Julio de Caro

Historical background

Born into a wealthy family where music mattered greatly - his father had taught at Milan's La Scala conservatoire before opening a music shop and school in Buenos Aires - Julio De Caro was meant, in his father's plans, to become a doctor or at least first violin in a symphony orchestra. Yet at only nine, during a visit from bandleader Vicente Greco, who had come to play a tango written for the official visit of the Spanish Infanta Isabella, Julio secretly grabbed his violin to play his own tango: he was punished with eight days of bread and water, but Greco left convinced the boy would go far, whatever his father had planned. At seventeen, pushed onto the stage by friends while Roberto Firpo was performing at the Palais de Glace, he played to such applause that Eduardo Arolas, in the audience, tried in vain to recruit him; when De Caro joined Ricardo Brignolo's group at eighteen anyway, his father threw him out of the house, and his brother Francisco left with him.

It was actually Francisco who put the sextet together in December 1923 for a run of high-society parties, bringing in Julio and Emilio on violin, Pedro Maffia and Luis Petrucelli on bandoneón, and bassist Leopoldo Thompson - with Pedro Laurenz soon replacing Petrucelli. Embraced by high society (the orchestra even played for the Prince of Wales in 1925), the group adopted that same year the famous "cornet violin," a horned Stroh violin given - and billed - to De Caro by the president of the Victor record company, which he used throughout the following decade. On Flores negras (1927), composed by Francisco, the sextet's harmonic richness is fully audible. Overtaken by the D'Arienzo wave in the 1930s, De Caro stopped recording for nearly five years before returning to the studio in 1949 for a final run of sides, including a 1952 recording of Flores negras with a new warmth - the echo, Lavocah suggests, of what Pugliese had by then taught him about his own music.

Source: Michael Lavocah, Tango Masters: Tango Stories, Musical Secrets, chapter 20 "Julio De Caro: tango is music".