Monday, March 05, 2007
Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival
Saturday, March 3, 2007
This was the night of the “gran milonga al aire libre,” a massive tango dance to live music that is the main closing event of the festival. The city closes one of the main downtown streets for the show—it was to be Diagonal Norte this year—and thousands of people come to dance outside with the famous Buenos Aires obelisk as the atmospheric backdrop. Unfortunately, if it rains the event is cancelled, and, you guessed it, after what was a beautiful if breezy day a thick blanket of dark clouds began to roll in over the city around four pm. By seven it was starting to drizzle. There goes the milonga.
Still having “ganas” to see something that night, I decided to head down to the Teatro de la Ribera in La Boca to see the Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro, one of several other events planned for that night that was sure not to be rained out. Thanks to the city government, all the events at the tango festival are free, but many require tickets that can be picked up earlier in the day from the venues. Knowing how popular the Fernández Fierro is, I knew I was taking a risk by showing up without a ticket, and sure enough, the concert was sold out. My friend and I mulled around for a while, wondering what we should do, when we heard a rumor that a restaurant down the street from the theater had extra tickets. This sounded strange, but we went to check it out and sure enough, the owner of the place was standing outside with about a dozen tickets in her hand, giving them away first come first served. It turns out that several people from the restaurant had gone to get tickets earlier in the day (they start giving them out at 10 am) but that in the end a lot of them could not go. So despite the rain and our short moment of disappointment upon arrival, things were going our way.
Back at the theater the crowded house was anxiously waiting for the band to take the stage. When they finally did come out the audience erupted with loud applause, which was followed by an awkward moment in which the band took several minutes to tune their instruments in the complete darkness. When they finally launched into their first piece the lights came up to display the group in all their scruffy glory: T-shirts, dreadlocks, ripped pants, etc. Not your grandfather’s tango orchestra (see my earlier piece on the group elsewhere in this blog). After this opening piece the crowd went absolutely wild, and their enthusiasm never diminished throughout the show. These guys are rock stars.
And they play like rock stars: aside from their look, their music has, over the years, become very hard edged and loud, to the point of lacking any real nuance and at times bordering on sloppiness. Like some noisy tango engine they were either on or off, at zero or at eleven with no in-between. While this extremity makes for an exciting show, especially the first time you see them and are expecting something much more square from a tango band like this, it works against them in the long run. What was exciting the first time becomes interesting the second, predictable the third, and then monotonous later, at least for me. That this show was song for song and even banter for banter almost exactly same as the show I saw a few months ago makes me think that, also like rock stars, the group must depend on die hard fans and/or a constant circulation of first timers to pull it off. In the Buenos Aires tango scene, that means playing mostly for tourists. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it does make me think that the band’s once key position within the city’s popular culture, especially among younger people, must have eroded over time.
That said, the theater was packed, and the audience was going wild. Can all those people be wrong? No, of course not: the band is great and should be heard. But when, between songs, the band asked how many people were seeing their first tango concert that night about half the hands in the audience went up.
This was the night of the “gran milonga al aire libre,” a massive tango dance to live music that is the main closing event of the festival. The city closes one of the main downtown streets for the show—it was to be Diagonal Norte this year—and thousands of people come to dance outside with the famous Buenos Aires obelisk as the atmospheric backdrop. Unfortunately, if it rains the event is cancelled, and, you guessed it, after what was a beautiful if breezy day a thick blanket of dark clouds began to roll in over the city around four pm. By seven it was starting to drizzle. There goes the milonga.
Still having “ganas” to see something that night, I decided to head down to the Teatro de la Ribera in La Boca to see the Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro, one of several other events planned for that night that was sure not to be rained out. Thanks to the city government, all the events at the tango festival are free, but many require tickets that can be picked up earlier in the day from the venues. Knowing how popular the Fernández Fierro is, I knew I was taking a risk by showing up without a ticket, and sure enough, the concert was sold out. My friend and I mulled around for a while, wondering what we should do, when we heard a rumor that a restaurant down the street from the theater had extra tickets. This sounded strange, but we went to check it out and sure enough, the owner of the place was standing outside with about a dozen tickets in her hand, giving them away first come first served. It turns out that several people from the restaurant had gone to get tickets earlier in the day (they start giving them out at 10 am) but that in the end a lot of them could not go. So despite the rain and our short moment of disappointment upon arrival, things were going our way.
Back at the theater the crowded house was anxiously waiting for the band to take the stage. When they finally did come out the audience erupted with loud applause, which was followed by an awkward moment in which the band took several minutes to tune their instruments in the complete darkness. When they finally launched into their first piece the lights came up to display the group in all their scruffy glory: T-shirts, dreadlocks, ripped pants, etc. Not your grandfather’s tango orchestra (see my earlier piece on the group elsewhere in this blog). After this opening piece the crowd went absolutely wild, and their enthusiasm never diminished throughout the show. These guys are rock stars.
And they play like rock stars: aside from their look, their music has, over the years, become very hard edged and loud, to the point of lacking any real nuance and at times bordering on sloppiness. Like some noisy tango engine they were either on or off, at zero or at eleven with no in-between. While this extremity makes for an exciting show, especially the first time you see them and are expecting something much more square from a tango band like this, it works against them in the long run. What was exciting the first time becomes interesting the second, predictable the third, and then monotonous later, at least for me. That this show was song for song and even banter for banter almost exactly same as the show I saw a few months ago makes me think that, also like rock stars, the group must depend on die hard fans and/or a constant circulation of first timers to pull it off. In the Buenos Aires tango scene, that means playing mostly for tourists. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it does make me think that the band’s once key position within the city’s popular culture, especially among younger people, must have eroded over time.
That said, the theater was packed, and the audience was going wild. Can all those people be wrong? No, of course not: the band is great and should be heard. But when, between songs, the band asked how many people were seeing their first tango concert that night about half the hands in the audience went up.
