Francisco Canaro: some love him, some hate him, but if you know me then you’ll know that my position is more nuanced. I adore his work with Charlo, and his valses, especially the early ones; and I also have a great affection for his work with Roberto Maida in the late 1930s. But when Maida quits at the end of 1938, the quality of Canaro’s work falls off a cliff. Nothing demonstrates this better than Canaro’s interpretation of Tormenta, Discépolo’s cry of existential dread. Canaro reduces the dark night of the soul to a soap opera in a performance that I can only describe as relentlessly superficial. I’ve long considered it the worst tango, ever; listening to it, for me, is a torment.

Despite these obvious shortcomings, Canaro’s Tormenta has been a popular tango over the years: Canaro’s insistent, almost martial rhythm can get the dancers going. I remember complaining about Tormenta to a tango colleague twenty years ago. He commented: It’s like a cup of coffee… paused, and added: a bad cup of coffee. I have to say, he was bang on. Canaro’s Tormenta is a cup of bad instant coffee. It’s that big old jar of Nescafé that stares you in the face every time you open the kitchen cupboard, years after you’ve switched to something better. But for those moments in which you need a coffee so badly that even a bad one will do, it does the job.

Two decades later the scene seems to have tired of Tormenta; maybe we’ve finally finished that twenty year old maxi-jar of Nescafé. But the idea of a “go-to” tango that can make the dead dance has not gone away.

The mantle has been resting on D’Arienzo’s shoulders for a little while now – don’t forget that his music was once described as capable of waking the dead. In Argentina they used to play D’Arienzo’s La Bruja in this moment, but that’s not fast enough for us – especially once we started playing it at the proper (slower) speed. For a few years it was Mandria that we heard several times at almost every weekend event. Mandria is also like coffee, but it’s a good Italian coffee, a nice double espresso. Some of you may have noticed a not insignificant coincidence: both these interpretations were recorded in 1939, tango’s most intense year. Argentina was partying hard whilst in Europe the fuse ran down on the powder keg of war and then exploded.

So it was interesting for me to hear one D’Arienzo tango played three times in a weekend recently: El tigre Millán. Recorded one year after Mandria, this is not as hard and intense but it is even faster: 68 bpm compared to 67 bpm. That’s fast. D’Arienzo’s 1940 band is more sophisticated than his 1939 one, so this is a bit of a change in the community’s taste.

What next? Di Sarli’s Catamarca has been tried, but it’s just a bit too complex. Troilo perhaps? Sadly we have no recordings from 1939 and 1940. Milongueando en el 40 and the other classic 1941 sides don’t have the same intensity. They are more like a good cappucino: stimulating, yes, but meant to be savoured, rather than thrown back in a single gulp before the milonga. Perhaps some Biagi? Son cosas del bandoneón is well known but has never achieved the gold status of Tormenta, Mandria or El tigre Millán, whilst Pura clase is just too joyful. Gólgota? Too slow… reader I don’t know!