El Rumor de los Tangos

This album gave me an epiphany – of the wrong kind. Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson once wrote, ‘if nostalgia is a country, tango is its capital,’ which is why tango fans are often archly sentimental, stylishly melancholy, or just plain miserable. The problem with the Trio Garufa – a talented little tango-cum-folk band made up of a Swiss bandoneón player, an American double bassist and an Argentinian on guitar – is that their polite renditions of ‘Malena’, ‘Gallo Ciego’, ‘El Torito’ and other standards doesn’t evoke any more than a collective wistfulness. In Guillermo Garcia’s guitar I hear a genteel longing for the pampas. Adrian Jost’s squeezebox is more of a serviceable lung than a pumping heart. And Sascha Jacobsen’s bass-playing is deft but a bit drab.

None of these versions is as good as the any of the originals. The tracks the band members composed are either derivative or merely satisfactory. For all the invited guests and overall musical competence, to make tango work in 2012 you have to add a layer of reflection or revision – something that sucks modern listeners in. If I want a fix of indulgent nostalgia I’ll put on a scratchy Gardél; from contemporary tango bands we expect something extra.