You must meet Carlos Puente if you're in Buenos Aires and are mad about tango music from the Golden Age (late 1920s to 50s).
Professor of the history of tango both at the Academia del Tango and the University of Tango Buenos Aires, Carlos also hosts a bi-weekly AM radio programme on tango and sells a huge collection of tango CDs at Buenos Aires Tango club.
He is a walking encyclopedia of Golden Age tango! Whatever you say, for example, 'it's a lie', he would pick it up and a tango with a guy who lies through his teeth would come singing out from his throat.
He can site endlessly the titles of tangos from every single composer, singer, orchestra, the time of the recording, etc, etc. So much so that you would start to wander whether he is human or not. As, believe you me, there are thousands around. My trick is to make him talk next to a CD player so that I can listen to his collection of magical melodies at the same time and it always feels like a treat! No one knows tango better than he does. From an academic point of view that is. Though his only and very reason for disliking contemporary tango is that they all sound too academic, too studied, less spontaneous, less gente de barrio (people from the neighbourhood). To cut it short, he calls them 'todos ruidos!' All noises. And he has a point.
The other day, during one of my final visits to pick up those albums I'm still missing, it suddenly occurred to me to ask him about Piazzolla. Maybe he does give some concessions to modern noises. Carlos looked at me without blinking his eyes behind his beer-bottle-bottom spectacles, 'Piazzolla is a bad vocabulary for me!' But then he went to his shelf and picked up an early album of Piazzolla from the 30s and said 'This is the only good one from him! Look at the photo of him! There he looks normal!' Piazzolla was 25 at the time. A clean-cut, nice looking young man in a sharp suit, like every other nice looking young man at the time I guess. He was smiling nicely in the shot and holding his bandoneon neatly on his knees. Then Carlos picked up another album from the shelf with Piazzola in the 80s. 'Look at him now! Doesn't he look like a mad man!' Hmmm...he does! In his mid-70s, Piazzollo looks scruffy with a head of messy thinning hair, in a shapeless shirt baring his upper chest. Furiously, he was in the midst of playing one of his modern compositions.
'But doesn't madness often make genius?' I probed.
'In this case, no!' Carlos snapped back.
By then I was too hungry for food to question the authority any further. But how about Amelita Baltar, whose Balada Para un Loco has tightened my breathes so many times?
'Ah, this woman doesn't exist for me!!!'
Later on back at home, when I told my landlady Margarita Carlos' views on contemporary tango, she laughed, 'It's amazing how some people can be frozen in time like an ice-cream!'
I know what I'm going to miss very much when I leave Argentina. Tango and ice-cream, to name just two!
