That’s right! Today one of my tango pictures was selected for tweeduizend.be, a photo site for pictures taken in and about Antwerp, analogous to drieduizend.be for Leuven.
One photo is selected daily from all photos tagged with “tweeduizend“, “Antwerp” or “Antwerpen” on Flickr and Photoblog. So everyone can easily participate! Just tag your pictures!
One cool feature of tweeduizend.be is the Google Maps mashup.
This is the winner:
TRANCE
Yesterday I went to a Otros Aires concert in “Openluchttheater Rivierenhof” in Antwerp.
Carlos Diaz’ 
Zapatango played before Otros Aires. I didn’t expect much of it but they were in fact rather good in their jazz-tango style. Not for dancing though…
Then came Otros Aires !
The music, electronic traditional tango’s and milonga’s, was so good that we couldn’t stay seated, after a few songs when they started “La Yumba” we jumped up and danced between the sitting audience and the stage.
Many people followed our example. No dancer could stay seated on this music. The rough concrete floor was awful but the dancing very inspired 
The week before the Paris tango festival I went on a city trip to the beautiful historic polish city of Kraków. Besides site seeing the city and visiting the amazing sculptures in the Wieliczka salt mine (worth a visit!) and the depressing concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, there was time to meet my long time tango friends from Warsaw.
On Saturday night we attended an open air concert of the polish tango group “Tango Bridge” with Katarzyna Jamróz near Teatr Slowackiego. They played mainly Piazzolla compositions, it was very enjoyable and the singer Katarzyna Jamróz was quite impressive.
After the concert we took a tram to a new milonga – the Milonga Royal -, the only choice that night. Some people at the concert warned us that it was not a very popular one… They were instead going to join the huge crowd that was celebrating Wianki (Saint John’s night) at the riverside.
The milonga was not crowded at all, maximum 15 dancers. It quickly became clear why it was not popular. It was a mainly neotango oriented milonga, which is not a priori bad – I’ve attended a rather good neotango milonga in Warsaw before (Milonga u Artystów at Mazowiecka street, unfortunately discontinued) -, but the choice of music was very erratic, no consistency in the sequence of tracks, no tandas. The music was mainly non-tango and electrotango with quite a lot of milonga’s mixed in.
Imagine for instance Narcotango followed by a milonga followed by a Miguel Calo tango followed by an amorphous piece of undanceable junk… You get the picture.
Anyway, we had some fun because I could dance with my friend again after about a year, which was why we went to a milonga in the first place.
Don’t let this put you off of dancing tango in Kraków though, my friends assured me that there are much better and traditional milongas. A few years ago we went to a good milonga there indeed.
These two great bands prominently use an electric violin to convey strong emotion with their music:
The first band is Dirty Three, I was blown away by their ferociously emotional songs when I saw them live on the Pukkelpop Festival in 1996. Very impressive! One of the few concerts I will never forget! Horse Stories
Be blown away:
The second are Beltaine, a Polish band who play, mainly instrumental, Celtic folk rock with other influences. I saw them in a small pub in Warsaw, the “Kliper”, back in 2004. The crowd went crazy and asked for more and more and more, it was a very memorable concert. I Bought their first CD “Rockhill” right there at the concert. Their music always excites me and makes me happy. I’m looking forward to the second CD that should be released in September.
Check them out: audio and video on their website or on YouTube:
Canaro’s “Poema” is everywhere these days, it was the warm-up song on the Benelux Tango Championship, it’s used in demo’s, it’s on every milonga, last night at La Tangueria DJ Tommaso even ended the milonga with it – exit “La Cumparsita”…
Since it’s one of my favorite songs I created a “Poema” playlist on YouTube and I made a page dedicated to “Poema” on this blog. It lists versions of “Poema” and the best videos.
If you know more versions of “Poema” or find more videos, please let me know so I can add them!
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