Thursday, October 05, 2006

 

Néstor Tomassini at Bar Tuñón

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Bar Tuñón is a fantastic little place on Maipu between Córdoba y Paraguay. There is a restaurant on the first floor, with the performance space downstairs. Named in homage to the militant writer and poet of Argentine street life Raúl González Tuñón (1905-1974), Bar Tuñón oozes an infectiously pleasant atmosphere, even more so now that the new anti-smoking laws have gone into effect in Buenos Aires. You read that right, folks: no more smoking in public places in Buenos Aires as of last Sunday. It’s hard to believe but true.

We were there to hear the tango clarinetist Néstor Tomassini present his new CD, De Corte Antiguo. You read that right, too: tango clarinetist. Because I myself play saxophone and clarinet—instruments rarely heard in contemporary tango—this concert was all the more interesting and special for me. Néstor was accompanied throughout the concert by a singe guitarist, and was joined on several selections by a bassist and percussionist who played the cajón, a musical wooden box that the player sits on top of and slaps with their hands like a skinned drum. The group's repertoire was dominated by both classic and lesser known tangos and milongas (an upbeat sub genre of tango) from the early history of the music, which, given the instrumentation they had, they played in a very romping and rollicking style. Tomassini attacked his clarinet lines with an intensity that was reminiscent of klezmer clarinet playing, slipping and sliding around the edge of the instrument’s capabilities to the point that some notes and a few whole phrases were squawked away and lost in the air. As a clarinet player, I could identify with this energetic, agressive, and joyful style playing, and was impressed by how different it was from the crisp precision you hear in a lot of tango music, due probably to the instrumental qualities of the bandoneón, where there are no "inbetween" notes.

This kind of groove heavy, percussion added tango music seems to be something of a phenomenon these days. While this style is obviously contemporary (it would not be too much of a stretch for some listeners to hear it as “world music”), it is interesting that the musicians themselves often imagine it as being more closely related to how tango originally sounded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when wind instruments such as the flute or clarinet were much more common in tango music. Today this kind of playing can be heard as making certain kinds of claims regarding the Afro-Argentine influence in early tango, which some people believe has been ignored or neglected in common understandings of the genre's origins and history. That, of course, is a big debate, and I am not going to go there in this blog entry, but if you are interested you can check out the recent (and polemical) book Tango: an Art History of Love by Yale art history professor Robert Farris Thompson (Pantheon 2005). No such claims were made from the stage last night, however, at least not verbally.

Aside from Tomassini, the MVP of this concert was guitarist Hernán Reinaudo, who I know from the fantastic group 34 puñaladas and who had invited me to the concert. Hernán contributed the only original song to the program (which unfortunately is not on the CD) and was given space for a solo rendition of the vals “Ojos azules” by (I think) composer and guitarist Miguel Cafre (1881-1936), which was among the evening’s highlights. Hernán has an instrumental voice that is at once virtuosic and tender, deeply expressive and lighthearted: quite a winning combination in my opinion.

Related Recordings
Néstor Tomassini, De Corte Antiguo (Art Menu/EPSA Music) 2006.

Related Links
http://www.nestortomassini.com.ar/
http://www.tunon.com.ar/

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