As a tango DJ I spend a lot of my time extending my collection and listening through different repertoires. It’s like a journey through time and styles. Often I recognise that I’m missing some recordings while digging further into one direction. Like very recently I had to admit that my combination possibilities for Fresedo Instrumentals from the 1930’s-1940’s were more than limited. I was trying for quite some time to create a nice tanda around Tigre viejo but the results were less than satisfying. Somehow heteroclitical, like a series which doesn’t fit together. So I was thinking: “Is this possible? I don’t really think that i’m missing the most important Fresedo CD editions.”

If you look at the Osvaldo Fresedo discography you can see that during his long career he quite often hopped between record labels: Brunswick, Odeón, RCA Víctor and later in the 1950s, Columbia and Arte. The biggest part of his catalogue is with Odeón and RCA Víctor and it seems that the instrumental recordings which interested me most are with RCA Víctor (today Sony-BMG) like Pimienta, Julián, El choclo, El irresistible, etc. To my knowledge Sony-BMG hasn’t reedited most of these tangos on CD. But they did in the 1970’s on their famous Camden vinyl series “Osvaldo Fresedo Coleccionista RCA Víctor CAL-3032” and “Osvaldo Fresedo Y Su Orquesta Típica Con Ricardo Ruiz Y Oscar Serpa CAL-2991”. This makes 28 recordings altogether, 14 instrumentals, for which I add here the front and back covers with tracklistings.

1. Sound sample: El irresistible Osvaldo Fresedo : Instrumental, 1943

The subtitle of these LPs is “Serie Apoyando El Buen Tango” (Del archivo de grabaciones de RCA Víctor de la época de oro del tango), the aim has been to provide access to a selected 78 RPM catalogue on the newer record media as the record players evolved to pure microgroove devices with RIAA preamplification and weren’t able to read the old 78 RPMs anymore. A situation we know from today where nearly nobody is able to play vinyls anymore and most of the record players are gone, therefore there has been a need to convert the tango catalogue to audio CD or to digital formats which might in their right replace the audio CD in the near future.

The city of Camden which gave the name to this serie is situated in New Jersey, USA, and has been the headquarter of RCA Víctor, centralising all their masters. Nowadays it’s owned by Sony-BMG. It’s also interesting to note that the full Victor catalogue is now available online (with some sound samples) at the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings. The following video is a documentary about the RCA Víctor Camden plant and you can see how the original recording process worked and how the masters were made:

So these vinyls are actually reeditions of the original 78 RPM recordings. This shows that already back in the 1970’s there has been an interest to listen to tango recordings and that it’s not the CD and the recent tango renaissance which procured us with a direct link to the original recordings. These vinyl reeditions have often been done in perfect analogue quality and they have most certainly lead in one or the other case to the later CD editions.

1940 French re-edition of Osvaldo Fresedo’s Vuelves (1939)

I have also discovered that much earlier there already existed a specific European market for Argentine tango records! I recently received a 78 RPM shellac from around 1940 from France with Osvaldo Fresedo’s Vuelves on the A side. It has been issued by Disque Gramophone directly in France and while looking at the french Disque Gramophone catalogue more closely, you can see that quite a lot of hard core tango music had been available immediately during the época de oro in Europe. Check out the full His Master’s Voice, The French Catalogue to get an idea of the diversity of available titles. It’s incredible! This allows for the wildest speculations … 😉

Rare test pressing: Re-edition of Troilo’s first recording with the Odeón label: Comme il faut and Tinta verde

Some people claim that most of the important tangos are nowadays available on audio CD or in some ITunes shop and that those which are not, are either bad or without any importance. Like as if an invisible God of tango controlled which recordings should be available today on CD or in the digital form. That’s an opinion I hear quite often, in reality the edition problem is much more complicated. It is to a great extent due to the record companies. Some tango artists have recorded with just one record label, others switched quite often, like Fresedo. When they switched often, the record labels were unable to reissue the complete works because of copyright issues and unavailable masters in their archives. A well known case is certainly Aníbal Troilo who recorded his first two recordings with Odeón in 1938, and from 1941 onwards signed with RCA Víctor. You will therefore not find Comme il faut and Tinta verde on the CD collection Troilo en RCA.

This is followed by the conservation problem. Some masters were destroyed by fire or had to make place for newer recordings after the época de oro and just went into the trash. Check Juan D’Arienzo’s discography concerning his 1930s and 1940s titles, a lot of his best recordings are just missing or are available in terribly bad quality! The same applies to Aníbal Troilo.

Let’s have a look at another beloved tango which is quite often played in the milongas but which is actually a rare recording: Invierno performed by Francisco Canaro with the singer Roberto Maida. There is no official CD version of this tango. I guess most of the versions played in the milongas are quite from the same source, the CdT CD version and maybe an audio copy of the Youtube version (You know this technique where you place a bypass mini-jack to mini-jack cable from the speaker to the microphone socket, start the Youtube movie and record via, for instance, Audacity listening on the microphone socket). I was thinking that the master must have been destroyed but I just hold an EMI triple LP album called “Album XX Aniversario Francisco Canaro EMI4730/2” from 1984, with, guess …, Invierno on it! And I discovered a very beautiful tango called Todo corazón (Julio De Caro) recorded on 17-7-1936 by Canaro. Invierno is edited for the first time on LP on this record, before this there is just the original release on 78RPM, and after it, well, there is not very much …

1. Short extract of Todo corazón Francisco Canaro : Instrumental 1936, for me one of the most beautiful Francisco Canaro tangos, it’s an interpretation of a Julio De Caro composition

2. Short extract of Invierno Francisco Canaro : Roberto Maida 1937, almost perfect restoration

“EMI-ODEON agradece a los Sres, Alfredo Contartesi, Boris Puga y Nicolás Stranger, el aporte del valioso material de sus colecciones particulares” is written on the back cover of this album which leaves a doubt about the persistance of the master recordings of some of these tracks. This could also explain why there never has been an official reedition of Invierno on CD.

Being able to process not exclusively audio CD but other formats like LPs, MCs, tapes and 78 RPM records comes in handy and opens up a new world in terms of sound quality and available titles. Most of the second grade labels, described by Johan in his Beginner’s guide to tango record labels as the other labels, often offer tracks in a very bad sound quality, using simply bad preamplification and are for these reasons quite often not playable at a milonga. Once you collect 78 RPM records, you control all filtering, preamplification and very important too, the pitch.

Some people say that the old tango recordings are in a poor quality and therefore a poor format like 100kbit MP3 will do largely. I say the monoroom holds sound recordings of an unbelievable beauty and quality and only the best proceedings with the least filtering will bring you close to your idols, where you have the impression that you can touch them!

The cosy Monoroom

I finally have some time to put all these D’Arienzo records I received over the past months into the digital form. They are all in a perfect state. No comparison to the CdT Vol. 26 – 48 compact discs which also cover the years 1957-1975 of the Juan D’Arienzo Orquestra and which I process in parallel. I recognised there are quite some transfer problems on the CdT edition. But, when the transfers are bad on CD you get at least an idea of the song 😉 See the next two sound samples for a comparison. The first one is from CdT and it’s too strong into the bass frequencies and nearly clipping when the whole orchestra is playing which is a challenging moment as the dynamics are quite strong. On the CdT version you get a sort of “sound soup” in these passages and it nearly hurts to listen to it. Also the speed of the CdT is too fast, you get a little Mickey-Mouse-effect on Osvaldo Ramos’s voice. This tango is already quite fast in the original version. Speeding it further up makes it more hysterical and less attractive which is a pitty. The second sample is my transfer from the original LP:

1. Dímelo Al Oído Juan D’Arienzo : Osvaldo Ramos 1974 CdT 1973-1975 Vol 48
2. Dímelo Al Oído Juan D’Arienzo : Osvaldo Ramos 1974 LP Interpreta A Francisco Lomuto RCA Víctor AVS-4308

The vinyl records are the original releases with an exceptional sound quality. The full view on the late Juan D’Arienzo recordings can be found in the great illustrated D’Arienzo discography by Johan. So this is a beginning, I hope to get the missing albums soon, some seem to be hard to get, like for instance the EP containing the beautiful version of “Nada más” with Mercedes Serrano …

The records are all issued by the label RCA VICTOR both in a stereo and in a mono version as it has been the transition period towards stereo recordings.

You can zoom into the covers and enjoy the accompanying liner notes:

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to assist a live concert of La Tubatango at a local milonga. After half of their performance they just settled down in the middle of the dance floor and had the dancers dancing around them. Quite some fun to a fresh and happy sounding orchestra. La Tubatango is a kind of revival band of an older orchestra called Los Tubatango active from the late 1960s to the 1970s. A lot of people intermingle La Tubatango, the contemporary evocative orquestra and Los Tubatango which doesn’t exist anymore. The focus in this post is on Los Tubatango.

It was in 1967, in the aftermath of the Summer of Love, that the bandoneonist Guillermo Inchausty created the quite curious tango orchestra, first as a duet then as a quartet, known as Los Tubatango. Introducing a tuba into the tango genre and reducing the number of musicians to four. The tuba replaces the double bass, the other instruments are a bandoneon, a transverse flute and a guitar. During the late 1960s and 1970s they recorded around ten long-play records with the label Music-Hall Argentina (this sums up to around 100 tango recordings). All recordings are “monofonico”.

Heinz Edelman drawing from the movie Yellow Submarine, 1967-1968

There are very few of their tangos republished on Compact Disc. The only official one I know is the BATC “Una Noche De Garufa” which contains barely 16 titles of the approximately 100 recordings. It’s also amazing that this orchestra has been created in a period where tango was supposed to be in a zombie state. Maybe one of the keys to their success has been their 1900 vintage look and sound which has been very popular in the 1970s. Their first 2 LP albums have been published in the same year, just a couple of months in between. What a success!

I like their sound for afternoon and openair milongas. They sound “park-like”. I always associate them with Sergent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Los Tubatango Bailonga Cover 1968

The Beatles Yellow Submarine poster 1968

If you have seen the movie Yellow Submarine, you know what I’m talking about.

Their first album has been released in May 1968 and contains 12 tangos. The title of the debut LP is “Tangos Del Tiempo Perdido”, MH-733

• Papas calientes (MP3 sample)
• Sacale Punta (MP3 sample)

Lado 1

1. El romantico – Tango – (Arturo de Bassi) – 2:20 – 1968
2. Papas calientes – Milonga – (E. Arolas) – 1:52 – 1968
3. Dede – Tango – (Mauricio Montiano) – 2:47 – 1968
4. Ciudad de Cordoba – Vals – (A. Chazaretta) – 2:38 – 1968
5. La refalosa – Polca – (Francisco Canaro) – 1:46 – 1968
6. Recordando el 900 – Tango – (Francisco Canaro) – 2:43 – 1968

Lado 2
1. El Once (A divertirse) – Tango – (Osvaldo Fresedo-Emilio Fresedo) – 2:24 – 1968
2. Sacale Punta – Milonga tangueanda – (O. Donato-S. Gómez) – 2:10 – 1968
3. Yunta brava – Tango – (Á. Villoldo-A. Polito-Carlos Pesce) – 2:40 – 1968
4. Maria Esther – Vals – (Juan Maglio “Pacho”-Juan R. Falchi) – 2:37 – 1968
5. Mordeme la oreja izquierda – Tango – (E. M. Alarcón) – 2:15 – 1968
6. La cara de la luna – Tango – (Campoamor) – 2:07 – 1968

The second record “Bailonga” was also recorded and published in 1968, MH-2035 (serie discoteca)

Lado 1
1. Sacame una pelicula gordito – Tango – (Ángel Villoldo) – 2:09 – 1968
2. Naipe marcado – Milonga tangueada – (Ángel Greco) – 2:18 – 1968
3. Luisito – Tango – (D. Fortunato) – 2:19 – 1968
4. Santiago del Estero – Vals – (Andrés Chazarreta) – 3:01 -1968
5. La biblioteca – Tango – (Augusto P. Berto) – 2:34 – 1968
6. Una noche de garufa – Tango – (Eduardo Arolas) 2:17 – 1968

Lado 2
1. El 16 – Tango – (Albérico Espátola) – 2:17 – 1968
2. Catamarca – Tango – (Eduardo Arolas-Jesús Fernández Blanco) – 2:18 -1968
3. Bailonga – Milonga – (Mariano Mores) – 2:22 -1968
4. El criollo – Tango lancero – (Eugenio Alarcón) – 2:17 – 1968
5. En el lago de Palermo – Polca – (Julio De Caro) – 1:29 – 1968
6. Pabellon de las rosas – Vals – (José Felipetti-Angela M. Felipetti-Antonio Catania) – 2:43 – 1968

The third record “En Lo De Hansen”, MH-2071 (serie discoteca) might have been recorded around 1970

• Porteña linda (MP3 sample)

Lado 1
1. La cumparsita – Tango – (M. Rodríguez-P. Contursi) – 2:36
2. Porteña linda – Milonga tangueada – (Edgardo Donato-H. Sanguinetti) – 2:16
3. Bar El Popular – Tango – (Alfredo Bevilacqua) – 2:08
4. Tubatangueando – Tango – (Guillermo Faustino Inchausty) – 2:11 – 15/09/1970
5. La correntada – Tango – (José Martínez) – 2:10
6. Francia – Vals – (Octavio Barbero-Carlos Pesce) – 3:00

Lado 2
1. El pensamiento – Tango – (José Martínez-Francisco García) – 2:11
2. El periodista – Tango – (Augusto P. Berto) – 2:15
3. Recuerdos de la Pampa – Tango – (Alfredo Bevilacqua) – 2:11
4. A punto y taco – Milonga tangueada – (José Carli) – 2:07 – 17/06/1970
5. El pinchazo – Tango – (Ángel Villoldo) – 2:06
6. La cabeza del italiano – Tango – (Francisco Bastardi-Antonio Scatasso) – 2:34

Later Guillermo Inchausty replaced all musicians and recorded the album “Tubatangueando En El Palais De Glace”, MH-2161 (serie discoteca) (but at least the Milonga “Platina” could still have been recorded with the old formation of the orchesta), it was probably released in 1972

Lado 1
1. El cuzquito – Tango – (Vincente Greco-José Arolas) – 3:26
2. Mi esclava – Tango – (Juan Rodríguez) – 2:53
3. Pura sangre – Tango – (Adolfo Rosquellas) – 3:10
4. Platina – Milonga – (Guillermo F. Inchausty) – 1:54 – 02/07/1970
5. El verde – Tango – (Carlos Minotti-Antonio Polito) 2:05
6. Un aplauso – Tango – (Antonio Polito) – 2:33 – 05/04/1972

Lado 2
1. Zorro gris – Tango – (Rafael Tuegols-F. García Jiménez) – 2:02
2. Alfredo – Tango – (Fumberto Canaro) – 3:13
3. Que me contas Guillermo – Tango – (José Carli) – 2:07 – 19/03/1970
4. Amelia – Vals – (Julio De Caro) – 2:36
5. Palospavos – Tango – (Miguel La Salvia) – 2:13
6. Alma de bohemio – Tango – (Roberto Firpo-Juan A. Caruso) – 2:45

The album “Cuarteto De Tango Los Tubatango” MH-2411 (serie discoteca) could have been published in 1974 (the album has a copyright ℗ 1973 mention, the sound recording copyright symbol is the symbol ℗ which is used to designate copyright in a sound recording, but the included tango “Bien añejo” is listed as recorded in 1974 in the SADAIC online database, so most probably the record was published in 1974)

Lado 1
1. El 13 – Tango – (Ángel Villoldo-Alberico Spátola)
2. Antañero – Tango – (Jorge Dragone)
3. Alma en peña – Tango – (Francisco García Jiménez-Anselmo Aieta)
4. Pebeta sin nombre – Vals – (Guillermo Inchausty) – 18/09/1972
5. La trampera – Milonga – (Aníbal Troilo)
6. Bailarin de San Telmo – Tango – (Orlando Calautti-Américo Cardinale)
7. Bien trajeado – Tango – (Felipe Villa-Ovaldo Evaristo Bruso)

Lado 2
1. Racing Club – Tango – (Vincente Greco-Julián Porteño)
2. Bien añejo – Tango – (Juan Cruz-Armando Lacava) – 16/05/1974
3. El malevo – Tango – (Mario Castro-Julio De Caro)
4. Tu, siempre tu – Vals – (José Antonio Orlando)
5. Cuarteto de tango – Tango – (Rodolfo De Forte-Guillermo Inchausty-Leopoldo Diaz Vélez) – 28/12/1972
6. No mezquines el cutis al vaporizador – Tango – (Orfeo D. Giúdice)
7. Por los palos – Tango – (Juan Cruz-Lilo Yubero-Rodolfo De Forte) – 09/03/1973

As you can see most of the titles are from the Guardia Vieja repertoire and some are genuine compositions. I haven’t heard them all yet but it seems they are all instrumental. Where is my record player again … ? Probably the most hippy tango orchestra of all 😉

Here are three sound samples from my vinyl transfers, transcoded from FLAC into MP3 medium quality:

Los Tubatango: Porteña linda – Milonga tangueada – (Edgardo Donato-H. Sanguinetti) – 1970

Los Tubatango:  Sacale Punta – Milonga tangueanda – (O. Donato-S. Gómez) – 1968

Los Tubatango:  Papas calientes – Milonga – (E. Arolas) – 1968