Review
Genre and Mood
Gotan Project’s Santa María (del Buen Ayre) is tango rebuilt for the electronic age: downtempo beats under an Argentine form, with the dub studio in the background. The mood is melancholic, romantic and elegant, the qualities the BBC heard the group exploring in tango, “its melancholy moods and romance”, on a record it called “achingly stylish”.
Song Summary
The title is the first name of Buenos Aires. Pedro de Mendoza’s expedition founded the city on 2 February 1536 as Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre, Our Lady Saint Mary of the Fair Winds. The track is the fifth of ten on the trio’s debut album La Revancha del Tango, 5:57 long and written by all three members. It came out first, in April 2001, on a 10-inch single with their cover of Frank Zappa’s Chunga’s Revenge.
Musical Breakdown
No source we found describes this track passage by passage or gives its times, so this part says only what the sources say.
The Tempo
The 10-inch’s notes put this side at 118 beats per minute, a steady dance pulse.
The Album’s Palette
The album credits ten players without naming who plays on which track, among them Nini Flores on bandoneon, Gustavo Beytelmann on piano and Line Kruse on violin. Across the record the BBC’s Chris Moss heard acoustic guitar, piano, double bass and bandoneon “overlaid with dub treatments, screeching violins, fast trancey beats and speech samples”.
The Album Version
The video here is the band’s own upload of the album version; their shorter official video is a different edit.
Concepts in Focus
dub began in Jamaica as a way of remixing a record in the studio, stripping it back and treating what is left with echo and reverb. Gotan Project bring that thinking to tango: Philippe Cohen Solal is credited with “dub FX” on the album, and the 10-inch was filed under dub and downtempo.
The track’s widest audience came through soundtrack placements: The Bourne Identity (2002), Shall We Dance? (2004), where it carries the main dance sequence with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, and Knight and Day (2010). Moss had written that the album works “like a soundtrack, you keep wondering what the film might look like”; film-makers answered.
Its remix life began early: XL’s 2002 single added Tom Middleton’s Cosmos Mix, more than eight minutes long.
Artistic Context
Gotan Project, based in Paris, formed in 1999: the Argentine Eduardo Makaroff, the French Philippe Cohen Solal and the Swiss Christoph H. Müller. Their name reverses the syllables of “tango”, a game of Lunfardo, the argot of the Río de la Plata. La Revancha del Tango came out on 22 October 2001 on XL Recordings and ¡Ya Basta!. Five years later came Lunático and Gotan Project – La Vigüela.
Impact and Reception
The BBC found the album “trippy, slickly-executed and utterly modern”, if “a bit too harmless” for tango conservatives. The record entered 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and this track went on into the cinema. Listen to it as the soundtrack of a film you have not seen yet.
