My choice for this week is ‘Dichas que viví’ (Rodolfo Biagi with Andrés Falgás, 1939). I reviewed 68 performances.
My favorite: Luiza Pasierowska & Osky Casas.
I also liked the performance by Barbara Carpino & Claudio Forte.
The discographies of the tango orchestras are scattered all around the web. Below is my best attempt to make the relevant links all available in one place. When I found more than one discography for a given orchestra, I chose the one which seemed most complete and reliable. I plan to keep this post updated, so if you think I’m missing something, please let me know.
Update: See here for my current attempt to improve on these discographies. The links below will gradually link to my own discographies, as they become available.
Biagi with Ortiz is simply Biagi at its best. And the four tangos included in this set are so congruent in terms of the mood they evoke that they seem to have been conceived for being played together. A sine qua non tanda.
When I started dancing and listening to tango music two years ago, I quickly discovered that one of the easiest ways to identify an orchestra was to pay attention to the final two chords of the song (the dominanc-tonic, characteristic “chan-chan” ending ). Each orchestra plays those chords in its own, distinctive way, so by learning how the chords sound like, one can infer the orchestra even of songs one is unfamiliar with. The video below, which I created a while ago for my own amusement, provides a sample of the tango endings of 20 of the most popular tango orchestras. I am now posting it here in case it is of interest to readers of this blog.
Hey there, I’m Pablo. I’m the director of Tlön, a small org that translates content related to effective altruism, existential risk, and related topics into various languages. I am also a co-host of the podcast La bisagra de la historia and a member of the Samotsvety forecasting group. I used to write a newsletter together with Matthew van der Merwe.
I’ve been part of the effective altruism community since its inception and have collaborated with several EA orgs and people over the years. As Will MacAskill‘s research assistant, I was responsible for much of the background research for Doing Good Better.
Some of my other interests and hobbies include modern and classical languages, travel, tango dancing and DJing, minimalism, Borges, and wasting time on my Emacs configuration.
Feel free to get in touch. You can also find me on the Effective Altruism Forum, Metaculus and LessWrong, though I am no longer active on these platforms.
We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.
— Derek Parfit