On Mixed-Singer-Tandas
If tango is a religion, then DJing is equivalent to preaching from the pulpit, taking repenting souls on a trip through sadness, anger and resignation to our very own humanity, as expressed by the words of great singing prophets, such as Alberto Podesta, Héctor Mauré and Angel Vargas. DJs work hard to make sure their sermonic tandas have a consistent message, shepherding dancers in a specific direction. But does mean that message have to be delivered by the same singer? Or is it acceptable to mix different singers within a single tango tanda? Throughout the past few months, I have been looking into my tango DJ gigs’ data in other to answer this and other similar questions.
As early as last year, I would have said that songs within a tanda should always have the same singer, except for a few, rare exceptions. Today, I am not so sure anymore. Through this post, I do not intend to put a definite answer to this question. Rather, I hope to look at the past and hopefully draw lessons I can apply to my future gigs. I strongly believe that tango DJing is more art than science, but I also believe that we can learn a lot from our past patterns, as long as we have good data.
For this post, I define a mixed tanda as one in which at least one song has a different singer than the others, even if that means no singer at all.
Findings:
As shown by the graph below, almost 40% of my 2014 tandas have had mixed singers.
When I first saw this data, I was shocked. I was sure that I was playing tons of Di Sarli tangos with Alberto Podesta’s sweet and romantic voice and multiple tandas of Troilo with the fun and playful Francisco Fiorentino, but that was not the case.
I initially suspected that perhaps most of these mixed-singer-tandas were valses and milongas which — according to conventional tango DJ wisdom — is generally acceptable. However, that is not what the data shows. 58% of mixed-singer-tandas were actually tangos, as shown by the chart to the left.
So which orchestras are driving this mixed-singer-tango-tanda trend? Nearly 70% of these came from either Edgardo Donato, Francisco Lomuto, Osvaldo Fresedo, Ricardo Tanturi or Orchestra Tipica Victor, as shown by the chart below. To a certain extent, this is not surprising. There are lots of possible mixed-singer-tango combinations for these orchestras that — at least in my opinion — work extremely well.
The data also shows that I even mix singers for Carlos Di Sarli and Juan D’Arienzo tango tandas, even though it happens less frequently for these orchestras. This seems surprising at first, but looking into those specific tandas, I noticed that I tend to mix 50s instrumental and Alberto Echague tangos for D’Arienzo, and Di Sarli tandas with this beautiful tango interpreted by Carlos Acuña together with three songs with Roberto Rufino singing.
Conclusion:
I have learned lots from looking at my own tango DJ data, and the most salient lesson is to question assumptions. Mixed-singer-tango-tandas can — and often do — work, even for orchestras with iconic singers such as D’Arienzo and Di Sarli. If the tanda works, people will keep dancing, and that is what matters.
