About “Never Too Tango”

Argentine soprano Lorena Guillén, composer/arranger/pianist Alejandro Rutty, and the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet present a beautiful and entertaining program of tangos, entitled “Never Too Tango,” including original material from the golden era in Argentina to more recent compositions by the likes of Astor Piazzolla, Thomas Oboe Lee, Alejandro Rutty and Paquito D’Rivera.

This concert offers an elegant blend of popular and "classical" styles, of traditional and new sounds. combining voice and instrumental forces in a variety of arrangements: from voice, sax quartet and piano, just sax quartet, sax quartet and piano, or the intimate piano and voice setting. In the tutti arrangements, Rutty treats the saxophones as a gigantic "bandoneón" that surrounds with its expansive colors the percussive piano and the lyrical vocal melodies of the tangos.

A comment from Lorena Guillén about tango: “The tango is the popular music style unequivocally associated with the city of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. The creational myth of the Argentine tango holds that it was born in the late nineteenth century as the music of the underclass, and that the tango gradually climbed the social ladder to be accepted as the dominant form of music, dance, and song by the late 1910s. After several peaks and declines, a tired and out-fashioned Tango lost ground against international music trends in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1980s, however, perhaps fueled by the international success of bandoneón virtuoso and composer Astor Piazzolla, a new generation of Argentine musicians, many coming from the classical music world, rushed to learn the fading tradition from older musicians of the ‘golden era’ of tango.”