• Festitango 2017

    Festitango 2017

    June 20-25 was my third time at the Festival International de Tango Medellín, a festival I like for its musical programming, its focus (in the city of Gardel’s death) on singers, and the window it opens on the city’s tango culture, which values professional distinction and amateur achievement in equal measure. There are competitions for…

  • Ariel Ardit

    Ariel Ardit

    Trim but stout looking, with a widow’s peak the curves of which seem to raise the eyebrows on his armadillo face, giving him a look not of surprise but of perpetual sympathy and amusement, the tango singer Ariel Ardit could be a clown or comedian were it not for his consummate posture and deportment, strong,…

  • Malena Muyala

    Malena Muyala

    Malena Muyala is, at age 43, a distinctive tango vocalist who just might be generationally defining. She advances a view of time that has little, if anything, to do with nostalgia. This distinguishes her, by way of comparison, from two of the innovative female vocalists who came before her. Adriana Varela, two decades older, is…

  • Adriana Varela

    Adriana Varela

    Last night, at Teatro Metropolitano in Medellín, Colombia, I heard Adriana Varela sing tango. This was no small matter. There are those who say she is the best living tango singer (among those still active), and although she recorded her first tangos in 1991, she carries the patina of an earlier era. She commands the…