This week, I’m featuring an orchestra you don’t often hear at milongas. Or rather, an orchestra whose tangos are well known, but whose milongas rarely reach the dance floor — the orchestra of Enrique Rodríguez, accompanied, as almost always, by vocalist Armando Moreno.
There’s a good reason why Rodríguez’s milongas aren’t commonly played. Throughout his career, he recorded only 17 milongas, and many of them were in the candombe style. Because of their distinctive rhythmic structure, dancers often find these pieces less comfortable to dance to. Once you exclude the milonga-candombe pieces, there’s little left to build a tanda from — so it’s no surprise that a Rodríguez milonga tanda is rarely played.
However, after discovering a high-quality version of one of these milongas, I decided it was finally time to create one.
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