Tango Renovator
Tango is the vertical expression of a horizontal craving, was how author and playwright George Bernard Shaw put it. Enrique Santos Discépolo, a legendary tango performer, sees it in a different light: “Tango is a sad thought that can be danced.” For Lusi Borda, however, tango is “culture” and never “something banal.” Which is why he has dedicated his life to it, as any number of family members have also done. His mother and two uncles sang in a traditional music group, and the magazine “Rolling Stone” once acclaimed Luis Borda’s sister Lidia as the best tango singer of our times. Therefore it’s not all that surprising that Luis, even as a young boy, started beating the large drum, called a "bombo". His mother initially urged him to take up classical guitar, which he did. As a teenager, however, he fell under the spell of Jimmy Hendrix and founded the rock band “Ave Rock”.
Soon though he joined a quintet headed by the bandoneon player Rodolfo Mederos – and discovered his love of tango. He took up studies in harmony and the composition at the music academy in Buenos Aires and, when he was 27, put together his first band, at first as a small trio, which later grew to a quintet. The military dictatorship at the time destroyed a number of Barda’s dreams, but didn’t hold him back from developing his own musical style and playing with great musicians in his field, including León Gieco, Litto Nebbia and Juan Falú. Today, Borda is considered to be the rejuvenator of tango, a representative of “tango nuevo”, which has little to do with the raw subculture of the Rio de la Plata or bombastic exoticism.
Borda loves the music of other cultures: he even finds Bavarian folk music “wonderful”. And although he hasn’t yet integrated it into his compositions, flamenco, touches of fado, African rhythms and even rock and jazz elements certainly have in the meantime. Luis Borda has lived in Munich for many years now. When he’s not performing, he composes and arranges, or writes soundtracks for documentary films like “Der letzte Applaus (The Last Applause),” which he recently presented. The film describes the moving story of a group of elderly tango singers from Buenos Aires and their struggle to survive during Argentina’s worst economic crisis. For decades they were the stars at the famous tango bar “Bar El Chino”. In 2001 the bar owner died under mysterious circumstances and the bar went bankrupt. Luis Borda, conversely, is already completely booked out for the year.
