I am asked quite often --and I don’t like it– since I am Argentinian and apparently such coincidence makes me an expert, "Yeah, but... They don’t play the real thing. Do they, Carlos?"

Apparently, the real thing is some kind of special elusive thing culturally bonded to our "hearts". Some sort of solid and unyielding thing, monolithic and impervious to evolutionary or transcultural bugs. Such conservatism kept Piazzolla away from us during my youth. The people and the new tango were in different gene pools... Like management and labor? Traditions some call it.

I think that in these days of a globalism that many of us despise enthusiastically, instead of asking and expecting what is the real thing in our cultures, we would do better by letting our definition of reality stretch a bit. Here and in Buenos Aires... the name of all our nostalgia.

* * * *

Jazz and Tango? But of course! Both had the uncertain origins of any other cultural hero; historically vague, suspicious, perhaps with very few recorded concrete and hard facts about it... Born of dubious or suspicious parentage, a hidden identity, persecuted and barely saved from extinction, a reluctant leader... Tango and Jazz were created in discredited places; colonies, ghettos, among the humble, the outcast and the marginalized.

It happened near Congo Square in New Orleans — which later became a parking lot and now is an atrocious apartment building-- and in the poor suburbs of Buenos Aires —still there-- among the poor immigrants from Europe or the children of people kidnapped from Africa. In a world of whorehouses and little bars, of delinquency and poverty... perfect places for miracles.

Both stories are one and the same. Only some details are different... Instruments sold very cheap after the bands of the Confederate regiments were dissembled, or the bandoneon that some hypothetical and drunk German sailor exchanged for drinks in some bar near Buenos Aires harbor... Who knows? The fog of the beginning is thick and somehow we are grateful for it because of those uncertainties we nurture our fantasies and dreams.

Both were forbidden in their birthplaces. Both had to go underground. Jazz migrated North. Tango was finally accepted because the slumming upper crust liked it, in spite of being "cosa de negros"..."Nigger’s stuff". And both have men and women of mythological statures whose names are safe-conducts, words of salutation and welcome, identifying a certain lifestyle, a specific group, a nation, a flagless empire of sounds and feelings, a language, a culture.

From the harbor and the southern suburbs of muddy streets and tin roof houses to the heart of Buenos Aires; from the damp and sweaty nights of New Orleans to Chicago our music migrated and in the process changed, dropped some of its instrumental luggage and acquired a new one.

Jazz lost its tuba and the banjo and Tango let go of the flute and the drums that somehow started the whole thing in the "candombe" that begot the "milonga" that mixed with immigrant sounds begot the tango... and both music, jazz and tango, got acquainted with the temporary immortality of the first recordings.

The firsts "race records" and that Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the music of a man who gave his nickname to the operation of buying a tango recording: "A kilo of sirloin, a bottle of house red, French bread and two Pachos." ... The tangos of Juan Maglio, nicknamed "Pacho" in old 78rpm discs.

The voices of tango and jazz singers were mostly untouched by the norms and the training of the European schools. Louis Armstrong or Tita Merello, Johnny Hartmann with the Coltrane Quartet or Edmundo Rivero with Anibal Troilo, Pedro Maciel or Chet Baker... All of them beyond the classificatory manias and methodological provincialism of the "continental" disciplines in vogue among the colonial intellectuals and artists.

The unorthodox use of the bandoneon to produce its vibrato or the clarinet "glides" rather than producing a chromatic scale (listen in your memory the clarinet at the very beginning of Rhapsody in Blue) clearly showed from which side of the Atlantic our music came from, and unencumbered by long traditions it developed its own "schools".

The Ellington machine offered its compact sound and the symphonic complexity of a mature music. Mariano Mores and Carlos Di Sarli obtained the same in Buenos Aires and Ellington’s piano signature wasn’t unequal to that of Osvaldo Pugliese.... The chamber music elegance of the Modern Jazz Quartet or the Quinteto Real of Horacio Salgan. The telegraphic piano of Thelonious Monk or Pablo Ziegler...

The sound of the bandoneon is tango’s signature and Anibal Troilo, "Pichuco", its greatest virtuoso, with a long career that took him from the oldest traditional pieces to the cutting edge of the most exploratory forms in existence. Somehow his trajectory is, like Satchmo’s in jazz, the history of his music, and beyond into the same area Coltrane explored, adding an extra dimension to his improvisations.