Tango trio strides the boards at Finnriver

Posted 1/25/23

The passion of tango will lift Finnriver Farm & Cidery with the romance of “Canarissimo: Where Fats Waller Meets Francisco Canaro.”

Presented by Bertram Levy with his group, The …

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Tango trio strides the boards at Finnriver

Posted

The passion of tango will lift Finnriver Farm & Cidery with the romance of “Canarissimo: Where Fats Waller Meets Francisco Canaro.”

Presented by Bertram Levy with his group, The Stride Tango Trio, the night will feature vocalist Robin Kallsen with her uniquely 1920s voice.

“Her theatre is fantastic, too,” Levy said.

The group will fuse early tango with the vintage jazz rhythm of the 1920s for two hours starting at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 28.

In the late roar of the ‘20s, the Buenos Aires tango orchestra of Francisco Canaro was king. Between 1925 and 1927, Canaro brought his tango orchestra to Paris where Josephine Baker and the American jazz scene were all the rage. Canaro was profoundly influenced and even formed his own jazz band.

Levy heard Canaro’s subsequent recordings reflecting the rhythm of the 1920s stride piano movement, as exemplified by Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Willie “The Lion” Smith, and decided to make his own fresh, Northern Hemispheric re-imagination of Canaro’s music in the style of the stride.

While Levy is a founder of Fiddle Tunes renowned for his concertina and banjo playing, he came to the tango through the bandoneon, a type of concertina resembling an accordion, but far more difficult.

“I started studying on my own and I did that for 14 years, and then I realized I had a horrible teacher, myself,” Levy said.

He had to learn Spanish to study under a teacher he found in Buenos Aires, Argentina while living there for years,  returning regularly to his home in Port Townsend.

His decades of diligence at the instrument will be accompanied by Ryan Hoffman on guitar and Jonathan Doyle on clarinet.

Levy also promised there will be dancers from the community, possibly including his wife Bobbie Butler, but he keeps his own feet off the dance floor.

“I have studied it, but I’m a musician,” Levy said of the dance. “I took lessons in Buenos Aires — my wife’s a very good dancer — I came back and thought I’d surprise her. And people in the dance community said, ‘Don’t do that to Bobbie.’ They said, ‘Don’t slow her down.’ But you have to understand the dance in order to be able to play.”

While Levy previously performed a three-night scripted spectacular with the group including storytelling, jokes, and asides at Key City Public Theatre, he mentioned the Finnriver performance will be stripped down to the flesh and blood of the music itself.

There is a $3 to $5 cover charge collected 30 minutes before the music starts.