Read more about Julio De Caro
Uncorrected translation by Google translate
In the wake of innovators such as Roberto Firpo and Eduardo Arolas, violinist Julio De Caro established a style in the second decade of the 20th century that would extend the reach of tango. This, like no other, gave the tango an impulse, Julio brought the arrangement into the tango. With Carlos Gardel on the vocal field and Julio De Caro on the instrumental field, two stakes were driven and one speaks of the period before and after.
De Caro maintained the essence of the tango that originated in the slums, courageous and playful, but he mixed it with a sentimental and melancholic expressiveness. His academic training allowed him to capture his message in a polished musical language of unspeakable seduction.
His sextet recordings, sometimes lazy, sometimes clear, bring us the sounds of watercolors of Buenos Aires with low houses, gray facades, streets with trees, flowering gardens, paving stones and old trams. The concept can clearly be heard in Boedo and Tierra querida, two of his tangos.
His brother Francisco, the pianist, contributed greatly to the sextet as a composer of lyrical-romantic tangos such as Flores negras and Loca bohemia. New for the time, the group switched with ease between the passion in Francisco’s tangos and Julio’s paintings of urban landscapes and characters.
Julio was born in Buenos Aires in a large house on Piedad Street in the Balvanera neighborhood, the second of twelve children in a family of Italian descent. His father, former director of the Teatro della’Scala de Milano, decided that Julio would play the piano and Francisco the violin, but they switched instruments and devoted themselves to the tango. This caused a family rift that never resolved itself.
In 1923 he joined Cobián’s sextet (Nostalgias). With Cobián’s departure to the United States, De Caro formed his sextet with, among others, the now famous bandoneonist Pedro Maffia. Thanks to the efforts of a violinist more famous for his conception than his technique, the tango entered a new era.
He recorded his first records for Victor in 1924, such as Todo corazón. Another 420 works followed in the 1930s. In 1933, De Caro entered a phase of experimenting with orchestras with amplifiers and new timbres (winds, percussion), but which ultimately obscured the contours of the message.
He happily returned to his own sources, but he fell into anachronism. Until his retirement he was the guardian of the ‘gems of tango’