Horacio Salgán

Historical background

Born Horacio Adolfo Salgán on 15 June 1916 near Buenos Aires' Mercado del Abasto, he studied piano from age six and, like many tango musicians of his generation, earned his first wages providing live music for silent films. Hired by Radio Belgrano at eighteen, he was heard and signed at twenty by Roberto Firpo, joining both his orchestra and the Cuarteto de la Guardia Vieja. In 1944 he formed his first orchestra - "forming it is tied to composing," he later said, "I started writing because I wanted to make tango a certain way" - which a Le Monde critic praised, for the years 1944 to 1957, for widening tango's traditional form and deepening its rhythmic sense. Yet Radio El Mundo's own artistic director judged that the orchestra was strange and the singer impossible: this first band, through which singers Edmundo Rivero and later Roberto Goyeneche passed, never cut a single record before disbanding in 1947.

Back at the head of a new group in 1950 and relaunched in 1957, Salgán also weathered tango's lean years as a café pianist, pairing with Ciriaco Ortiz and, at the Jamaica confitería, with guitarist Ubaldo De Lío. That partnership led, through a mutual friend, to the 1960 founding of the Quinteto Real with bandoneonist Pedro Laurenz - found without an orchestra at the Richmond confitería - under the sponsorship of Aníbal Troilo, launching a decade of triumphant tours across Japan and Europe. Salgán composed some of the most enduringly played tangos in the repertoire, including "A fuego lento" and "Don Agustín Bardi," and a waltz, "Motivo de vals," born from a counter-melody jotted down during an arrangement, which lyricist Carlos Bahr immediately set to words. Described by his biographer as warm and unaffected, with a luminous sense of humour, Horacio Salgán died on 19 August 2016.

Source: Sonia Ursini, "Horacio Salgan," Todotango.com, https://www.todotango.com/creadores/biografia/1047/Horacio-Salgan/.