Carlos Di Sarli

Historical background

Carlos Di Sarli is the orchestra that pushed melody furthest of all, while keeping a steady walking beat that still makes it one of the favourite orchestras for salon-style dancers today. Everything runs through the violins: they carry both the staccato rhythm and the melody, while the bandoneons fade almost to inaudibility — the true Di Sarli signature, recognisable both on his earliest, surprisingly rhythmic sides (sometimes mistaken for D'Arienzo) and on his final tape recordings of 1954-1958, all melody.

Formed at the end of 1938 after a spell as one of Fresedo's pianists, the orchestra stayed remarkably consistent for dancing across its entire career, from the first 1939 sides with singer Roberto Rufino — then just 17, too young to legally enter the cabarets where the band played — through to singer Jorge Durán (1945-1947). Blinded in one eye by an accident with his father's gun at 13, Di Sarli never wrote down his piano parts, and is said to have turned the keyboard away from view to stop people copying his style; when he died in 1960, Troilo reportedly said of him: "El ciego se llevó el secreto a la tumba" (the blind man took his secret to the grave).

Source: Michael Lavocah, Tango Masters: Tango Stories, Musical Secrets, chapitre 4 « Carlos Di Sarli: doing it with strings ».