Edgardo Donato

Historical background

Unlike Enrique Rodríguez's orquesta característica, Edgardo Donato's band remained a true orquesta típica, but one of the most openly cheerful and childlike in tango, driven by the playful pizzicato of its violins (Donato's own instrument) and, above all, by a piano accordion — rather than a fifth bandoneon — entrusted from 1934 to 13-year-old prodigy Osvaldo "Bertolín" Bertone. When Astor Piazzolla later said the bandoneon was made for sadness and the accordion for joy, that is exactly the choice Donato had already made back in the 1930s.

His best years (1932-1942) begin before the 1935 D'Arienzo revolution and outlast it, making him, in Lavocah's words, a bridge between the guardia vieja and modern tango. The decline, triggered by Bertolín's 1942 departure to form a jazz group and completed by a love-triangle quarrel that led Donato to fire all three of his singers, coincided with the general slowdown of sung tango from 1942 onward — a shift his light, rhythmic style never really managed to adapt to.

Source: Michael Lavocah, Tango Masters: Tango Stories, Musical Secrets, chapitre 11 « Edgardo Donato: get happy ».