Launching TANGO NOTES

How it all started

What would become TANGO NOTES started as far back as 2013! I had recently begun to DJ, and I was working my way through my tango library trying to figure out the correct information about each song: which orchestra, which recording year, which singer... It wasn’t easy! Many tangos had been recorded lots of times, by several orchestras. Sometimes, a tango would even be recorded several times by the same orchestra, sometimes with different singer every time. The whole thing was a hot mess - so much information was missing. YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify were helpful only to a certain extent, but important information was often (still is) either left out or simply wrong.

I was in the process of organising all my Di Sarli recordings when my boyfriend came up with the idea. "We should have a timeline of all the singers", my bf said. "We could print it out and tape it to the fridge". I found this such a brilliant idea that I spent the same weekend designing a timeline in Photoshop Elements.

Fast forward a few years. I had discovered data visualisation and was learning to make graphs with code and data. My bf (who apparently is the one with the brightest ideas in this household) said: "You can build your Di Sarli timeline with code and the discography in a table." So I did, and after a while, the idea of a whole tango music website started growing. After many hours of poring over discographies and design and code, it's time to publish!

TANGO NOTES is not finished yet - it never will be. There will always be something more to add: new orchestras, new articles, new music visuals... The discographies certainly need more work. But I've decided there's enough content to make TANGO NOTES public now. I hope you like it and want to follow along as I add more content!

Most of all, I hope TANGO NOTES can make the tango orchestra field easier to enter and easier to navigate for everybody who dances Argentine tango. ❤️

Oslo, October 2020