short notes on music, national identity

A few times I have walked through the center back home at night.  It is quite a safe walk, and no more than 2 km, I would guess less.  I work most of the day in Centro, but at night it is a completely different place.  Sometimes I find that I have bought into the collective paranoia, in fact I know it.  Sometimes, at night I follow no order or plan with how I navigate the blocks, but create my own labyrinth through the downtown streets.  It is not a particularly attractive part of Buenos Aires, but it is the center of mania, anxiety and frustration during the workday.  At night it is desolate.  With the exception of more active streets with a lot of bars and restaurants, there are few people on the s  and it is dark.  Many of the few people in Centro in the night hours are tourists going to overpriced tango shows that are choreographed demonstrations of acrobatic motion; all flare and for show, missing something genuine and sensual about the dance in its more "real" form.  For me, the "real" tango is what I see when I cross Plaza Dorrego near my house and see elderly couples, young couples, old and young dancing together, displaying a an elegant grace and understated passion that, for me, has the potential to elicit sincere emotion.  This is an example of tango in its truest form-improvisation.  Tango has steps that can are complicated, but they are not, at least not in the context of a show, planned ahead of time.  The lead gives his partner cues that indicate responses.  It is about feeling each others weight, which is a whole other way of knowing somebody.  It is a dance in which bodies resist and follow each other.  

Tango is ubiquitous.  During the day, Centro is filled with small CD stores, open in the front, blasting tango;  the electric modern interpretations to the easily identifiable Gardel.  The "authenticity" of tango has, for many, become non-existent (if authenticity really means anything it all), reduced to a parody of Argentine cultural origins; that is to say, nothing of substance.  It is a tourist attraction; a Disney Buenos Aires.

Perhaps my sense of what the music scene is like here is completely distorted because I live with a jazz musician.  From my experience, jazz seems to be popular with many young musicians that I have come into contact with.  The look down on tango because of its magnetic effect on tourists.  It is a very condescending attitude towards the dance, the music and those that participate in either.  It is considered so "other" to many Argentines of my age.  Jazz, is a high art form of musical improvisation, like tango, an artistic incarnation of spontaneous expression.  Buenos Aires is noticeably racially homogenous.  Jazz is mostly being played by the whitest of the whitest.  They come from a city in which families proudly flaunt their European last names to link themselves with Europe, to differentiate themselves from their South American neighbors, who are often darker in skin.  You find people from such a city, idolizing an art form with its origins in resistance, protest songs of abstract song.  I know many musicians who realize how they are discursively contextualized in terms of their own cultural identity, an identity that is used to other oneself from the Other by removing one's cultural ascendancy from Argentina and defining oneself, rather, as European, understand the history of jazz with the States as coming from the Other, and that they understand the history of jazz in the States.  However, I wonder how many of these people, who are part of a culture that prides itself on its European ascendancy, understand that in their self-identification within Argentine, (or really Buenos Aires) society, they are engaged in an othering discourse very much tied to a colonial mentality about race, and yet playing the music of the Other as a form of rebellion against such an exclusively bound social structure.