to sell records. But I did get to hear some stuff by other people who are mixing tango and electronica and I like this to happen. I support all those initiatives. Tango is not particularly easy to be mixed artificially. It’s not just one genre more in the world-music department. It’s a sophisticated type of music that you need to know how to read it to be able to play it correctly.

- You are planning on touring the United States in support of the local release of La Revancha Del Tango. How exactly do you get to transfer the sound of Gotan Project to a live experience?
- It was a big challenge to take this live, because it is not so evident. I think that in the live shows we successfully mixed the real acoustic tango, with accordion, piano and violin, with electronic gadgets, computers and all the DJ culture. Our performance in the visual aspects is also very refreshing, because it’s a mixture of the two aesthetics as well.

- In your future projects the idea is to keep on exploiting this combination?
- Yes, we are going to make a new record and we’re certainly going to explore even more into the Argentine music, not only tango but also folk. It’s a very rich universe, so there is a lot to do and to experiment with. Our focus is on not repeating ourselves, and not to make a formula out of this but continue to create. In my particular case, I’ve also just launched my own record label, called Mañana, especially dedicated to the creation of tango. Tango musicians should not be content with the same standard repertoire of the classics… Remember that “El Choclo” (one of tango’s biggest classics) was created exactly one hundred years ago. The problem is that the new generations took other rhythms of angle-saxon origin, to express what they felt.