Earlier this morning I was playing a superb CD called 'The Soul of Tango' which consists of Yo Yo Ma's collaborations with some of best tango musicians, all playing the music of Astor Piazzolla. Now I am a clumsy dancer (think of a puppet or a corpse dancing in a Roald Dahl short story) but I heart tango: the music, the performance, scenes in movies, and whole movies* themseleves which have been made around tango. It also helps** that the great J.L. Borges had written extensively about tango; his best pronounciation of the tango is as follows:

"The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration"

Since I am not accquantied with the backways and the technical alleys of tango, here is an excellent Economist essay on the history of it from my bookmarks. Here are some more of those aphoristic lines forged by Borges in one of his essays discussing the origins of the tango:

"This brusque and severe man, whom we can picture clearly from the two verses, illustrated very well the people's first reaction to tango – as a "brothel snake" in Leopoldo Lugones' laconic words. After being found less offensive and thus more socially acceptable in Paris, it took many years for tango to penetrate the tenements in the northern part of the city – and for all I know it may not have succeeded even now. Formerly, tango was orgiastic devilry, and now it is a way of walking."

But let's get to the music itself. Here is a sampling from the numerous videos I found on YouTube:

Enjoy! May you walk the tango today!

*"The Tango Lesson" is one of these; extremely enjoyable with fantastic tango music. Also if I ever partake in the making of a movie, you can be sure that tango would show up in it.