This playlist focuses on the orchestra of Julio De Caro

This is one of the most important tango orchestras, not so much because of participating in the golden age of tango dancing, he didn’t really, but for the musical ideas, innovations, and great tangos he wrote.  De Caro didn’t have a popular orchestra for dancing, and is generally not heard at milongas, but he was a driving inspiration for a number of orchestras that shaped and drove the later golden age, including Anibal Troilo, Pedro Laurenz, and most importantly Osvaldo Pugliese.  Without the De Caro orchestra there might not have been a Pugliese orchestra, or if there was it would have sounded completely different.

The music of this orchestra is very modern for its time.  The sound is playful, and fun but in its time it wasn’t really thought of as dance music.  This music was pulling in another direction.  When the more rhythmic orchestras launched the dance craze that would become tango’s golden age De Caro seems to have chosen not to participate.  The younger musicians he inspired however would go on to completely define the music of the later golden age.

When you listen to De Caro his music will often sound very familiar, and I think this is because we are so familiar with the orchestra of Osvaldo Pugliese.  Pugliese played many tangos written by De Caro, and with very few changes to the musical arrangements, some change was necessary because the orchestra was twice the size of the classic De Caro sextet.  Pugliese took this style very far, creating his own unique sound and his own unique innovations to tango music.  De Caro sounds familiar to us through Pugliese, and if De Caro’s music sounds quite dancable to our ears it is because Pugliese taught us how to dance to it.