Barrio de Tango

"Barrio de Tango" — Tango Neighbourhood — is Aníbal Troilo's love letter to the Buenos Aires streets that produced the music he dedicated his life to. The piece has a warmth and specificity that marks it as something more than generic nostalgia: the neighbourhood the title names is a real place, a set of real streets and sounds and people, and Troilo plays with the particular knowledge of someone who grew up inside what he is now describing. The bandoneón here has a fuller, more sociable tone than in Troilo's more introspective work — this is music that imagines rooms full of people rather than a solitary figure alone with memory. Homero Manzi's lyrics build the neighbourhood from specific images: the corner bar, the cobblestones, the sound of the instrument itself drifting from upstairs windows at night. There is a quality of evidence in the song — testimony about what this place was actually like, offered to people who may never have known it. Troilo's orchestration supports this testimonial quality with an arrangement that sounds lived-in, as though the music itself has the particular density of a neighbourhood accumulated over decades. A piece of music that is also a piece of urban history.