How Argentina’s gravel-voiced crooner put the soul back into tango for the rap generation

How Argentina’s gravel-voiced crooner put the soul back into tango for the rap generation

Daniel Melingo who reinvented the music for a young crowd is on his way to the UK

Uki Goñi Buenos Aires
Saturday 22 October 2016 19.04 EDT

Halfway though the concert, Daniel Melingo dramatically removes his left shoe to extract an imaginary pebble mentioned in the lyric he is singing. The shoe stays off for the rest of the night, much of which Melingo spends on his belly “swimming” across the stage, arms flapping loosely like a drunkard, as his breathy basso voice infuses the hall with that heady mix of disillusionment, longing and betrayal that is the hallmark of Argentina’s soul-searing tango music.

It has been said that listening to Melingo is like watching a Federico Fellini movie with your eyes closed. The circus elements beloved by the Italian film-maker are all present – the barrel-house music, the burlesque comedy, the soppy southern European sentimentalism.

Then there is the persona Melingo has invented for himself, a black-clad, rumpled-up, Chaplinesque vagabond that the singer has used to make tango cool again for a new generation of Argentinians raised on rap, hip-hop and the South American tropical cumbia rhythm.

“My mother’s side of the family were tango people,” says Melingo, sitting down to talk at a cafe in the tree-lined neighbourhood of Villa Ortúzar where he lives, only a couple of days after his barefoot antics while performing his new album Anda at a vaudeville theatre in downtown Buenos Aires. “But on my father’s side my grandmother sang opera. One of my first musical memories is listening to Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Infanta on the radio with my grandfather holding me in his arms.”

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/22/melingo-argentina-rediscovers-tango

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