Orquesta Típica Select

Historical background

The Orquesta Típica Select was not an orchestra in the ordinary sense: it was the name under which a group of Argentine musicians recorded, for the space of a season, in the United States. In mid-1920 they were sent to travel; once there, a second violin and a double bass were added to the line-up to cut records at the Camden studios, in New Jersey, under that name. In three months they recorded fifty titles and were paid five thousand dollars, La historia del tango : la Guardia Vieja reports.

Benedetti ties these sessions to the Tito-Fresedo-Cobián trio, which had already recorded for the Tele-Phone label, and sees in them more than an American parenthesis. In them one perceives, he writes, the break with earlier forms and the irreversible character of the stylistic change then under way: these 1920 recordings place whoever signs them on the side of the movement that follows the Guardia Vieja rather than with the musicians who embodied it. The name served that occasion alone, and that is what gives this body of recordings its unity: a single year, a single address, a single recording campaign.

Source: Pesce, Del Priore and Byron, La historia del tango : la Guardia Vieja, 1977; Benedetti, Nueva historia del tango : de los orígenes al siglo XXI, 2015.