El Dia Que Me Quieras

Composer and singer Carlos Gardel, the "king of tango", was born in the late 19th century in France, but soon moved to Argentina, where he began singing tangos in bars around 1917. Carlos Gardel transformed tango into a generally accepted genre and is seen as the person responsible for making tango an absolutely Argentinian art form. "El Dia Que Me Quieras" (or "The Day You Love Me") was first recorded on March 1935. Few months later Gardel died tragically in an airplane accident over Colombia.

Tango is a type of dance as well as the music that is played with it. It originated in Buenos Aires at the turn of the 19th century, developing in the melting pot of cultures that Buenos Aires was at the time. Inmigrants brought their native music and dances with them, while assimilating new innovations from abroad. The generally accepted theory has it that Tango originated from low-class thugs - the "compadritos", with nothing to their name except macho pride - while imitating the dances of the African population as they danced on the street.

Some people see tango primarily as a dance - a connection between two people in a beautiful pas de deux. However, most will say that Tango is the music, the lyrics, and the dancers' interpretation of that music as well as feelings it expresses. As the music developed it became less rigidly rhythmic, more harmonic and melodic, and the hallmark tension and release was developed. The "fraseo" - in which the soloist bends the melody across the underlying rhythm - became a central part of tango.