Quinteto Don Pancho

Historical background

The Quinteto Don Pancho was an offshoot of Francisco Canaro's orchestra, born of a fashion. In 1936, taking advantage of the renewed popularity of the guardia vieja repertoire, Roberto Firpo founded a quartet to play in the old style. Its success was plain, and Firpo did not give up his orchestra for it: he ran both formats at once. Seeing this, Michael Lavocah reports, Canaro founded his own in 1937, the Quinteto Don Pancho. Benedetti places such ensembles among the small line-ups drawn from a larger orchestra, cheap to assemble because they demanded neither heavy investment nor high costs, and which carried on into the nineteen-forties.

From the end of 1940 the quintet took the name Quinteto Pirincho. Lavocah gives the origin: the pirincho is a South American bird with an orange crest, and at the birth of Francisco Canaro, who had a tuft of hair on his head, the midwife is said to have exclaimed that he looked like a pirincho. That change of name explains why the recorded trace of the Quinteto Don Pancho stops there: the ensemble did not disappear, it changed its name, and it is under the second that it went on with its career.

Source: Michael Lavocah, Tango Stories: Musical Secrets; Benedetti, Nueva historia del tango : de los orígenes al siglo XXI, 2015.