Tango For Ears

The tango was born in the late 1800s in Buenos Aires, where it was first danced in grimy bars and brothels. It began as a souped-up habanera, a slower dance made famous in 1875 (and familiar to almost everyone still) from Bizet’s hyper-sexed opera Carmen. But the tango became an even more successful transplant when it leapt across the Atlantic and caught on in Paris in the early 1900s. First picked up among sophisticated Parisian socialites, it quickly became a hugely popular dance craze, spreading rapidly to London, Berlin, and New York City.

It’s easy to see why: urban and urbane, the tango is unhurried but athletic, elegant but sensuous, a tug-of-war between precision and abandon, a choreographic stylization of seduction. The basic steps are simple, but can be elaborated to a high level of bravura and finesse. It appealed strongly to cosmopolitan Parisians already fascinated by the sensual, “primitive,” and voluptuous innovations of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe as well as the provocative syncopations of jazz also recently imported from the New World. Tango seduced avant-garde artists too, enacting the insolence, eroticism, transgression, and enthrallment central to such au courant movements as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism.

The beguiling tunes and insinuating rhythms of tango music not only attracted dancers and dance bands; they also caught the attention of composers around the world who in the late 19th and early 20th century were zealously exploring their national heritage of folk music and now began delving into vernacular music from cities as well as from the countryside. Ragtime, jazz, and popular dances such as the Charleston, shimmy, and foxtrot were soon adopted by forward-looking composers and cast as recital and concert pieces. But the tango has proved far more popular and more durable than any other such modern-era dance craze.

Tango, then, though it began as music for a (somewhat disreputable) dance that quickly caught on among those with “advanced” tastes, was soon adapted to many different kinds of musical idioms and uses. Tangos can be music for the recital or concert hall. They can also be songs—in musicals, in movies, on stage—or popular hits to sing or hum along with. And they can take yet another form, too, as a hybrid that combines indigenous and classical traditions into a sort of (often extended and sometimes partly improvised) rhapsody—a form explored most famously by Argentinian Astor Piazzolla, who broke into widespread cultural awareness here in the U.S. late in his career after decades of renown in Europe. Some of Piazzolla’s tangos are danceable, but many are meant to be enjoyed as a kind of world music or even as fully-fledged art music to be listened to in a concert setting as one might a string quartet or a symphony.

The territory of tango is immense, and this brief sketch of its domain doesn’t aim to be comprehensive; much must be touched on only lightly. The intent is to give some idea of the variety and scope of tango as a musical, rather than dance, phenomenon, and to suggest some exemplary tangos well worth seeking out in four categories: Theatrical and Popular Song Tangos, Jazz Tangos, Piazzolla’s Nuevo Tango, and Art Music Tangos. (Album titles are included in descriptions of recommended tangos so readers should be easily able to find the recordings.) These four categories make no pretense to be mutually exclusive or exact. They’re merely an attempt to delineate an unruly and diverse realm, always with the proviso that tango’s pungent blend of stylized elegance and moody sensuality remains ever protean and unpredictable.

Theatrical and Popular Song Tangos
Theater composers quickly recognized the tango’s potential to dramatize the ecstasies and ironies of love. One of the earliest to do so was Kurt Weill, who (with Bertolt Brecht) wrote his “Tango Ballade” for 1928’s Threepenny Opera. Sung (on the 1954 New York cast Decca recording) as a duet for two disillusioned lovers—the parasitic male and his paramour who supports the both of them—it both celebrates and mocks the mixed motives that bind them together. Weill’s catchy-as-velcro music, which works perfectly also as an instrumental-only number with the saxophone “singing” the vocal lines (in The Threepenny Opera Suite played by Chicago Pro Music on Reference Records), instantly and vividly evokes Berlin in the hedonistic and cynical 1920s.

Almost as well known is Danish composer Jacob Gade’s 1925 sumptuous orchestral “Jalousie,” originally written to accompany the popular silent film Son of Zorro. It soon became a huge hit detached from the movie, appeared in various arrangements (several featuring a violin soloist), and was first recorded by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops (in their first-ever recording!) in 1935, making Gade wealthy (albeit a one-hit wonder)—and Fiedler famous. There are dozens of recordings: Tango Goes Symphony (Naxos) programs “Jalousie,” along with other classic tangos including Cole Porter’s “So in Love” and Piazzolla’s “Oblivion”; Tango Tango, by Viveza (on Vanguard Omega) offers a more passionate and authentic-sounding small-ensemble arrangement of Gade’s hit in another outstanding program of tango standards.

Some of the most memorable tangos by Americans showed up in the 1940s and 50s as pop songs and numbers from Broadway musicals. Two of the latter variety—both scenes of insidious temptation ultimately resisted, and both written by the team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross—are “Hernando’s Hideaway,” from 1954’s The Pajama Game, and “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets” in 1955’s Damn Yankees, where the tango’s peremptory rhythms accompany an inspired-by-the-devil attempted seduction. Both were huge popular hits, recorded by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Della Reese, Gwen Verdon, and Fiedler with the Boston Pops, and eventually becoming part of the Great American Songbook. Another evergreen tango-as-love-song from a Broadway show that gained entry into that pantheon is Cole Porter’s “So in Love” (from 1948’s Kiss Me Kate). Stellar performances by Ella Fitzgerald (Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook) and by Julie Andrews lead the long list of recordings. Though it hasn’t so often migrated from the theatrical stage, Bernstein’s “I Am So Easily Assimilated” from Candide (1956) might be added, as it often appears on show-tune recitals.

From 1952 came two huge-hit tangos not originally from Broadway musicals. Al Hoffman and Dick Manning’s spunky “It Takes Two to Tango” was recorded by Pearl Bailey, Louis Armstrong, and many male-female duets, becoming so popular that the title entered the vernacular lexicon. (Louis Armstrong’s All-Time Greatest Hits on MCA includes “It Takes Two to Tango.”) Leroy Anderson’s “Blue Tango” was a smash in its original instrumental-only version, recorded by everyone from Mantovani to Liberace to Frederick Fennell (on Mercury Living Presence LP and CD reissue). Sentimental lyrics were later added by Mitchell Parrish and crooned by various singers on other recordings.

The tango craze continued. Other 50s popular American songs appended lyrics to borrowed melodies from traditional Argentinian tangos. “Kiss of Fire,” for instance (recorded by Louis Armstrong), is based on an early tango, “El choclo,” and “Strange Sensation” (sung by June Valli) on “La Cumparsita.” (One wonders how many listeners knew that “choclo” is Spanish for “corncob,” used in the song’s original lyrics with salacious intent.) Meanwhile popular dance orchestras began issuing tango programs on LP like Freddy Martin’s 1957 At the Coconut Grove, Pancho Rosquellas’ 1958 Tango Time, and Xavier Cugat’s tango disc on the popular Columbia Records House Party series.

There are by now a multitude of popular song and theatrical tangos (many if not most danceable), not to mention innumerable tango-style arrangements of everything from Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme to whole albums of tango-fied Beatles’ songs. Tangos also pop up often in movies, from early Valentino films like the 1921 silent blockbuster The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (which helped make both the actor and dance famous), to tangos danced by Fred Astaire in 1933’s Flying Down to Rio, to Billy Wilder’s 1950 Sunset Boulevard, to the almost subliminal tango that recurs in Bernard Herrmann’s noirish score for Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo, Bertolucci’s sexy females entwining in his 1970 The Conformist, and Carlos Gardel’s “Por una Cabeza” in the suave dance lesson of 1992’s Scent of a Woman. Cinematic tango scenes are usually sexually charged, but some are also sardonic, as when drunken Paul meets again with Jeanne in Last Tango in Paris. Others serve as backdrops for intrigue or espionage (Never Say Never Again, True Lies.)

Jazz Tangos
Tango has obvious affinities with jazz. Both use African-derived rhythms, both grew out of dance music, both arose from oppressed urban classes, both convey vivid emotions (defiance, arrogance, joyous release, fury), both are, in their most primal forms, played by small bands of mixed instruments that (at first) entertained mostly in shady urban saloons and bordellos. Both were met with early disapproval from the sanctimonious and were soon taken up by the smart set. Both have mutated into multiplicitous strands; both have been hugely influential on many other kinds of music; and both have achieved a lasting place in our culture, musical and otherwise.

As we saw in the previous section, tangos from the 40s and 50s were quickly picked up and recorded by jazz performers like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. This pattern has continued, and jazz renditions of tangos have been played and recorded ever since, some as instrumentals (as for example the amiable two-guitar collaboration of Laurindo Almeida and Charlie Byrd on their 1985 Concord album Tango that includes such standbys as “Blue Tango,” “Jalousie,” and “Hernando’s Hideaway” along with several classic Argentinian tangos), and some by singers (as in the smoldering take on “Whatever Lola Wants” by singer Tierney Sutton on her 2009 Telarc release, Desire). At the other end of the spectrum is Frank Zappa and company’s likeably game run-through of the much-loved 1955 Finnish tango “Satumaa” (with abjectly wishful lyrics about a heavenly never-never-land) recorded on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Volume 2 from his 1974 concert in Helsinki. Quavery soulful guitar solos and clavinet riffs start sweetly, build into fusion-style climaxes, and still the tango beat goes on.

But jazz musicians not only performed tangos, they also began to write them—as jazz compositions in and of themselves, not simply jazz versions of existing tangos. One of the first to do so was Richard Twardzik, whose “Yellow Tango” came out on his 1954 Pacific Jazz album Trio. What’s remarkable about this bouncy number is Twardzik’s unbuttoned, inventive, Thelonious Monkish piano playing; it pushes at the edge for its time yet remains both genuine jazz and a recognizable tango. Twardzik died at only 25 of a heroin overdose and so never became widely known; Gil Evans, on the other hand, was celebrated for his distinctive and imaginative brass-heavy ensemble arrangements and collaborations with Miles Davis. His darkly sonorous “Las Vegas Tango” came out in 1964 on Verve’s aptly-named The Individualism of Gil Evans. This number is a sizzler, with the unhurried, majestic power and deep crimson glow of molten lava. (For another—and terrific—version of the piece, check out the new Cuneiform recording by guitarist Bill Frisell with a big band led by Michael Gibbs; it’s reviewed in this issue by Bill Milkowski.)

Also prepossessing, if in a very different way, with notably idiosyncratic brass, crafty electric guitar licks, and a marvelously incongruous Hammond B-3, is Carla Bley’s 14-minute “Reactionary Tango” from her 1987 ECM release Social Studies. Underlined by an obsessively drumming tango-rhythm tattoo, this has a sort of mock-martial arrogance carried by a cleverly addictive melodic line set to tangy Kurt Weillish harmonies—and some hilarious interpolated quotations from “Hernando’s Hideway” (themselves stolen from an early traditional Argentinian tango).

Not to be outdone by his ex-spouse, Paul Bley (with trio-mates Jimmy Giuffre and Steve Swallow) offers another eccentric entry, “Tango Del Mar,” on his 1989 The Life of a Trio: Sunday. Spare, wistful, introspective, chromatically wandering, this tango is a slow dance, more like the pensive epilogue than the steamy prelude to a romance. The long-spun-out entwining lines of Bley’s piano, Giuffre’s sax and clarinet, and Swallow’s electric guitar seem to call up from the cloudy depths of memory a piercing image of the sweetness of a love forever lost, as a photographic image emerges from alchemical waters to condense the vaguest blur into a sharply-etched face from which shines the beloved smile and dancing eyes that once so delighted.

One of the biggest names in jazz to write his own tango is Dave Brubeck, whose 1995 Telarc release Young Tigers and Old Lions sports “Joe Lovano’s Tango,” a winsome four-minute modal-jazz (and quite danceable) charmer that the 75-year-old Brubeck dashed off on the way to the recording studio. Lovano turns in a mellow tenor sax solo complemented by Dave’s deft follow-up piano commentary; Telarc captures both in pristine sonics. More ambitious and rhythmically trickier but with lots of uplift and foot-tapping drive is Jack DeJohnette’s “Tango African,” which leads off his 2009 collaboration with Danilo Perez and John Patitucci on Music We Are. This is an interesting and unusual piece, with DeJohnette playing drums and overdubbing solos on melodica (a sort of cross between a harmonica and an accordion that sounds similar to the bandoneón used in traditional tango bands). 

Musicians that specialize in playing jazz tangos (in performances with lots of the improvisation so essential to traditional jazz) have proliferated in the last decade, many of them now issuing excellent recordings. Typically they play a wide-ranging repertoire that includes arrangements of older Argentine tangos, Piazzolla-style Nuevo Tangos (almost always at least one or two by the master himself), and newly-written jazz tangos. Indeed to describe the current jazz-tango scene as thriving is to understate; “efflorescing” might be more accurate. Some comments on a few of the more notable currently active jazz-tango musicians may help readers interested in exploring this territory get started. (More will be mentioned in the following section.)

Pianist Pablo Ziegler (born 1944) played with Piazzolla for many years and has continued to perform as a soloist with orchestra, and in a variety of group settings. Among the many well-known musicians he’s collaborated with are Emmanuel Ax, Gary Burton, Regina Carter, Paquito D’Rivera, Joe Lovano, and Branford Marsalis, and he’s as likely to be playing alongside a vibraphonist or cellist as with the more traditional bandoneón and string bass players. The numbers on his 2003 Grammy-winning album Baja Cero with Quique Sinesi encompass a wide expressive range, from sinister, dissonant tone-clusters to ethereal lyricisim. The Pablo Ziegler Quartet’s 2007 Tango & All That Jazz includes one of this superlative musician’s many amazing performances of Piazzolla’s dazzling “Fuga Y Misterio”—a thrilling composition that persuasively synthesizes devices and techniques from tango, jazz, and classical music.

Also far-ranging in musical aesthetic but consistently alluring in both melodic inspiration and rhythmic impulse, the jazz tangos of saxophonist Jorge Retamoza as heard on his marvelous 2010 Vientos De Tango and in concerts (now on YouTube) with the Cuarteto Andorra are brimful of verve and spontaneity. Another YouTube discovery (this one not yet on any CD that I could find) is the aptly-named Tango Jazz Quartet, four young musicians playing less exploratory but very pleasing jazz tangos with slinky tunes and comfortably danceable beats (their YouTube page is tangojazzquartet). There’s no bandoneón in sight; here the melodic lines are taken by clarinet, saxophone, and piano. These guys are definitely keeping the “tang” (and the “go”) in tango; their music is hummable and audience-friendly in a way that recalls some of Dave Brubeck’s and Stan Getz’s more uptempo releases from the 1960s.

Astor Piazzolla and Nuevo Tango
Traditional Argentinian tango has, of course, its own many-stranded and venerable history, and is a very worthy subject of study on its own. There are thousands of recordings, many of them anthologies with selections from different performing groups. Interested readers might start with The Tango Project (Nonesuch), a good sampler from 1981 played by a close American approximation of the standard tango-band trio (accordion, violin, and piano) that includes “El choclo,” “Jalousie,” and other standards in the traditional tango repertoire.

But traditional tango, with or without words, is emphatically dance music, and our concern here is with tangos primarily meant for listening. Which brings us to the expansion of tango from Argentinian-style tango-for-dancing to music of a more ambitious and experimental sort. This evolutionary trend was dominated by Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992)—so dominated, in fact, that he’s been described without much exaggeration as “a one-man tango avant-garde.” Born in Argentina but raised in New York City, he began by playing in local tango dance bands while simultaneously soaking up the vibrant NYC jazz scene. Returning as a young man to Argentina, he studied composition with Alberto Ginastera, then later with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. There he also became intrigued by Gerry Mulligan’s Paris-based jazz octet, later modeling some of his performing ensembles on it.

On his return to Buenos Aires in 1955, Piazzolla began composing a radically new kind of tango. The conventional rhythms and traditional dance structure were abandoned, replaced by an enlarged harmonic vocabulary, freer and more varied phrasings and tempos, unpredictable cross-accents and rhythmic suspensions, contrapuntal interplay, jazz-like improvisations, and more extended, rhapsodic forms. These innovations made his Nuevo Tango (“New Tango”) much more complex and volatile; it became a kind of concert music, no longer suitable for dancing. (This led, despite growing worldwide recognition, to Piazzolla being for many years denounced by traditional Argentine tango aficionados for corrupting authentic tango. Gershwin had been similarly scolded decades earlier by jazz purists when he wrote Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F.)

Piazzolla’s output over his half-century career is huge: more than 750 works, including concertos and scores for film and theater. He toured internationally, wrote works for such famous musicians as Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the Kronos String Quartet, and collaborated with such jazz icons as Gerry Mulligan and Gary Burton. His own instrument was the bandoneón, which he set into many sizes and sorts of ensembles that included non-traditional tango instruments like saxophone, electric guitar, and vibraphone.

Among the very best of the many recordings that Piazzolla made of his own music are three from late in his career. If you haven’t heard Piazzolla playing Piazzolla, listening to his bold, fiery, and fantastic 1986 Tango: Zero Hour will be a mind-opening experience. (It’s out on a Nonesuch CD, though originally released on vinyl by American Clavé, the first American label to pick up Piazzolla’s music.) Also consider Libertango (several labels) and Piazzolla’s Bandoneón Concerto (Nonesuch). Piazzolla’s collaborations with jazz musicians Gary Burton (The New Tango, recorded live at the Montreux Festival), and with Gerry Mulligan (Tango Nuevo), are likewise superb. 

Recordings of Piazzolla’s music by other musicians have greatly increased in the past two decades, the majority of them appearing after he had achieved universal posthumous acclaim. Many are by classical music performers and offer various non-traditional instrumental combinations. Exceptional releases include Gidon Kremer’s Hommage a Piazzolla, Yo-Yo Ma’s Soul of the Tango, and the Kronos Quartet’s 1991 Five Tango Sensations. Pianists Emmauel Ax and Pablo Ziegler spin out brilliant two-piano arrangements of his pieces on 1996’s Los Tangueros, and the Ian & Ani Duo’s 2012 Tango Plus includes eloquent readings of such Piazzolla favorites as “Oblivion” and “Adios Nonino” on cello and piano.

A sampling of outstanding Piazzolla recordings (not yet cited) by jazz musicians would include Gary Burton’s melodically ingratiating Astor Piazzolla Reunion; Di Meola Plays Piazzolla, highlighted by the guitarist’s airy, exhilarating, bravura account of Piazzolla’s 18-minute Tango Suite; Piazzolla in Brooklyn, the Pablo Aslan Quintet’s genial take on some of the master’s earlier and more danceable pieces; the noirish and seductive “Ah Intruder (Female)” on Kip Hanrahan’s 1988 Days and Nights of Blue Luck Inverted—of special significance as Hanrahan was an early and ardent American supporter of Piazzolla’s music, producing several of Piazzolla’s last recordings (including Zero Hour) and releasing them on his American Clavé label; and Quartango’s Espresso, a playful and sophisticated Piazzolla collection tossed off with nimble gaiety and more humor than passion.

Art Music Tangos
Forward-looking “classical composers” (most of whom also wrote sonatas, quartets, concertos, symphonies, ballets, operas, and so on) were among the first to fall under tango’s spell after the dance arrived in Paris. It caught on so fast and spread so widely that only a decade or two later composers all over the world were hooked. Gallic-centric figures like Satie, Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Virgil Thomson turned out tangos, as did Central Europeans like Hindemith, Krenek, Martinu, Wolpe, and Schulhoff, Brits like Walton and Richard Rodney Bennett, Americans like Copland, Foss, Barber, Harbison, and Previn, Russian expatriates like Vernon Duke. Even Soviet composers like Shostakovich, iconoclasts and experimenters like John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow, hard-core serialists like Milton Babbitt, minimalists like Terry Riley (see review page 194), performers who dabbled in composing like violinist Misha Elman—all wrote tangos too. Much as writing a waltz, or a batch of them, became de rigueur for 19th century composers from Schubert and Chopin to Brahms and Tchaikovsky, tango became a standard form for 20th century composers.

Art music tangos (or “concert tangos” if you prefer) fall into two broad categories that veer toward or away from two opposite extremes. The first is nostalgic and bittersweet, with the music retaining enough of the triadic harmonic scaffolding and familiar rhythmic lilt to be at least theoretically danceable. If seasoned with mockery (as indeed are many traditional tangos), still the attitude toward the genre remains affectionate and appreciative. The populist spirit and vernacular origin of tango survives, intact and easily recognizable—formulaic yet supple, elegant yet seductive, stylized yet intimate, ceremonious yet earthy.

The second tendency is self-consciously modernist: atonal (or post-tonal), pointillist, and disjointed, often obsessive or subversive, the music angular, jabbing, and assaultive, or intricate, ghostly, and vaporous. The dance rhythms are mere remnants, the forms mere concatenations of musical debris that only faintly suggest—often mostly through the title—the exploded remnants of an outmoded relic to be deconstructed and dismembered. But whether they embrace or reject the generic conventions, the best art-music tangos reflect the distinctive personality and imagination of their composers; the music always speaks with an individual and identifiable voice.

One of the earliest composers to write an art music tango is the eccentric and witty Parisian original, Erik Satie. His “Le Tango Perpétual” is from a 1914 cycle of 21 short piano pieces called Sports et Divertissements. The cycle’s title reflects both the “subjects” of the various movements as well as the composer’s intention in writing them, and indeed his tango makes a sort of Cubist parody of the whole idea of “art music tango.” With its uncluttered lines, looping iterations, and delicately-placed “sour” notes, it’s demure and placid—the exact opposite of the tango as a dance. Yet it beats out strict and unchanging tango rhythm with mechanical perversity. Like Satie himself, the result is both impossible and enchanting. (Among many good recordings, Ciccolini’s pioneering 1960s EMI set of Satie’s complete piano music is ideal.)

Stravinsky snuck a brief tango into his 1918 L’Histoire du Soldat, but was far more memorable in his magisterial 1940 Tango originally written as a piano solo and later arranged (by the composer) for chamber ensemble. This is a “straight” tango, quite danceable, with an indelible melody, piquant harmonies, emphatic and sharply articulated rhythms, and some real bite. It’s also pure Stravinsky: tart, jagged, sharp-edged, lapidary in craft, with no wasted notes or sentimentality. For the piano version get Jenny Lin’s marvelous program of Stravinsky’s piano music (Steinway). In the ensemble arrangement, Dorati and the London Symphony (Mercury) and Stravinsky Conducts Chamber and Jazz Ensembles (Columbia LP) are authoritative.

Of the many Central European composers who flourished between the world wars, Erwin Schulhoff was, along with Kurt Weill (whom he somewhat resembles), perhaps the most proficient at adapting popular dance forms to his compositional style, performing the results himself (he was a fine pianist) on his concert tours. Several of his richly harmonized and wonderfully-scored tangos are nicely played by the Ebony Band (Channel Classics); Schulhoff’s own recordings on the piano, recorded in Berlin in 1928, are on a Decca CD. The performances are supple and spirited, and the sound surprisingly clear and detailed. Even better—truly one of the most beautiful tangos ever written—is the lilting, mysterious, magical fifth movement of his harlequinesque ballet Moonstruck, gorgeously played by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (London CD). It was first performed in 1931 with the composer conducting the Czech Philharmonic; ten years later he was dead—like so many others, murdered by the Nazis.

Schulhoff established the genre, but orchestral concert art-music tangos (as opposed to the more populist sort made famous by Gade’s “Jalousie”) have remained few and far between since then. Two notable examples are Bruce MacCombie’s 1991 expansive and hypnotic Chelsea Tango, brilliantly recorded by the Singapore Symphony on a stunningly-well-recorded BIS CD program of dances for orchestra, and Miguel del Aguila’s 2012 Concierto en Tango for cello and orchestra, with bravura acrobatics by the soloist set off by lush orchestral panoply, just recently recorded by the Buffalo Philharmonic (on the orchestra’s “house” label) under JoAnn Falletta.

Two all-piano anthologies, both offering many first-and-so-far-only recordings of fascinating new-music tangos—most leaning to the more subversive or etiolated rather than conventional side—finish my recommendations. Yvar Mikhashoff’s 1992 Incitation to Desire (New Albion) gathers 19 tangos, all post-WWII, with contributors that range from Copland and Cage to William Duckworth and Richard Rodney Bennett. Amy Briggs’ even more encompassing 2010 collection, Tangos for Piano (Ravello), stretches from the subtle, airy, complex percolations of Colon Nancarrow’s Tango?, David Rakowski’s catlike Zipper Tango, and Per Norgard’s spiky Hermit Crab Tango, to Yu-Hui Chang’s dreamy, oblique, disillusioned, and very beautiful Tangled in Smoke, its spectral image of dance refracted through memory and looming up through the darkness as a revenant of long-ago love.