On June 26th, I posted about the making of this book trailer. Well, it has launched, and I love it.
The choreography for the premier dancers is a metaphor for the relationship between Juan Peron and Evita as it is portrayed in the story. The curly-haired dancer in the flower print dress is my daughter Kerry Ann King, who produced the video. I am proud of the film and of her!
Last evening was the launch party for Blood Tango at wonderful Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street in New York. Among the dear friends who attended was Dan Gaba, photo editor for The Wall Street Journal. Here is the photo you get when a consummate professional attends your launch. THANK you, Dan.
I am really too distracted by the events of this week to write a cohesive sentence, much less a whole blog. In fact, i am on my way in just a couple of hours to Dag Hammarskjold Park near the UN, where my Daughter is staging a tango flash mob to promote the book. I am bringing the rented generator to run the sound equipment. It is strapped into the passenger seat of my tiny sports car.
So in anticipation of my own flash mob to share, I am posting a couple of tango from YouTube. The one I like best is the on of Florence in the snow. All that snow is an extremely rare sight there.
Once the Blood Tango Flash Mob is edited, you will see it here.
Blood Tango will launch on July 2nd! In honor of having turned in the copy-edited pages yesterday, I am rerunning my earlier post on the dance that ignites the lovers in my story.
Setting a historical mystery in Buenos Aires means I have to do a lot of research. If that sounds daunting, don’t you believe it. It’s often pure pleasure — as with studying about Tango —the music, the dance, the culture that surrounds it. Lately, I have been watching a lot of dancing on YouTube. Today I want to share a few short films with you.
The first is from the movie Scent of a Woman, in which Al Pacino plays a blinded military officer. It's a good flick. Check it out if you haven’t seen it. Here is the scene where Pacino, in the Plaza Hotel in New York, dances the tango to “Por Una Cabeza," a melody by the incomparable Carlos Gardel:
This next is an amazing performance of a style of Argentine tango dancing called Milonga, characterized by the beat of the music and the double-time rhythm of the steps. The best and most delightful way to understand this is to watch this mesmerizing video clip. Get this:
Another style of Argentine tango music and dancing is Vals, where constant turning is the mode. This gorgeous young couple dance it in a Twenty-first Century style, but the picture on the wall behind them is of the great Gardel. These kids know and honor the past of the art they practice so beautifully:
The bandoneón is central instrument for tango ensembles, which can also have a piano, often a violin, a guitar maybe or a bass, but ALWAYS a bandoneón. Until I started researching this next book, I knew the sound of the instrument, but not it's name and certainly not its origin. Now that I do, I want to share it with you.
The bandoneón makes that wonderful almost-human breathing, gasping, and sighing sound that gives passion to tango music. We associate its voice with the hot, Latin romance of Argentina's premier art form, but this concertina-like instrument is actually a German, and a religious one at that.
Called bandonion by its inventor Heinrich Band (1821-1860), this wonderful music maker was intended to take the place of an organ in poor churches that could not afford the real article. There isn't any easy-to-find documentation about the bandoneón's eventual use in religious establishments. What we do know is that German sailors and Italian seasonal workers and immigrants brought the first ones to Buenos Aires at the end of the 19th century, just as the working class newcomers in the bars on the waterfront were evolving a fabulous new music and dance art: the tango. The new arrival that most influenced how that new music would sound was the bandoneón.
It seems as if it must be a tricky instrument to play. It is played by pulling the bellows apart and squeezing them together. The buttons on the ends change the notes, and here's what knocks me out – the buttons play different notes depending on whether the player is pulling the bandoneon apart or pushing it closed. If you ask me, the musical geniuses who master the bandoneón must each have two or three brains.
The most famous recent maestro was also the great composer, Astor Piazzolla. Here is a lovely little film of one of his compositions in a performance that brings the bandoneón back to its intended locale – a church. The elegance of the scene rivals recent weddings of European royalty. The name of the piece is "Adios Nonino," which given the Italianized Spanish of Buenos Aires, I make out to mean, "Goodbye, Little Grandfather." That may account for the beautiful bride's emotional reaction. Then again, the plaintive voice of the bandoneón could easily have moved her to those tears.
Setting a historical mystery in Buenos Aires means I have to do a lot of research. If that sounds daunting, don’t you believe it. It’s often pure pleasure — as with studying about Tango —the music, the dance, the culture that surrounds it. Lately, I have been watching a lot of dancing on YouTube. Today I want to share a few short films with you.
The first is from the movie Scent of a Woman, in which Al Pacino plays a blinded military officer. It's a good flick. Check it out if you haven’t seen it. Here is the scene where Pacino, in the Plaza Hotel in New York, dances the tango to “Por Una Cabeza," a melody by the incomparable Carlos Gardel:
This next is an amazing performance of a style of Argentine tango dancing called Milonga, characterized by the beat of the music and the double-time rhythm of the steps. The best and most delightful way to understand this is to watch this mesmerizing video clip. Get this:
Another style of Argentine tango music and dancing is Vals, where constant turning is the mode. This gorgeous young couple dance it in a Twenty-first Century style, but the picture on the wall behind them is of the great Gardel. These kids know and honor the past of the art they practice so beautifully:
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