Anclao en Paris

Juan ‘Tata’ Cedrón has been making folk and tango music with one quartet or another since 1964 and has released no fewer than 36 albums. That he doesn't have a Wikipedia entry means he's either brilliant but so underground that the grid hasn't found him – or just not very good. Based in Paris for three decades, the Cuarteto is one of the best known ex-pat bands in the French capital and has traded successfully on the relationship between the Paris of South America, where tango was born (and where El Tata was born in 1939) and the Parisian nostalgia for le grand tango. This French release brings together five albums from 1974 and 1990, and the mood of exile is evident both in the poetry and politics of the lyrics – the 70s and 80s saw thousands of Argentinians go into exile to escape from state terrorism – and in the gentle, reflective arrangements. Cedrón is not a great vocalist but he balances the cerebral and sentimental urges deftly and is always testing the tango genre's formal rules, whether with his own material or through re-arranged covers of classics. His guitar-picking and the viola, bandoneón (squeezebox) and assorted other instruments meet to greatest effect in that interzone where urban tango merges with rural folk, and his opus is a reminder that tango always has one foot in the pampas.