Sanju Chiba of ELP Japan, who builds the famous laser turntable for analog records, comments on analog music:
“For me, listening to analog music makes me peaceful and relaxed. […] We cannot say which music is better, digital or analog. Like a tiger and a lion, which is stronger? They are different. Digital music has good portability – anytime, anywhere without noise. Analog music is totally different! Portability is so poor but it has a different value and advantage. Analog means natural, like a conversation, nothing computerised. Music, like a live performance, with singing, is natural. We call it analog. Digital sound quality is haunted to try to come close to analog music. But it will never be better than analog music because sound is a natural thing. Year by year digital sound approaches natural, analog music but never reaches it or will ever be getting above it. Music in vinyl records is more valuable than money that’s why revitalising analog music should be very very important, not only for current people but also for next generations.” Watch the amazing documentary!
I heard quite some opinions about why tango DJs should use different other words for what they are doing because the expression DJ wouldn’t fit them. I totally disagree with this and that’s why I drop these lines. The abbrevation DJ means Disc Jockey where Disc stands for a phonograph record, and, in extension any sound recording, and the word Jockey stands for operator. So in short it’s an operator who presents or mixes different sound recordings to an audience.
Some people argue that a tango DJ doesn’t mix and therefore you ought not call him or her a DJ like as the expression became reserved to the single context of clubbing. But the meaning of “to mix” is not that narrow it can also mean juxtaposing not just superimposing. And indeed the expression disc jockey is also much older than the electronic or scratched music culture from the 1980 and the first beatmatching experiences from the mid-1960s. It has started with early radio programs where presenters were playing records to the audience. Check this photograph, it’s from a time when records were still cylinders and they got already played to an audience!
According to Wikipedia “In 1935, American radio commentator Walter Winchell coined the term ‘disc jockey’ (the combination of disc, referring to the disc records, and jockey, which is an operator of a machine) as a description of radio announcer Martin Block, the first announcer to become a star. While his audience was awaiting developments in the Lindbergh kidnapping, Block played records and created the illusion that he was broadcasting from a ballroom, with the nation’s top dance bands performing live. The show, which he called Make Believe Ballroom, was an instant hit. The term ‘disc jockey’ appeared in print in Variety in 1941″.
Duncan’s with the Miller Bros. western swing band recorded in Fort Worth, 3/16/53, DJ record copy
The term is very much connected with radio programs or dance venues where recordings are played in a juxaposed manner just as we do in modern milongas.
Therefore please spare me with words like TJ or other rare flowers. Also the word musicalizador is taken from a radio context and more specific to South-American Spanish and doesn’t mean anything else as DJ. Pinchadiscos, diyéi or disyóquey seem to be more common in Spain. Just changing the language of a word doesn’t necessarily change its meaning. Let’s keep it simple and call a spade a spade! 🙂
Christian Xell from Tangotunes.com asked me a couple of months ago to write a small article about Juan D’Arienzo’s second studio contract during the years 1935-1939. Here is an excerpt:
On 24th June 1935, Carlos Gardel, the most popular tango star at that time, died tragically. Such was Gardel’s prominence in Tango music that his sudden death left a void, but that was to change. Precisely 8 days after this sad event, Juan D’Arienzo reentered the recording studio, signing an initially short contract with the Victor label for a series of instrumental themes. This time, D’Arienzo would put aside his violin and take the lead as conductor for his ensemble. The first record he produced with Victor included the vals « Desde El Alma » on the A-side and the tango « Hotel Victoria » on the B-side. As it turned out, he would remain faithful to the same record label for the rest of his long career, laying the foundations that would revolutionise the tango genre forever, and open the door to the Golden Age of tango!
D’Arienzo constructed his new arrangements around four accented beats per bar, creating the impression of a more sustained rhythm where the beat is over the melody. The new « D’Arienzo sound » was characterised by a faster tempo that suggested more action and movement, it subconsciously recalled fundamentally natural rhythms, like that of a heartbeat. This new music had a great impact on all the major bands of the time and by the end of the 1930s most of the orchestras had adopted a faster pace and stronger accentuation of the beat. Everybody got caught up by the D’Arienzomania and tried to catch up with its success.
Christian and his team were busy on making new transfers from shellacs available on their website which cover this complete period of D’Arienzo’s second outfit. Some of these titles had already been published previously by Tangotunes but they decided to do the whole series again. Right now three download volumes are finished and already available on their website but they want to release all of the titles. The rest will be available soon. I think it’s worth to dig a little deeper into this great restoration work as it has some aspects which witness very high transfer standards.
In recent times there have been two major papers which sustainably unveiled a new approach towards transferring and dealing with tango records. One is Age Akkerman’s manual on how to retune tango recordings called Lost in History – the Keys of Tango Music. This analysis is based on the conclusion that most of the CD transfers which are available nowadays are out of tune, most of the time overclocked. As a result all the instruments and voices in the recordings sound false and unnatural and he shows a method to bring them back into tune by analysing the frequencies of the A reference tone, which is also called the concert pitch.
Often these pitch shifts were introduced intentionally by some recording companies in later reeditions, see my previous posts on this subject, or, happened directly during the recording sessions. Peter Copeland shows in his Manual of Analogue Sound Restorations also some possible causes which could have influenced on the correct speed of a 78 rpm recording, like fluctuations in the power network which wasn’t yet so stable as it is nowadays. In the 1930’s, especially in cold winters, the frequency of the current could vary from the standard 60 Hz oscillation and make the motors of the record cutter run at a slightly different speed (nevertheless Buenos Aires is less likely to have had very cold winters) … Most of the record players at that time, as Age stressed out, had a pitch control, permitting for an instant correction by the listener.
The other paper is that of Igor “El Espejero” Shpigelman, called the Equalizer-4-TJ, The Equalizer for Tango DJs. It’s a comprehensive guide which shows how to use an equalizer to get the best sound out of a given tango recording. Showing precisely how the sound spectrum of a tango recording goes and where frequencies might be attenuated or amplified to obtain a certain result to fit the venue or the sound quality. This work is very interesting as it does not exclusively apply to the playback domain, the tango djing, but also shows some interesting findings which could be applied to the transfer of recordings.
According to Tangotunes, the idea of the new D’Arienzo series is to offload most of the processing into the analog domain. Using a good restoration preamplifier and an equalizer to have the best and purest deemphasized signal for a careful last digital processing mainly limited to click and crackle removal. If you put together the two before mentioned methods of retuning and equalizing and offload those steps into the analog field then you can get excellent transfers. And that’s what Tangotunes did!
Doing the retuning in the analog phase, by speeding up or down the turntable just inverses what happened when the recording speed fluctuated and the musical keys went out of tune. Doing it on a digital sound file, though, by computing all samples, might introduce quite some interpolation errors. Where information is missing, the computer will add something, so the result could be different. By the way, the computing gets more and more imprecise the higher the percentage factor of a digital pitch filter.
And indeed, up to now, the best transfers I can currently think of are earlier LP transfers done by the Japanese collectors label CTA, Club Tango Argentino. Their LP transfers are among the best restoration works on tango recordings I ever heard. To a certain extent, these vinyls sound even better than their recent CD transfers as they did most likely not undergo any digital processing at all. Hence, reproducing the initial sound signal of the original recording session in the purest imaginable manner.
It’s interesting to recall what these original recording sessions were: They were direct-to-disk recordings. No multichannel, no tape, no editing, no overdubbing, just plain recording directly onto the wax platter without any stops, intermediate or post-production steps. This also meant that there was no way to cheat or to alter the result and there had been very few takes because of the high price and intensive preparation work of the recording support. Most of the time these sessions were done in one flush at first take. Unimaginable today. Though, this direct-to-disk process had been around until the end of the LP era as you can read in the aforementioned Wikipedia article! And it’s coming back, look for instance at the new label Berliner Meister Schallplatten, they are reintroducing the direct-to-disk process with vinyls and taking it to a new climax, they even invite the public into the studio during a recording session. The direct-to-disk process makes me think about Roland Barthes who wrote about silver photography in his essay “La Chambre claire”, long before the advent of Photoshop, that the noema of photography is the shocklike ça a été(that has been), as with these direct-to-disk recordings which are an immediate conserved state of sound without any cosmetics! A shocking document of what has been … A great deal of the emotions we live while listening or dancing to these recordings certainly result from this circumstance!
The Tangotunes series has the mention “Golden Ear Edition” to distinguish it from their former transfers of the same orchestra. Now, the retuning effort clearly merits this self assigned label. It’s something quite special which hasn’t been done yet openly for larger reeditons. According to Tangotunes, they used the CTA D’Arienzo transfers (CTA-301 to CTA-318) as a reference and found out that during the year 1939 the average A concert pitch measured in these recordings suddenly changed from 435 Hz to 440 Hz:
“When we measure the pitch, it should be taken from the piano in the recording, provided that the tuning of bandoneons could range from 435 Hz to 445 Hz. The violins are not a well-tempered instrument and the musicians always adjust themselves to the piano or the bandoneon, so we cannot rely on them.
Since the only possible pitch would be 435 Hz and 440 Hz, the figures significantly show that:
1. The standard pitch of 435 Hz was used by D’Arienzo’s Orquesta until 1939.
2. The standard pitch of 440 Hz was applied by D’Arienzo’s Orquesta since 1940
3. The CTA recordings, statistically, were 2.60 Hz higher transferred in average than the original play, which is around 10-15 cents.
[…] Naturally, we can find that the time when D’Arienzo’s orquesta was retuned is between 1939-03-03 to 1939-04-18.”
Source: Frank Jin of Tangotunes
The dramatic pitch jump up to ~448 Hz in the diagram between 1939 and 1941 could also be a hint that the speed of the recordings could have been intentionally increased on some of D’Arienzo’s studio sessions at around 1940-1941 as the Tangotunes document further states. According to them there are also some recordings where one is able to hear differently tuned bandoneons playing together during this retuning periode, like in Di Sarli’s recording El retirao from 11.12.1939 …
I have traced the spectrum of different versions of the recording El cencerro, which is one of the titles of the new Tangotunes series, all are in 44.1 kHz 16 bit, FLAC, the last Tangotunes is in AIFF. What we can see in the following spectrograms is that the first, taken from the El Bandoneón CD-43, has nearly sheer edges on the left in the bass, cutting off at around 60 Hz and on the other extreme, a high cut starting almost at around 4 kHz, leaving not so much music in the low and high frequencies. In the middle range you can see also a drop between 1000 and 2000 Hz, maybe due to the strong echo effect which had been added to this version.
Overall spectrum of El cencerro from the El Bandoneon CD EBCD43
Overall spectrum of El cencerro on the Audio Park CD Vol. 1
Overall spectrum of El cencerro from the CTA-303 CD
Overall spectrum of El cencerro from the Tangotunes download, AIFF file D’Arienzo Vol. 1
Comparing the Audio Park to the CTA, one can see that Audio Park cuts off a little less towards the 20 kHz, in the treble, compared to the CTA version. The CTA on the other hand seems to leave in all the infra-bass region. Just judging from the spectrum the Tangotunes seems to have the most balanced frequency range. Listening to it confirms this very good impression …
One word about the background noise which is quite subtle on the Tangotunes AIFF version and a little stronger on the CTA and Audio Park CDs: Once coffee and milk are mixed, it’s difficult to remove the milk without removing some coffee too. The same applies to sound restoration. It’s better to attenuate the background noise and not to try to remove it completely. The El Bandoneón version is the quietest because of its strong shelve filters in the bass and treble regions but it’s therefore missing music too, sounds muffled and has added artefacts, a strong reverb effect and other noises resulting from heavy filtering and which are actually not in D’Arienzo’s music! From a psychoacoustic point of view, the human ear is very well capable of removing carefully attenuated background noise from our perception. Whereas it is very aware and annoyed by artefacts and missing frequencies. In the end, we can use an equalizer to cut off hiss and other background noises and individually decide how much to remove during playback. Most of the time, anyway, it’s the bad PAs at the venues which eat all the background noise as they tend to be good in bass and mid-range reproduction but often are deficient in high tones. From my experience, events with audiophile 3-way systems are rare.
As Tangotunes is dedicated to music for the modern milongas the two polcas from 1937 will be missing as polca is not so much in vogue anymore 🙂 By the way, the Tangotunes version of Don Esteban is, like the CTA version, take 2. Could be cool to add take 1 with the two added Biagi solos too which is quite rare without reverb effect. For a deeper analysis of take 1 and 2 see my article News from Don Esteban.
Their recent Ángel D’Agostino transfers were already very good but they missed the retuning part which is now integrated into this new series. Already since the D’Agostino series, their sound files look very well done, no clippings left as it had been the case with some files in former series.
During our talks, Christian told me: “What I find most exciting is that everybody can use their ears to get an idea if a recording sounds right and if the speed is correct. Especially with strong speed fluctuations this is easily possible.” So let’s trust our ears, that’s what it’s all about!
In the elder days of the tango, but also in other genres of the time, the singer’s role has been considered to be no more than that of another instrument. Estonishingly the early singers somehow camouflage into the line of the other instruments of the orchestra. This has been the fashion during the 1920’s and the 1930’s in all sorts of dance orchestras not only in tango. And it still exists nowadays in what is called backing vocals. Often the singer was recruited amongst the musicians of the band and would sing an extended chorus, entering quite late into the performance, around the second chorus or even later. And just because of this short and late appearance, he remained in the background of our perception. It happened that I danced a beautiful tango with refrain singing and asked my partner during the cortina how she liked the singer and she responded: “Has there been a singer?”
Most of the time tango uses the strophic form of the Kunstlied, where contrasting verse – chorus (refrain) parts alternate, more or less as in the following schema in a binary alteration where each part takes approximately 30 seconds:
Depending on the length of the piece, this scheme might vary or contain more or less parts. So let’s listen to a typical refrain structured tango where the singer enters at the second chorus in the older style refrain singing of the 1920’s and 1930’s:
Tipíca Enrique Santos Discépolo con Tania (estribillo/refrain style), Desencanto, 1937
Here are the main formal characteristics of the estribillo or refrain style of singing:
Entry of the singer at the second chorus, +/- at minute 1:30, or later
Singing the refrain or an increased refrain
I have chosen this example because the same orchestra, Enrique Santos Discépolo, recorded the same title twice, once in estribillo style (refrain singing) and a second time where all the lyrics are presented (tango canción).
Tipíca Enrique Santos Discépolo con Tania (canción style), Desencanto, 1937
This last example represents yet another style of singing as you can recognise. It’s not estribillo style but tango canción. Tania, Discépolo’s wife, has been a very famous singer and actor, a tango diva, who just starred in the movie “El pobre Pérez“. These two recordings of the tango Desencanto were made on the 1st February 1937, just a couple of days before the public release of the movie. These records were therefore a kind of early soundtrack issued to cash in on the eventual success of the movie. In the second recording the orchestra starts with a reduced intro and immediately backs off into accompaniment. This let’s the singer enter into the performance and the orchestra then gently follows her voice quasi solely imitating the rubato of the voice at a considerably lower loudness to let the singer shine in the forefront. This genre had a long tradition with the cantor nacional, like Carlos Gardel, Ignacio Corcini, Agustín Magaldi, Charlo, Alberto Gómez, Agustín Irusta, Roberto Díaz and many others and still is very present nowadays. I’m thinking about the legendary Alberto Podestá who still today appears in public, accompanied just by some musicians. The biggest historical star of the tango canción genre has certainly been Carlos Gardel who’s discography is nearly exclusively composed of canción titles. With tango canción, the accompaniment is often done with guitars and the aim is to listen to the song carried by the beautiful voice of the singer. It is a purely recital presentation of the complete song lyrics, less suited for dancing and more aimed for listening and contemplating. Whereas the estribillo version of this recording is the presentation you will hear at the milonga because it’s better suited for dancers as it has a steadier and faster tempo and another balance between the singing and the orchestration. If you are a tango DJ, you should be aware of these different kinds of song interpretations.
On canción recordings the name of the singer is written in big letters and mentioned first on the label of the records. Often the name of the orchestra or the guitar players are not given (in the database at tango.info you therefore might see the mention –unspecified guitars or –unspecified orquestra). Whereas on the estribillo recordings, the orquestra is mentioned first and the singer second, like in the current example “Estribillo cantado por Tania“. But sometimes the refrain singer wasn’t mentioned at all and replaced with the words “Con estribillo” (in some meta databases you might therefore find the mention –unspecified male|female singer). To sum up: On the tango recordings with refrain singer, estribillista, the singer wasn’t considered as very important, and given only sparse credit, on the opposite, when the singer presented the tango in tango canción style, he was considered back then to be the most important performer.
Record label of the refrain version
Record label of the canción version
The tango canción genre certainly found its climax in the mid-1930s incarnated by Carlos Gardel, the most prominent figure in the history of tango. “Gardel’s baritone voice and the dramatic phrasing of his lyrics made miniature masterpieces of his hundreds of three-minute tango recordings.” [Wikipedia]
Carlos Gardel played a very important precursor role and is known as the first tango singer. Let’s see how he earned this titel: Mi noche triste has been composed in 1915 by Samuel Castriota in Buenos Aires without lyrics. His instrumental version was called Lita. It was Pascual Contursi who later wrote the lyrics to this tango in Montevideo and Gardel, who liked it, performed this combined Castriota-Contursi vocal version in January 1917 in Buenos Aires. This is the first time that a tango received sentimental lyrics with a sad character fitting the music. Now all of a sudden, poetry and singing had been added to tango. If we check the discography of the important tango orquestras around that time, we can see that their whole production had been instrumental! Canaro and Firpo were struggeling to find new and more satisfying forms for the tango orchestra and the tango genre was developping its instrumental foundations, violins were added to counter balance the loudness of the newly arrived piano (Firpo), a little later the doublebass found its entry into the tipica (Canaro) but nobody had a singer. The tango Mi noche triste is considered to be the birthplace of the sung tango.
Now, lyrics weren’t completly unknown to the Guardia vieja, there are several recordings by Villoldo and others which testify this. But their music was faster and these lyrics missed the sentimental component, they were happy, sometimes burlesque or even vulgar. Also Gardel himself performed until then a folk repertoire which was composed of “Estilios”, “Tonadas” and “Milongas camperas”. When Gardel performed Mi noche triste, the tempo of the tango orchestras had slowed down and this tango hit the community with a huge impact and a new form of identification through the lyrics which were perfectly in sync with the tempo of the music! The title is program and we can see that there is a first person narrator and a plot with a beginning and an end. Somehow a very short story. This kind of narrative voice is very common for most of the tango texts which would follow. Full lyrics of Mi noche triste.
Without any doubt, as he confirms himself in his auto-biography, influenced by Gardel, 1917 is also the year when Francisco Canaro composed and recorded the first tango with a song himself called Cara sucia, cantado por Arturo Calderilla. It’s a transcript of an elder tango composed in 1884 by Casimiro Alcorta, el Negro Casimiro. Interestingly, this tango was known before under the title of Concha sucia, After some initial experiments the sung tango became more and more frequent in the orquesta típica and was generalised and in equal production compared to instrumental tangos at around the year 1928. Francisco Canaro later reflects this change in his auto-biography [Mis Memorias, 1957, p. 168]: “Always being demanding with myself, I didn’t feel satisfied and it seemed that to my records and the orchestra that, meanwhile, already it had been increased in the number of musicians, they needed something and were not yet complete: they needed a vocal part, that is to say, the singer.”
[Mis Memorias, 1957, p.177]: “In my long artistic trajectory I had the following singers in my orchester: Roberto Díaz, with whom I initiated for the first time on record refrain style singing for a tango composed by my brother Mario called: ‘Así es el Mundo‘ […]” This recording by Francisco Canaro of a first refrain style singing was made in 1926 and has the Odeon record number 4155B, technically still an acoustic recording but the starting point of a new style of singing derived from the canción genre. Interestingly, we can therefore date the usage of refrain singing in tango just at the transition to the electrical recording process which was introduced just a couple of months later in Argentina in 1926.
Gardel’s funeral
On 24th June 1935, Carlos Gardel, died tragically. Such was Gardel’s prominence in Tango music that his sudden death left a void, but that was to change. Precisely 8 days after this sad event, Juan D’Arienzo entered the recording studio, signing an initially short contract with the Victor label for a series of instrumental themes.
If we take apart the vals and milonga recordings of Juan D’Arienzo in his pre-1940’s phase, there is one tango recorded with Enrique Carbel, Paciencia, and 14 tangos with Alberto Echagüe and it’s impossible to say that these recordings remained in the purest estribillo tradition of singing. We are about to enter into a transition period!
During this transition period which lasted from around 1937 to 1941, the role of the singer started to change again, more and more the singer presents at least two strophes of the song and sometimes he even comes back in the outro to finish the tango together with the orchestra. Later in the 1940’s a singer would even deliver the complete lyrics without therefore drifting necessarily into the tango canción genre. There has been nevertheless a general trend in tango starting towards the end of the 1940’s to a more recital, concert style with some orchestras as the public lost more and more interest in the dance. Check out the following example of a late 1940’s recording of the before mentioned tango Desencanto recorded by singer Alberto Marino. This recording dates from his beginning solo career. It has been recorded shortly after he left Aníbal Troilo’s orchestra:
Alberto Marino, Desencanto, 1947, (presenting the complete lyrics)
Here are the main characteristics of the new cantor de orquesta style of singing:
Entry of the singer at the first strophe, +/- at minute 1:00
Singing at least 2 strophes of the song (not just an increased refrain)
Optional: Reentering of the singer in the outro to finish the tango together with the orchestra
The orchestras of the 1940’s, like the newly formed orchestra of Aníbal Troilo with its singer Francisco Fiorentino immediately integrated this style in their repertoire at least at their first recording sessions in 1941. Fiorentino himself started off as a bandoneon player in the late 1920’s and was asked to do estribillo for the bands from time to time. And he later became such an important singer with a solo carrière in the end. By the way, Todotango.com mentions Francisco Fiorentino in a very interesting article as to be the first glance of a cantor de orquesta:
En 1934, siendo estribillista de la orquesta de Roberto Zerrillo, produce el singular hecho de cantar un tango con la letra completa en la grabación del tema “Serenata de amor” del propio Zerrillo y Oreste Cúfaro. Se vislumbra el fin de la “era de los estribillistas” para dar paso a la nueva etapa de “los cantores de orquesta”.
Oreste Cúfaro, Roberto Zerrillo con Francisco Fiorentino, Serenata de amor, 1934
Some say D’Arienzo stuck to the old scheme and reserved therefore a reduced role to the singer to remain himself the most important star of his orchestra. There is though at least one recording where this isn’t the case, it’s in the movie “Melodias Porteñas“ from 17th November 1937, interestingly also a tango composed by Enrique Santos Discépolo. Here Echagüe is singing surprisingly in pure cantor de orquesta style the tango Melodías Porteñas. Impossible to say if this form had been influenced by Troilo whose band just started to perform with Fiorentino in the summer of 1937. This is because Troilo didn’t have a chance to record anything yet. So we don’t know for certain how the Troilo – Fiorentino’s lyrics might have sounded that year …
Original record of Melodías Porteñas
It seems also that in this situation Juan D’Arienzo didn’t dominate the recording market yet because the soundtrack of the movie “Melodías Porteñas” hasn’t been done by his orchestra, but again, was sung by Tania accompanied by Enrique Santos Discépolo’s own orchestra as you can see in the image to the left. Without any doubt the relation between Enrique Santos Discépolo and the Víctor company had been sealed with a precise recording contract. Don’t forget that Juan D’Arienzo was already under contract at the same record label but never recorded his version of Melodías Porteñas with Alberto Echagüe. He recorded only an instrumental version on the 21st December 1937. Whereas Tania’s version had been on the market already on the 9th November 1937, exactly 8 days before the release of the movie!
Analysing the other bands’ repertoire shows nevertheless that the form of the cantor de orquestra existed in an embryonic form since much earlier, listen to the following recording of Alma by Adolfo Carabelli with the singer Alberto Gómez. It anticipates some formal elements of the cantor de orquestra singing style already back in 1932, it is still missing a second sung strophe but it has the entry at the first chorus and the optional element of the singer coming back to prepare the ending of the tango together with the orchestra:
Adolfo Carabelli con Alberto Gómez, Alma, 1932
The return of the singer in the outro, is also present in several Francisco Lomutu recordings with Jorge Omar and Fernando Díaz, like Monotonía, 1936, No cantes ese tango, 1937 or Propina, 1934, etc.
In the Donato repertoire you can find a lot of recordings which give a more important role to the singer and you could qualify some of them as to be in perfect cantor de orquestra style. As if Donato refused the fashion of the refrain singer, setting his own trends. Listen to his recording of Madame Ivonne with the same Alberto Gómez from 1935:
Edgardo Donato con Alberto Gómez, Madame Ivonne, 1935
And if we have a look at what’s happening in Paris at around the same time we can see the same shift to more song in the danse music when we approach the end of the 1930’s. Compare these two versions of Campanas del recuerdo one by Rafael Canaro and the other by Manuel Pizarro recorded in the same year:
Rafael Canaro con Ricardo Duarte, Campanas del recuerdo, 1936
Manuel Pizarro con Manuel Pizarro, Campanas del recuerdo, 1936
Where Pizarro sticks to the older fashion of the estribillista, Rafael Canaro presents a nearly full blown cantor de orquestra! The Francisco Canaro repertoire with singer Roberto Maida is also spiced up with this more present role of the singer. Check out their version of Desencanto and compare it to Tania’s recording with Discépolo. Where Tania remained in estribillo tradition, Maida presents 2 strophes of the song:
Francisco Canaro con Roberto Maida, Desencanto, 1937
There has been undeniably an evolution which let to the music of the 1940’s and the new understanding of the singer. Nobody in particular invented this singing style, it just came upon, helped by some early adopters and sparsely spread singular experimental cases. All of its ingredients have been present all along the 1930’s in some blueprint form. It’s also worth to mention that the record labels in the 1940’s were still printed with the words “Tango con estribillo” even if the style has been “cantor de orquestra”. Only in the 1950’s the mention “Canta: …” replaced definitly the word estribillo on the records.
There is though an aspect which cannot be pinpointed and that’s the expression of the singer. In the 1940’s the singing has been more of a celebration of the tango lyrics where the singer would live all of the presented sufferings and feelings once again on stage. Whereas the estribillo singers had a more frivolous, nearly uninvolved, distance to the lyrical plot.
Now I know why I like so much Franscico Canaro’s recordings with Carlos Galán. It’s the gentle singer’s presence which blows some 1940’s modernism into these 1930’s recordings!
Recently I had some strange conditions during playback of certain FLAC files in my digital tango collection. First I thought there must be a bug in my player but checking the player’s logs showed that the problem was within the FLAC stream. Somehow, some of the files must have gotten corrupted. This could have different causes, like power failures and unclean shutdowns, maybe an error on the media or an uncompleted copy task. Once a byte get’s changed in the FLAC file in the worst case it might not be playable anymore. In my case, I had two different conditions: First the file would start playing and then after a certain point the music output stopped. In another situation the corrupted FLAC file would trigger an exception in the decoder and it crashed the whole player application.
As a matter of fact this is a feature of the FLAC audio format: “Suitable for archiving: FLAC is an open format, and there is no generation loss if you need to convert your data to another format in the future. In addition to the frame CRCs and MD5 signature, FLAC has a verify option that decodes the encoded stream in parallel with the encoding process and compares the result to the original, aborting with an error if there is a mismatch.”
So the good news are that the FLAC format has a MD5 checksum mechanism integrated which provides for an easy integrity check. There is also a command line programm to check a FLAC file:
flac -wst flacfile.flac
Here are the command options explained: -w, –warnings-as-errors Treat all warnings as errors (which cause flac to terminate with a non-zero exit code). -s, –silent Silent: do not show encoding/decoding statistics. -t, –test Test (same as -d except no decoded file is written). The exit codes are the same as in decode mode.
Now this is useful to check an individual FLAC file but when you have to scan several thousand files it might be more useful to put it into a shell script and run it against the whole music folder. I found this script which I saved as flactest.sh in my home folder:
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/Musique
if [[ -f flac-errors.txt ]]; then
rm flac-errors.txt;
fi
touch flac-errors.txt
shopt -s globstar
for file in ./**/*.flac; do
flac -wst "$file" 2>/dev/null || printf '%3d %s\n' "$?" "$file" >> flac-errors.txt;
done
The script changes into the Musique folder in my home directory and then creates a text file called flac-errors.txt, if it’s running consecutively, it tests if this text files exists and when it exists it deletes and recreates it as an empty file prior to proceeding.
shopt -s globstar means that the Bash script will perform recursive globbing on ** – therefore matching all directories and files from the current position in the filesystem, rather that only the current level.
In the for loop it will loop through all FLAC files in the Musique folder and its subfolders performing the integrity test. If the FLAC file is OK, the output is send to /dev/null which means the output is deleted and if the test is not OK, meaning that there is corruption, it will be written into the flac-errors.txt file with a little formatting. So you will have the title and the path of the corrupt FLAC file written each on one line in the text file for a later analysis and eventual restoration of the dammaged files.
The script will take quite some time to loop through all files. What I do is opening the flac-errors.txt for continuous reading to see the progress in another console, like this:
tail -f /home/jens/Musique/flac-errors.txt
So every once in a while such a test might be a good idea to check if all the music files in the collection are still OK. This rules out bad surprises during playback!
By the way, the foobar2000 player has such an integrity test in the interface, Mixxx will write FLAC stream errors into its log file.
The test script can also be useful to be run on newly added folders in the music collection to check that all FLAC files are in OK condition and that the encoding worked out well, like a last test before playback or archival. The verify feature of the FLAC audio format is actually a big advantage compared to other formats which don’t have such a mechanism!
