Selections from Forever Tango

The following note about the tango was provided by Luis Bravo's Forever Tango:

"The tango," says Luis Bravo, "is the music of the emigrant, of someone who is always leaving and never finds home." The tango was born of a culture created by the thousands of men who were forced to leave their homes and families during the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century by the desperate poverty of a disintegrating Europe. They boarded crowded steamers in Napoli and Genoa, Marseilles and Hamburg, Belfast, and Istanbul to seek their fortunes in America.

Those who went to South America usually ended up in the packing houses along the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires and near the port in Montevideo, Uruguay. They worked from dawn to sundown in the heat and the stench of the abbatoirs or along the docks of the mud-colored Rio de la Plata. At night the Italian, French, Irish, and German immigrants crowded into the bars and gathered at the street corners of the arrabales, where they drank cheap wine and sang mournful Neapolitan and Andalusian love songs to the women they left behind. "The tango belonged in the night," says Bravo. It was a man's world. Violence was common, stoked by alcohol and cocaine. Knife-wielding toughs--the compadrones--ruled the arrabales. Many of the early tangos tell the stories of these violent confrontations.

Eventually women, many of them prostitutes, came to the ports. They, too, found their way into the tango. The enramadas (brothels) where they plied their trade around the turn of the century became the show place for the tango. "The tango is known as music of passionate love," says Argentine philosopher Ricardo Gomez. "But it's actually the music of loneliness and lust. Look closely at the dancers and you'll see the relationship between the prostitute and her client. The dance is intricate, legs intertwine, but all of the movement is from the waist down. If properly danced, the upper body is stiff, the look between the dancers intense but distant. It is the intensity of lust and power."

Initially, the moralistic (but not necessarily moral) Argentine high society rejected the tango. But the spoiled children of the landowners and cattle barons began to make their way to the enramadas. Then shortly after World War I, a group of Argentine intellectuals on their annual sojourn to Paris, demonstrated the "indecent" tango to their friends. It was soon the craze of Parisian ballrooms.

Always looking to Europe, Argentinian society promptly reimported the tango. And with the times, it began to change. The compadron locked in combat was replaced by the compadrito with a wide-rimmed hat pulled down over one eye, a white handkerchief tied raffishly around his neck, a short coat, and tight trousers. A knife at his side was the only lingering reference to dockside thugs. As the dance continued to evolve, it entered the better dance halls of Buenos Aires. The dramatic hat and silk handkerchief were replaced by a black tuxedo, patent leather shoes, spats, and silk top hat.

Forever Tango hearkens back to the days of immigrant despair recapturing those raw emotions, revisiting those historic ghettos. Listen to the pain of the bandoleón. Feel the sadness of the dancers. "You'll see everything is a lie," says Luis Bravo. "You'll see nothing is love. You'll see the world doesn't care. It just keeps turning, turning."

"All my life," he says, "I, too, have been leaving somewhere. I was an immigrant in my own country. The tango feels like my destiny."