TRANSCRIPT ~ EPISODE 10

EPISODE 10: Music for dancing, with Craig Einhorn

Producer/Host: Liz Sabatiuk | Music: “Milonguea del Ayer” composed by Abel Fleury and arranged and recorded by Craig Einhorn; “Spetsai Tango” composed by Georges Moustaki and arranged and recorded by Craig Einhorn; improvisations on classical guitar and djembe by Craig Einhorn | Image Credit: Unknown

[MUSIC - MILONGUEA DEL AYER]

LIZ ID INTRO:
I'm Liz Sabatiuk and this is Humans of Tango, where we explore what tango has to teach through the experiences of those who dance it.

LIZ SCRIPT:
You may or may not have heard of Craig Einhorn, but if you dance tango, you've probably heard this song.

CRAIG:
Abel Fleury is the composer. I downloaded the sheet music from the Internet. The particular sheet music that I found for free on the Internet was from some other country, possibly Russia, and they spelled "Milongueo del Ayer" "Milongue del Ayer." I instinctively thought that another letter needed to be on the end of there, and I put an "a" instead of an "o." I've been told by some Argentines that that title has a meaning also, that it's not bad, but it's not the title that the composer gave it. In addition, I spoke to an expert on the music of Abel Fleury, and he told me that there are two titles that he gave it. So he had sheet music written by hand that said simply "Milonga del Ayer," and then his printed sheet music said "Milongueo del Ayer," and then my version is "Milonguea del Ayer."

LIZ SCRIPT:
I first heard "Milonguea del Ayer" while prowling YouTube for tango videos in early 2015. The performance I found of legendary maestros Mariano Chicho Frúmboli and Juana Sepulveda remains my favorite tango video of all time and immediately inspired me to buy Craig’s Choros album. YouTube has at least 8 videos of Chicho and Juana performing to "Milonguea del Ayer," with a total of more than 3 million views between them. Craig says he’s found more than a hundred videos on YouTube of people all over the world performing to the track. With the wisdom of hindsight, he has some ideas about what makes "Milonguea del Ayer" so popular with dancers, starting with his experience playing live music for modern dance classes while he was in college and graduate school.

[CLASSICAL GUITAR MUSIC]

CRAIG:
I was studying classical guitar and I got involved with accompanying dance classes. I tried to do that on the classical guitar for modern dance classes and I found very quickly that the classical guitar wasn't really a good instrument for 30 people in a room
dancing. So I switched to percussion.

[DJEMBE DRUM MUSIC]

And I started playing any drums I could find, hand drums, and sometimes drum set. During those years, I developed a more keen sense of the connection between music and movement, music and dance. And I was really fortunate to develop that connection.

And when I recorded "Milonguea del Ayer," I decided to add other instruments to it. It was written for solo guitar. One of the instruments I added is- I have a drum right here, this is a djembe from West Africa. I had already played a lot of djembe in those dance classes. And so when you hear that djembe on that recording, you're hearing me. I'm playing everything.

The other thing is I met an African man from Senegal who was here in Eugene, Oregon. I don't know how he got here, where he was going, but at the university, he was at a little fair and he was selling things and one of the things he was selling was a little metal scraper that I have over there on the other side of the room, that looks like a tin can that somebody poked bumps into it. And I use that scraper on "Milonguea del Ayer" and if you listen closely, you'll hear these really, very striking scrapes. It's not like one of those wooden ones you get in Mexico. It's like, you know, [MAKES SOUND] it's very bright.

LIZ: I can't wait to listen to that.

[MUSIC]

CRAIG: And then the other thing that's really striking, well, the rhythmic thing that was included in "Milonguea del Ayer" was the hand claps, or what they call in Spanish, las palmas. And so, that idea I can't take credit for. My friend Rebecca Oswald was helping me with that album when I was recording it back in 2004. And she came up with this polyrhythm. So the hand claps are in a totally different meter.

[MUSIC]

LIZ: So you feel like all of those different instruments and the development of your percussion skills really added to that recording.

CRAIG: You know, I'm not a great percussionist. And I'm really, I wouldn't say percussion skills, I would say more, it's the connection between dance and music. I had already been dancing tango. I had tried taking modern dance and jazz dance, even though as a musician, a lot of musicians feel very uncomfortable dancing to anything. But I was kind of crazy and I took a modern class, and I took a jazz dance class. And I fumbled through, especially the jazz dance class - boy, it's a lot harder than it looks. But when it came to tango, at least I felt like, okay, this is a walking dance. And I felt like I was able to do something. I mean, I don't have any fantasies that I'm a professional dancer. But I felt like, okay, I can dance and go to social dancing and, you know, enjoy that.

When you dance with anyone, as you know as a dancer, within three seconds, you know if this person feels the music or not. And or if they feel it the same way that you do. And so you're always kind of craving this magical connection. Sometimes they don't- you can dance with someone from Japan who doesn't even speak your language or from China or from anywhere, Germany, and they don't speak your language and you dance with them and all of a sudden, like, "Oh my gosh, where have you been all my life?" [It's such] a wonderful dance. And I think rhythm and understanding music has a lot to do with that.

Tangos for dancing are at 60 on the metronome, which is like seconds on a clock. And if you stray even slightly faster or slightly below that, it doesn't feel good to dance tango. Like, if you go up to 63 on the metronome, or 57 on the metronome, you can feel that in your body. It's, it's, it's uncomfortable to dance. But milonga is different. Milonga, people expect milongas to be fast. And there's, I think a lot of, a lot of people believe that milongas are always supposed to be fast, but that's not true.
And you can find some recorded milongas that are really slow. And "Milonga del Ayer" seems to be definitely on the slow side.
I felt embarrassed after I listened back to the recording when I first finished it. I thought, I recorded this too slow, what did I do?
And- but it turned out to be a good thing.

[MUSIC]

My friend Rebecca Oswald was helping me with the recording process - we arranged it together the piece, really. And one night I was really tired and I went to sleep and she was- stayed up, like, really late, like, till five in the morning or something, editing. And she had decided that "Milonga del Ayer" would be better if she put in a click track and then moved every single note exactly onto the click track.

[LIZ ASIDE] A click track, in case anyone else wasn't familiar with the term, is an automated beat musicians sometimes use to help them keep time.

CRAIG: And I use a click track with a lot of my recording. I'm a singer-songwriter also, and a lot of my straightforward folky or rock songs have lyrics and they have a real nice groove, and I use a click track. But for "Milonguea del Ayer" I just played it without any click track, I just played it like I was performing. And the tempo slows down in places. And so she was trying to fix that. And in the morning she was very excited, she was like, "you'll never believe what I did last night - you've got to hear this."
And she played it for me and she could read my face really quickly that I was not pleased. It was like all the soul was sucked out of the piece completely. And I said, "Oh, Rebecca, I don't like it at all. Can you put it back the way it was?" And she was like, "I worked on it until late into the night." She's like, "all right, I'll put it back the way it was."

If I had let her keep it the way she had, you know, edited it, I don't think- it definitely would not be the hit that it is. I mean it was, all the feeling, all that, that natural stuff - that imperfection, maybe, you know, that- all the feeling was gone. And she put it back in there and, and then years later now we know what happened.

LIZ: Did she like how it sounded at the time? Or was she just like, I did it, I'm going to stick with it? [LAUGHS]

CRAIG: I think she liked how it sounded. I think- she seems to be a little bit more sophisticated in terms of- both of us have
classical music educations, but my childhood music education consisted of playing Bob Dylan songs and Rolling Stone songs and other rock songs with my friends and hanging out in a park. It wasn't until I was in college when I discovered classical guitar and classical music. So I think she was a little bit more rigid wanting it to be perfect timing and... But in the end, I'm sure she realized, oh yeah, the groove was more important than being perfect with the timing.

Before I recorded it, when I had only been dancing for a year or two, I was down at the Tango Center in downtown Eugene.

[LIZ ASIDE] That's Eugene, Oregon, where Craig lives.

CRAIG: And there was a woman, a wonderful dance teacher named Elizabeth Wartluff. She now lives in Portland, she teaches tango there. And so I was playing "Milonguea del Ayer" at a, I think it was just a practica or something. And she came over to me, she said, "Craig," she said, "that's really wonderful." And she didn't mean the song, she meant the way I was playing it. And I didn't really think much of it. I said, "Oh, I'm glad you like it." I mean, it was, I had just learned it and- but there was something about the way I was playing it that she liked. And it wasn't for maybe another year or two, till I started recording it and adding the other instruments, but that was just sort of a glimpse of what- you know, that something was good about my way of playing that piece.

And then, so then I recorded it, released the CD. And then a dance teacher from San Francisco was here, Homer Ladas. And I gave Homer a CD, took it to San Francisco, and he liked it. Somehow, I think he took it to Europe when he was teaching there or something. And within another year, a woman that I knew here in Eugene was studying in Italy, in Napoli, Italy. And she emails me, she says, "Craig, I went to a milonga last night in Napoli, and they played your 'Milonga del Ayer.'" After that, I started getting messages on Facebook and other places from Russia and Venezuela and Hawaii and, uh, Ukraine and Romania. It's just amazing... Japan.

When you go to milongas, they tend by the end of, by 1960, they won't accept any more music into the repertory of what's in the computers and ready to be played. That's why it's sort of a miracle that my song gets played in so many places. But I'm just, I'm thankful that somehow my song has sort of gotten into the playlists where a lot of tango won't be accepted.

[MUSIC]

Because of the success of "Milonguea del Ayer," people have labeled me as a tango musician, and that's- I'm more of a tango dancer than a tango musician. I was trained as a classical guitarist, so I look for nice arrangements, something written out, where I can read 99% of the notes and I can add something to it, but in Argentina, the guitarists who play tango seem to be able to just think of any old tango and play so well, just create an arrangement, the way maybe a jazz guitarist in the United States would create a jazz song just by sitting and thinking about it. And it wouldn't be the same - every time they played, it would be a little different. Not being Argentine, and also not being trained in that improvisatory way, especially in tango specifically, I have a really hard time keeping up and I've been to jam sessions in Argentina where I was completely useless. So- and I'm not exaggerating. So to be known as this guy who recorded a milonga that people love all over the world, I'm flattered. And maybe it's because I have a certain approach to recording - I consider myself a recording artist - but I'm definitely not as talented as a guitarist specifically as some of the great Argentine tango guitar players.

LIZ SCRIPT:
I confessed to Craig that I don’t think I’ve ever actually encountered “Milonguea del Ayer” while social dancing. I also shared that when I finally had a chance to dance to the song myself while practicing with a friend, I felt like I couldn’t do it justice. I know it so well from listening on my own – and watching and re-watching performance videos of Chicho and Juana… I guess it was frustrating not to be able to represent the music’s intricacies with the mastery I admire so much. Craig had some useful perspective on this topic.

CRAIG:
I have a rule in my life. I don't remember who told me this, but the rule is if someone sings, don't ever stop them and don't ever criticize them - especially children. And so this is the way I feel about dancing to my music. I don't care what you do. I don't care how bad anyone thinks the dance is or how good anyone thinks the dance is. I'm honored that my music inspires anyone to dance. You know, I used to tell people this about guitar playing, they'd say, doesn't it bother you that all these guitar players are so bad? And I said, "If everyone was great, then how would you know that they were great?" So in all art forms, you've got to have all different levels. And then you recognize the masters of the art form, and you can really appreciate them.

LIZ: Totally. Yeah, that actually touches on something I'm thinking about a lot in terms of art, like art for art's sake, and I don't know how much is a US thing because of the culture of competition and how much it's just human nature, but I do think there's a tendency to feel like you need to be really good at something to do it at all. Like, that's not valid to just do it because you want to or it feels good or something. You have to, you have to either be good or you don't do it. And it's hard to get good if you're too afraid to do things, right?

CRAIG: Yeah, you know, when I've danced at at milongas, there are people who sometimes complain about the beginners or they don't want to dance with beginners. But the way that a dance community thrives is when you embrace the beginners, literally- physically, emotionally and physically embrace the beginners, you know, to not dance with them is to not augment your dance community.

[MUSIC - SPETSAI TANGO]

CRAIG:
So in my early 30s, I found myself single and was looking for social activities. I went to a square dance here in Eugene. At the end of the evening, a woman asked the band if she could use the microphone, and she announced that she's a tango teacher.
And she said she was giving classes in a private home and if anyone was interested to come get a flyer from her. So I thought, hmm, tango, I don't know much about tango and it's another social activity, so I went and took a flyer. And I took three classes. I didn't really like it that much, but I did find out that there was a tango Center in Eugene, Oregon, and also that there was a woman teaching classes at the University of Oregon for the dance department. And so I signed up for the classes at the university.

And this woman, her name was Vicky Ayers, was very knowledgeable, had visited Buenos Aires many times. And she had just a thorough knowledge of the music and techniques and everything and really gave a wonderful introductory class. And so I went- that was my beginnings in the class and then later going to the Tango Center in Eugene, which at that time was the largest tango center in the whole United States. They didn't have the largest number of people dancing, but they did have the largest tango club in the whole United States. It was a big-

LIZ: Wait, so, like, the space was the biggest, physical space.

CRAIG: The space was enormous. The space was enormous. Yeah, it was a big, huge building that used to be a place where farmers sold vegetables and fruit in Eugene when it was raining. And that Tango Center no longer exists. There's not much going on here in tango right now because of the pandemic, I think - and it is a smaller population. One of my goals is to start teaching. I've taught the dance, uh, quite a few times, and one of my goals is to start creating my own tango community here in Eugene from scratch, just teach people who've never danced tango and just start getting together and create a milonga. And I have an old friend who I ran into a few weeks ago, and she was in China for years and she's back in Eugene, and she's gonna do it with me, we're gonna do it.

I was married to an Argentine woman for almost 10 years, and I went there in 2008 because some of the local dancers here in Eugene told me that, um, you know, if you went there, that you could learn a lot about the dance. And I was incredulous. I thought, "Well, I'm learning tango here in Eugene. What could be better about Buenos Aires?" But I was wrong, I was wrong. It's really something, learning from the Argentines. Over a 10-year period, I was there for six years. I went back and forth.

LIZ: So did you meet your wife right away? Did you meet your wife through tango, your ex-wife?

CRAIG: I did meet her, yeah. I went to a milonga on New Year's Eve of 2009, and we danced together and hit it off and
we dated for three months my first time there. And I really feel a lot of empathy for foreigners who go into any country not speaking the language. I spoke a little bit of Spanish. I thought that I spoke well, actually, but I didn't speak nearly as well as I thought I did. And it was a struggle for me even once I spoke the language and even once I was married to an Argentine and even once I had friends there. I'm not a city person. Even though I grew up just outside New York City, I don't like so much energy, and I feel a little bit insignificant when there's so many people around you all the time.

My girlfriend and I both go to bed really early at night. We go to bed at 10 every single night, no matter what. And that was...

LIZ: Are you going to start like a daytime tango community then?

CRAIG: Yeah, absolutely. Like, in Buenos Aires, the only people that dance while the sun is still up are the people
in their 80s or late 70s, 80s, and 90s. And those are the kind of milongas I like, because- I assimilated my whole life into Argentine culture. I really- I speak Spanish like an Argentine. I learned about their food and I took many tango and milonga lessons, but I couldn't stay up late. That's a cultural thing that I couldn't assimilate. It makes me feel bad to stay up until three or four in the morning and it takes me a week to recover. But now that I'm in the States, I mean, Eugene turns into a ghost town at about 11 at night. And so the milongas usually end here by 11, so it's a good place to be.

[MUSIC]

CRAIG:
About 15 or more years ago, I was traveling through Europe, through France, Spain, and Portugal and- with a backpack and my guitar. And I met some people there and there's a woman from France who I became friendly with. A couple of years later, when I was back in the States, she said, you know, I really think you'll like this album and she sent me this whole album. And specifically, she told me to listen to this one song called "Spetsai." And "Spetsai" is a Greek melody composed by Georges Moustaki, who was a very, very popular musician in France in the 60s, maybe in the 70s too. He was born in Greece, raised in Egypt, and spent the rest of his life in France. When he was a young man, I think he wrote a song that was recorded and sung by Edith Piaf.

[LIZ ASIDE] It’s called “Milord” and I’m SURE you’ve heard it, but if the name doesn’t ring a bell you can listen through a link in the show notes.

CRAIG: And he actually dated her when he was young and she was a lot older. Um, but at some point in his life, he recorded this "Spetsai Tango" and it wasn't published. But this group of friends of his, after he passed away, recorded a bunch of songs of his and ended with "Spetsai Tango"- I'm sorry, with just "Spetsai," I call it "Spetsai Tango." So then I took this Greek melody and I played all the instruments and arranged it as a tango. And then I asked my friend Joe Powers, who is a just fabulous tango harmonica player, to play on it. And so he came over and he played the melody with me and then he improvised. And it came out pretty, I think, really well. So, it's exciting. It's exciting. And it's- you know, when you try to make a hit, it, it gives me a lot of respect for people who create music that just becomes hits, like the Beatles. How many hits do they have? It's unbelievable. And I'm trying to get another one. And I thought the "Spetsai Tango" would have taken off by now - it's been out for about a year. But I'll give it some time. Maybe it will.

I read an article yesterday of a man who's very knowledgeable in the music business and he thinks that this total availability of all music is going to start reversing itself. And in order to get that kind of access, we're going to have to start paying. Like, right now, you go on YouTube and you can listen to pretty much anything that exists. I mean, everything old is out there for free and new stuff is being uploaded and distributed on a daily basis. And that may not be that way forever. We'll see.

Well, one thing is for sure is that artists are not getting enough of a piece of the action with all of this streaming. It's worse for musicians in the recording industry than it has ever been. So, I used to sell CDs and I would, you know, do pretty well with them. They'd add a significant part of my income every year. And it was okay a little bit with MP3s - I was still making a very small amount of money. And now with streaming, it's- I have 22,000 streams on Spotify alone per month. But the money that comes in from that is probably less than a dollar a month. But I mean, if this was 30 years ago and the same amount of people were listening and choosing my music and buying it, it would mean quite a lot of money. But also it probably wouldn't be in Russia and in Romania and in the Ukraine and everywhere else that it has shown up. So, I didn't get into music to make money, but it is a business - I mean, you have to survive too. So it's always a balance there between selling yourself out and being an artist. I've always tried to balance that somehow. But I try to, I try to keep the attitude that you have to be true to yourself and just, you can't please everybody. You have to just be creative and do something interesting and hope that there's somebody out there that likes it.

LIZ SCRIPT:
Here’s to taking inspiration wherever we find it and appreciating mastery and imperfection. Thank you Craig for sharing your story and your music, including the recordings of "Milonguea del Ayer" and "Spetsai Tango" that accompany this episode.

[MUSIC]