Listen:
Sopapa
una iguana y tres monedas
Frankenstein
Chamarrita del chaman

"A relevation: with elements from "mestizo"-rock, trips to the folk music of the Pampa, chamber-music strings, exotic instruments and even an explicit hommage to Berthold Brecht, the band from Buenos Aires strips off the elegant attitude of "Tango Argentino". Thrilling how the genre becomes the reflection of an absolutely contemporary and at the same time completely forgotten Argentina: by the way they discover the raw Afro-roots that underlie tango music, the Argentinian National brand mark, before the appearance of the big tango-orchestras." - Stefan Frantzen, Rolling Stone Germany

What the band has to say for themselves:
La Chicana was formed in the first months of 1996 with the clear intention of producing tango music with a rougher edge. They favour the "canyengue" rhythms and humorous melodrama of early tango as opposed to more solemn later flavours.

They truly believe that the essence of tango lies in its 1920's spirit of rebellion and spontaneity witch puts it ideologically closer to rock music than to the orchestral forms that popularised it in the world since the '40s. But they don't lack subtleties or precision ; they are solid musicians with just a taste for improvisation and noise. All they need is the chance to prove that tango music should thrive as popular music in the streets while it continues to dazzle from the orchestral stand.

They have performed in many tango-bars, night clubs and milongas of Buenos Aires never failing in the task of combining communication with soul ; danceability with pathos. Their first independent release spans from "guardia vieja" instrumentals to forgotten gems of the 30s' and their own songs.

Since then, they have taken advantage of numerous tours to the most dissimilar corners of the world (Spain, Germany, Brazil, Canada, England and Senegal) to add to their music elements of different cultures akin to tango. In their second release : "Un giro extraño" (A strange turn) we see a thorough deepening of the concepts of the first CD : Tango with camaristically refined arrangements, more of their own songs, rhythmic investigation into African and Brazilian milonga and insightful visits to non-tanguero argentine folklore.

Press info:
The 20th century has testified the birth and the expansion of one of the most emblematic styles of music history: tango. Tango is at home in the salons of Paris and the big theatres and the touristical shows in Buenos Aires, but it also lives on in the cafés of Buenos Aires where poets and intellectuals join, and in the dirty and rough neighbourhoods where low-budget delinquents, whores and street dogs hang around. La Chicana gives new life to the spirit of the tango of the suburbs that emerged with the inmigrants arriving at the port of Buenos Aires with nothing in their pockets than their own courage and the will to find a new sense for their lifes and an escape from the poverty of their homelands. Nowadays they don't arrive at the port anymore, but their struggle against human misery –omnipresent in La Chicana's original lyrics- lives on through their children and grandchildren. Everyday's circunstances have varied during the last 100 years; but the typically tango-characters and topics invented for La Chicana's short-story-songs continue being most up-to-date: disappointment, decadence, regret, misfortune, endless love, impossible affairs, nostalgy... La Chicana creates a new tango sound: far away from the grand orchestras they find themselves at home in an accoustic quintet and selected guest musicians. So their line up reminds more of a rockband than of a tango orchestra in its "typical" style. Their instrumentation exposes the "ethnical" background from the beginnings of tango; that melting-pot-identity that characterizes Buenos Aires more than anything else; that tango that started to develop its form at the beginning of the 20th century is a fusion of Italian, Polish, Spanish, German and African traditions and cultures, and nowadays is the main reference of whole Argentina all over the world. La Chicana communicate in a perfect way the two essential aspects of tango psychology: the passionate woman, at once sweet and rough, challenging and melancolic, and the tricky, viril, intellectual and ironical man. The "Premio Gardel"-award (something like the Argentinian "grammy") in the "New Tango" category shows that La Chicana does not only count on a huge audience, but also on the appreciation by professionals and press.

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