Meet & greet with Gotan Project

Chunga’s Revenge Verse 1

La Revancha del Tango, the Gotan Project debut album, was released in October 2001. Even if the group had been around for 2 years, with 3 maxi singles already being played by club DJs in the know since 1999, for the general public Gotan Project was a new name which raised questions : Who are these people? Where does their music come from? Some say it’s tango others say it’s electro tango, but who’s right?

One song on that debut album, called Chunga’s Revenge, gave answers to all of these questions in a sort of meet & greet. For those with ears to hear, the track presented all the members of Gotan Project by name, and then listed the influences and inspirations behind the music.

I like it when different origins mix together to make something new, and Gotan mixed their hybrid world of dancefloor club DJs with the world of tango. Not everybody in the world of tango liked the result but, with over a million copies of La Revancha del Tango sold, word certainly got around and actually connected quite a few people to tango who may not have done so otherwise. The group would go on to make several albums with their final new release, Tango 3.0, appearing in 2010.

In a short series of posts, I’d like to look at who is behind the names listed in Chunga’s Revenge on that first album. Today, we will begin in Verse 1 where the founding musicians in Gotan Project all get name-checks. You can click here to listen to Verse 1 and here are the lyrics for all those who can’t hear the song right now :

Philippe, Christoph, Eduardo / Nini, Cristina, Gustavo / Edi, Line, Fabrizio / Es la revancha del tango

Let’s see what else we can say about these 9 musicians – the voice on the sung-spoken lyrics is that of the Argentinian Willy Crook, guest artist only this one Gotan Project song.

Verse 1 – Meet Gotan Project

Philippe, Christoph, Eduardo

Line 1 gives the first names of the Paris-based founding trio : a Frenchman, Philippe Cohen Solal, on keyboards, bass, sounds and dub effects; a Swiss, Christoph H. Müller, on beat programming, bass and keyboards; and an Argentinian, Eduardo Makaroff, on acoustic guitar.

Cohen Solal and Müller had already had their names on The Boyz from Brazil (2000), a record giving Brazilian music the electro treatment. To continue the series, the following year they made Gotan Project – La Revancha del Tango, which offered an electro refit for tango from Argentina. They invited Makaroff, an authentic porteño, born and raised in Buenos Aires and well established in Paris since 1990, along for the ride. Makaroff and Müller would go on after Gotan Project to create the duo Müller & Makaroff – I particularly recommend their music for the film El Gaucho (2010), and the songs written for the group formed around French singer Catherine Ringer for Plaza Francia (2014).

Nini, Cristina, Gustavo

Let’s move on to line 2, starting with Nini and Gustavo, two more Argentinians, both already well-known in French tango circles in 2001.

Nini, alias Avelino Nini Florès, master accordionist and bandoneon player, was born, like his guitarist brother Rudi, in Corrientes in north-west Argentina into a family with a solid reputation for composing and playing chamame, an essential and massively popular regional folk genre.¹ It is Nini who invented the emblematic bandoneon sound which would be central to Gotan Project, with his greatest moment possibly being when he sits in on a Gotan remix of Round ‘Bout Midnight by Chet Baker adding a bandoneon to the jazz combo as if it had always been there.

Hiding behind the name Gustavo, we find Gustavo Beytelmann, pianist, composer, and a respected collaborator of Astor Piazzolla‘s, perfectly at home in tango, jazz or contemporary classical music. His string arrangements in particular gave a new sound to Gotan Project‘s second studio album, Lunatico (2005). The string parts he wrote and conducted for the track Diferente give the final section of the song a completely new musical line, elevating the piece to a close.

Between Nini and Gustavo is Cristina or, more precisely, Cristina Vilallonga. Originally from Barcelona, but musically trained in the USA and in Paris, she was the singer with Gotan Project from 2001 to 2010. Singing only in Spanish, she created an unusual, occasionally dissonant, vocal style, mixing tango and contemporary classical music, which was definitely another key feature in the group’s identity. You can get an easy example of this by listening to Una musica brutal from the Gotan début album where Cristina Viallonga‘s profile was clearly established for the first time.

Edi, Line, Fabrizio

Finally, what about Edi, Line, Fabrizio ? Concerning Edi (or Eddy) Tomassi, he was and still is a percussionist, but that’s about all I’ve been able to find. He only appears on the group’s debut album. Maybe you know more? It’s much easier with Line and Fabrizio. Line is Franco-Danish violinist Line Kruse, whose solos were always given plenty of space both in the recordings and on stage by Gotan Project. She is still a very active musician and composer particularly in the jazz fusion mode, and she still works with Fabrizio Fenonglietto, the double bass player who, like Edi Tomassi, only plays on the debut album. We can see them playing together in this clip of one of Kruse’s compositions performing alongside Argentinian percussionist Minino Garay and pianist Fabrice Devienne.

La revancha del tango ?

Verse 1, and in fact each verse of the song, finishes with a declaration :

Es la revancha del tango

The song seems to be saying that the 9 musicians who make up the Gotan Project team are here to carry out tango‘s revenge : taking it to a new audience. Which tango features can we pick out in the group’s profile?

Gotan is Tango with the syllables reversed. This name references both vesre, a syllable-switching feature of Spanish slang in the Rio de la Plata area, and lunfardo, an Italian-influenced urban dialect which arrived in Argentina through 19th century immigrant and appears frequently in tango lyrics even today.

The music of Gotan Project is not traditional tango but samples sounds and phrasing from tango and flolkoric traditions from Argentina and Uruguay. Traditional tango would be played on acoustic instruments by an orquesta tipica with a string section of three or four violins plus an optional viola or cello, three or more bandoneons, a double bass and a piano. To this, you can add a singer. You get an idea of how that looks and sounds in the extract from the Argentinian movie Mis Cinco Hijos from 1948 which shows the Orquesta Tipica Osvaldo Pugliese playing live for dancers.

There are fewer musicians in Gotan Project than a traditional tango orchestra because electro tango uses high volume drum machines, beat programmers and various electronic keyboards to give more prominence to rhythm and repetition. In Gotan, Cohen Solal and Müller take care of the electro elements which are then fused with certain instruments used by traditional tango orchestras played by the other musicians, all with some sort of a tango background : Line Kruse on violin, Fabrizio Fenonglietto on double bass, Gustavo Beytelmann on piano and Nini Flores on bandoneon. We must also include Eduardo Makaroff playing acoustic guitar on the list because the guitar commonly features in smaller tango groups.

Visual bonus

Finally, a visual bonus. If you looked at the live video from 2001 mentioned earlier, you will not be surprised to hear that one important person from the Gotan team is missing from Verse 1. She had to wait for the final verse of Chunga’s Revenge to get a mention. Her name is Prisca Lobjoy, and she created Gotan Project‘s visuals, directing their promotional video clips and all the visuals projected during their concerts. Because the group never put themselves on screen when playing live, preferring to use film to add another esthetic dimension to the music.

The video from 2001 shows images of tango dancers behind Gotan Project playing live. 9 years later, the clip for La Gloria, directed by Prisca Lobjoy in 2010 and only has one tango feature : Carlos Gardel, the legendary tango singer, is tattooed onto the skin of two dancers mixing hiphop and contemporary dance with steps from a chacarera, another traditional folk dance from the north-west of Argentina.

Lobjoy‘s videos were the visual counterpart to the electro remodelling of the music, all of which was intended to wreak vengeance – la revancha del tango – on all those who had announced that tango was dead and buried, by showing that this infinite art-form was alive and kicking and ready for new adventures in the new century. Tango is sampled both musically and visually.

Interestingly, La Gloria uses the same enumeration technique as Chunga’s Revenge naming the musicians and commenting on their talents. This time it is the famous Uruguayan football commentator, Victor Hugo Morales, who does the presentations, with his trademark Gooooooooal! transformed into Goooooootan!

Still want more?

Well, so much for the meet & greet with Gotan Project. As I said at the beginning, this post is part of a series based on the track Chunga’s Revenge. The forthcoming posts will explore electro and tango references in the lyrics to the song, and there some interesting mixes ahead.

Frank Zappa and Mad Professor will be two important ingredients to the overall mood of Chunga’s Revenge.

Tango giants Astor Piazzolla and Anibal Troilo will rub shoulders with rhumba king Xavier Cugat.

The cool rhythms of Kruder & Dorfmeister will find themselves intertwined with the intense tango of Osvaldo Pugliese.

Finally, the discreet duo who make up Thievery Corporation will try to steal the attention from legendary tango singer Alberto Castillo.

Yes, all these artists get mentioned in Chunga’s Revenge by Gotan Project. Watch this space for posts as they appear or subscribe to the newsletter and email alert.

1. Nini was named after his father, a renowned composer and musician as this page shows. ↩︎