Recordings and Discographies

How to choose

There are tens of thousands of tango tracks recorded since the beginning of commercial music recording; however, just a small fraction of those recordings are suitable for social tango dancing.

Given the size of the tango music collection, selecting music suitable for social dancing can be a daunting task for anyone, let alone for the beginning tango dancer. Although most tango music danceable as tango was recorded in the thirties and forties, the date of the recording does not automatically indicate that the music is danceable as tango, since there are plenty of recordings from that period that were aimed at the listening public and are not suitable for dancing.

We suggest to start a tango collection for dancing with recordings from orchestras that recorded almost exclusively danceable music. The orchestras led by Rodolfo Biagi, Francisco Canaro, Juan D'Arienzo and Edgardo Donato have recorded mostly danceable music with a clear beat. Slower, more melodic music was recorded by Carlos Di Sarli and Ángel D'Agostino with singer Ángel Vargas.

Songs recorded by those orchestras are available for listening for free at Todotango.com. Another site that offers free listening is Pandora.com

CD's and individual songs are available for purchasing from vendors such as Amazon.com and itunes. Music cleaned from noises typical in older recordings can be purchased from Totango.net.

A comprehensive (and impressive!) collection of discographies of tango artists can be found at eng.tango.

Edgardo Donato and his orchestra in a scene of the first Argentine talkie (Tango, 1933).

Juan D'Arienzo and his orchestra playing on TV in the early sixties.

Orchestra leader Ángel D'Agostino (wearing a moustache) and lyricist Enrique Cadícamo introduce a clip showing singer Ángel Vargas singing Tres Esquinas (with a young D'Agostino at the piano).