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Blue Tango concert seduced audience April 28 at Artisphere near DC

(by Marsha Dubrow, examiner.com)
Blue Tango, a sensual fusion of tango and blues seduced the audience April 28 at Artisphere just outside Washington. People were even dancing in the aisles.

Argentine Latin Grammy-nominee singer-songwriter-guitarist María Volonté, blues harmonica player-songwriter Kevin Carrel Footer, and Argentine folk-rock star Mavi Díaz entranced the Arlington, VA audience with their Blue Tango Tour — Que es?

It’s “two parts Buenos Aires tango, and a light helping of Mississippi Delta blues, where even misfortune changes to celebration,” explained the gorgeous Volonté. “It’s a bit Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen — and a dash of Jim Morrison if we’re feeling a bit wild.”

The audience went a bit wild for Volonté’s and Footer’s highly original, oh so evocative songs of love, including “9 Vidas” (Nine Lives, also a CD), “SF Tango” and “The Road is My Home”.

The melodies are as passionate as the lyrics — more poetry than mere lyrics: “wolves and angels fighting for your soul”; “I bled my dreams to death”; “Dressed with your kisses”… She intros that one “for those moments you are absolutely out of control. You know you’re going to hell, and you don’t care.”

Their music enticed men and women not to hell but to tango in the aisles, even before Volonté said, “Feel free to dance; It inspires us.”

She and Footer seemed to tango together at times, swaying together as he played the harmonica over her bare shoulder. He almost embodied the white serpent painted on the right shoulder of his black suit.

Volonté has won the Carlos Gardel Prize, Argentina’s top music award. She still uses the guitar she played on Buenos Aires street corners at the beginning of her multi-award-winning career.

Footer learned to play harmonica while hitchhiking cross-country from his home in Oakland, CA. Following the scent of tango, he lived in Buenos Aires for 15 years. He met Volonté at the city’s famed Cafe Tortoni, where she sang every Thursday night for many years. Footer is also a photographer and writer whose work was featured each Sunday for a decade in the “Buenos Aires Herald” newspaper.

Mavi Díaz, whose slogan is “rock the folk”, also won the Gardel Prize. She formed a girl band when she was only 19, and its CD of her songs sold 500,000 copies in less than a week. “So the baby knew what to do with the rest of her life,” Volonté said when introducing her for the second half of the show.

With a style more effervescent than sensual, Díaz introduced her songs like “If I Could”, about “love and wanting time to stop forever — fortunately, it doesn’t.” The next piece was its antithesis, “Knives”, about “the moment of love where he or she takes the remote and never pays you any attention anymore.”

Díaz quipped, “We’re such boring people, we talk just about love, love, never about politics or anything interesting like that.”

They sang, “The joy that you find here you borrow.” The audience certainly found joy here.

And audiences in Chicago can find similar joy when Volonté performs at Old Town School of Folk Music on May 16 and 17.

As Argentina’s greatest writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “The infinite tango takes me towards everything.”