Gabriel Rivano: playing WITH tango

One can play Tango. Astor Piazzolla did. Anibal Troillo did. Leopoldo Frederico did. Many have done, do, and will go on doing. This is what is expected. But you cannot play WITH Tango. This is hallowed ground, protected by taboos, punished by social exclusion. Gabriel Rivano took this risk, all alone, and suffered the consequences. In Rivano’s hands, the bandoneón is no longer a vessel for male affirmation. When Rivano places it on his knees, it’s a child, it’s a toy. Julio Cortázar, one of countless great “porteño” (from Buenos Aires) writers, said that children take their games very seriously, create their own rules — their own Universe — and abide strictly by them. When Rivano plays his toy, the bandoneón, he does it with the rigour and abandon of a
child. He achieves the utmost playfulness within the strictest rules.

Rivano’s music swings between these polarities: structure and playfulness. Tynianov, the Russian constructivist from the 20′s, wrote: “The artistic fact can’t exist outside the submission, the deformation of each and every factor by the constructive factor”. This is Rivano, his method. Rivano inherits the love for structures from his father and the compulsion for playfulness from his mother: he is born into what will become his method, his style: his music is an endless attempt to equate this family polarity, to infuse beauty into and from it. Each of his albums testifies to this struggle.

Rivano walks against Tango mainstream when he refuses its inherent violent and dramatic pathos and insists on being playful. The most direct consequence is:with the exception of a single album (“Tradición”), Rivano records and distributes all his albums independently. Each album will overstep a Tango taboo.

In “Tradición”, he plays the music of his grandfather, Adolfo Pérez Pocholo, a famous bandoneón player from the turn of the 20th century. He creates the most modern sounding music out of the most traditional musical material. Rivano rejects the occidental fallacious musical path: onwards, always, towards
dissolution. He moves in spirals, recovering bits and pieces from the past at each turn, reinvesting them with the harmonic, timbric, rhythmic conquests of his time.

Johann Sebastian Bach straddled the tense line between the sacred and the profane. His music is crucified against these extremes. The bandoneón was crucified against this: it was originally used to replace the organ in poor churches, and also in brothels. Rivano records “Bach en Buenos Aires” and his own polarity structure-playfulness reflects Bach’s and the bandoneón’s
sacred-profane polarity.

Brazilian culture can be summarized by a single word: anthropophagy. Brazilian culture eats and digests all foreign influences. Rivano, as Tinyanov said, submits all his influences to the constructive factor. It couldn’t be helped that Rivano felt so attracted to Brazilian culture and expressed this attraction and affection through a record, entitled “Porto Seguro”.

Piazzolla himself broke with certain streaks of the Tango tradition. He absorbs Bártok and Stravinsky, injecting rhythmic vitality into Tango. He uses Bachian counterpoint, as Heitor Villa-Lobos, in Brazil, also did. But he doesn’t break the ultimate Tango axiom: he still plays as a “porteño” male, he still uses his bandoneón to affirm drama and tragedy. Rivano records “Piazzolla en Bandoneón”
and crosses cultural barbed wire: he doesn’t play Piazzolla: he plays WITH Piazzolla. Tempestuous Piazzolla, fond of hunting sharks, sits on a sand beach and plays with toys. Piazzolla is treated amorously, playfully.

Rivano never had his picture on the cover of his albums. Neither did he record traditional Tango themes, such as “El Choclo” or “El día que me quieras”. Sitting on the sands of Ipanema, the same Brazilian beach immortalized by João Gilberto, Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes, his wife Claudia suggests why not record Tangos and Milongas, the quintessential “porteño” genres. From the sands of Ipanema, with a cover photograph taken by a Norwegian, Rivano continues to cross cultural barbed wire, improvising playfully and rigorously with sacred themes from the Tango repertoire.

As Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, was characterized, Rivano is always the same, always different. His polar movement between structure and playfulness repeats, and repeats and repeats, incessantly. This doesn’t change. But each movement produces a different album, another work of beauty, another work of transgression, the transgression of a child that has the guts to say that the King is naked, but the King is so much more beautiful naked…

Por Paulo Marcel Coelho Aragão, escritor, tradutor e colaborador da Muitas Letras.

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