Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Juan Carlos Caceres at the Centro Cultural Borges
Friday, March 16, 2007
Juan Carlos Caceres is an expatriate Argentine singer and piano player who has been based in Paris since 1968. He has worked not only as a musician and composer, but also a visual artist and a professor of art history, a job from which he has recently retired. Caceres’s musical project is centered on what he calls “tango negro,” or “black tango,” that is, a rather personalized and poetic interpretation of the theory that tango originated in the musical practices of Afro-Argentines who have since been written out of the genre’s history and folklore (not to mention the history of Argentina more broadly).
On the face of it, this is quite an interesting proposition. What role, if any, Afro-Argentines might have had in the historic origins of tango is a topic of some dispute, and a lot of ink has been spilled on the issue. Real evidence from the time period in question is both expansive and limited enough that any number of yarns can easily be spun: etymological conjectures that the word “tango” is derived from West African languages; conclusions made seemingly self-evident by the single famous (and derogatorily caricatured) image of a black couple dancing with the word “tango” printed above it; the fact that tango music does (or does not) feature “black” rhythmic syncopations; etc, etc, etc. The fact is that no one really knows that much about the origins of tango. Moreover, ever since it was canonized as a national genre in Argentina following World War I, tango’s history has been only further entrenched in legend and myth (with serious scrutiny of some topics becoming nearly untouchable in the process). That said, it is undeniable that Afro-Argentines as a whole have been systematically and unjustly excluded from their place in Argentine history, be it musical or otherwise. Therefore I feel that any real effort to reexamine and interrogate those histories should be applauded.
The problem then becomes, of course, how you define “real effort.” Unfortunately, I don’t think Caceres’s project would meet that standard by any definition. While apparently based on some kind of research and investigation (the program notes state that Caceres is a “studious researcher of tango”), tonight “black tango” seemed to mean little more than adding several percussion instruments to the more standard tango instrumentation of piano and bandoneón. These included cajón, a wooden box percussion instrument of Peruvian origin, the “bombo porteño,” which is the bass drum and cymbal combination heard in Argentine murga (a genre associated with neighborhood carnival organizations not unlike Brazilian samba schools but with a different rhythmic vocabulary), and a general percussionist who played a set of snare drum, hanging cymbal, djimbe, and an Uruguayan candombe drum.
It was an interesting combination, to be sure, and there were moments when the band really had everyone’s head bobbing, but does just adding some drums make this “black” music? Earlier this very evening I had gone to hear the ultra-establishment tango singer Susana Rinaldi perform for the inaugural event of the 2007 “bares notables” music series, and she had a cajón-playing percussionist in her band too. Was she therefore playing “tango negro?” Are all the many bands that feature percussionists playing it? They don’t seem to think so, or at least don’t make a point of it. The real story, as even Caceres announced from stage, is that the cajón, which has a long history in Peru and elsewhere, became a fashionable “world music” instrument in Paris the 1990s, and found its way into current groups through that route rather than through any historical connection to tango. Caceres just chooses to be precious about it.
As the night went on it became clear to me that the narrative being performed by Caceres and his band was not one of a new historic revisionism vis-à-vis the black contribution to tango music but the tired (but still very much alive) trope of the insatiable European thirst for the exotic. The banality of Caceres’s lyrics, over and above the idea that simply putting a drum on stage makes the music “black,” very much brought this point home to me. Lines that translate into something like “Drums, drums, the black people play the drums. They play tango on the drums, the black people play the drums” were typical. Despite the overly reverent and at times condescending attitude regarding the whole “tango negro” matter that Caceres projected from the stage, with lyrics like these the show began to border on minstrelsy. I might be accused of bringing an overly American viewpoint to this topic, but judging by this concert, it seems like the black contribution to tango, at least as seen from Caceres’s perch in Paris, has not really changed all that much between 1911 and 2007.
Juan Carlos Caceres is an expatriate Argentine singer and piano player who has been based in Paris since 1968. He has worked not only as a musician and composer, but also a visual artist and a professor of art history, a job from which he has recently retired. Caceres’s musical project is centered on what he calls “tango negro,” or “black tango,” that is, a rather personalized and poetic interpretation of the theory that tango originated in the musical practices of Afro-Argentines who have since been written out of the genre’s history and folklore (not to mention the history of Argentina more broadly).
On the face of it, this is quite an interesting proposition. What role, if any, Afro-Argentines might have had in the historic origins of tango is a topic of some dispute, and a lot of ink has been spilled on the issue. Real evidence from the time period in question is both expansive and limited enough that any number of yarns can easily be spun: etymological conjectures that the word “tango” is derived from West African languages; conclusions made seemingly self-evident by the single famous (and derogatorily caricatured) image of a black couple dancing with the word “tango” printed above it; the fact that tango music does (or does not) feature “black” rhythmic syncopations; etc, etc, etc. The fact is that no one really knows that much about the origins of tango. Moreover, ever since it was canonized as a national genre in Argentina following World War I, tango’s history has been only further entrenched in legend and myth (with serious scrutiny of some topics becoming nearly untouchable in the process). That said, it is undeniable that Afro-Argentines as a whole have been systematically and unjustly excluded from their place in Argentine history, be it musical or otherwise. Therefore I feel that any real effort to reexamine and interrogate those histories should be applauded.
The problem then becomes, of course, how you define “real effort.” Unfortunately, I don’t think Caceres’s project would meet that standard by any definition. While apparently based on some kind of research and investigation (the program notes state that Caceres is a “studious researcher of tango”), tonight “black tango” seemed to mean little more than adding several percussion instruments to the more standard tango instrumentation of piano and bandoneón. These included cajón, a wooden box percussion instrument of Peruvian origin, the “bombo porteño,” which is the bass drum and cymbal combination heard in Argentine murga (a genre associated with neighborhood carnival organizations not unlike Brazilian samba schools but with a different rhythmic vocabulary), and a general percussionist who played a set of snare drum, hanging cymbal, djimbe, and an Uruguayan candombe drum.
It was an interesting combination, to be sure, and there were moments when the band really had everyone’s head bobbing, but does just adding some drums make this “black” music? Earlier this very evening I had gone to hear the ultra-establishment tango singer Susana Rinaldi perform for the inaugural event of the 2007 “bares notables” music series, and she had a cajón-playing percussionist in her band too. Was she therefore playing “tango negro?” Are all the many bands that feature percussionists playing it? They don’t seem to think so, or at least don’t make a point of it. The real story, as even Caceres announced from stage, is that the cajón, which has a long history in Peru and elsewhere, became a fashionable “world music” instrument in Paris the 1990s, and found its way into current groups through that route rather than through any historical connection to tango. Caceres just chooses to be precious about it.
As the night went on it became clear to me that the narrative being performed by Caceres and his band was not one of a new historic revisionism vis-à-vis the black contribution to tango music but the tired (but still very much alive) trope of the insatiable European thirst for the exotic. The banality of Caceres’s lyrics, over and above the idea that simply putting a drum on stage makes the music “black,” very much brought this point home to me. Lines that translate into something like “Drums, drums, the black people play the drums. They play tango on the drums, the black people play the drums” were typical. Despite the overly reverent and at times condescending attitude regarding the whole “tango negro” matter that Caceres projected from the stage, with lyrics like these the show began to border on minstrelsy. I might be accused of bringing an overly American viewpoint to this topic, but judging by this concert, it seems like the black contribution to tango, at least as seen from Caceres’s perch in Paris, has not really changed all that much between 1911 and 2007.
