Album Notes:

“The Other Side of My Heart”
 

In its first album, the Lorena Guillén Tango Ensemble presents an enticing new tango sound and soul with dynamic arrangements of tango standards and original pan-Latin compositions through which you can hear the voices of Latina immigrants or imagine the tango of 2145.

 

 LORENA GUILLÉN
voice

JACQUI CARRASCO
violin

ADAM RICCI 
piano

GUY CAPUZZO
guitar

ALEJANDRO RUTTY*
electric bass

FERNANDO MARTÍNEZ LÓPEZ
percussion

*piano in Cantando


This recording has at its core The Other Side of My Heart, a collaboration between Lorena Guillén and Alejandro Rutty based on the stories of Latina immigrants to the North Carolina region . Rutty’s musical composition feeds from various Latin American musical traditions, which he blends in his own original pan-Latin style. ”Many Ways of Arriving,” with its slow crossed rhythms and its folk-ballad melody, evokes the rural Argentine pampas style known as zamba. Other movements, such as “Interlude” bring the dynamic mannerisms of new-tango. “My Mother has this Saying” mixes high-plateau chanting styles from Bolivia-Argentina with fiddling and guitar strumming of the native Guarani people from the Brazilian-Argentine-Paraguayan border. “Far Away” lays the tango lyrical melodic phrases of the voice, violin and piano over an Uruguayan candombe rhythmic backbone. Finally, “Home” closes with a whimsical jazz-ballad style. But the real final movement, “Voices,” brings back the same opening zamba-ballad and more substantial audio fragments of the interviews with the six women telling their stories.

Three of the other tracks, “Tiempos Viejos,” “Cantando” and “Sueño de Barrilete” present different facets of Argentinian tango through Rutty’s meticulously crafted and elegant arrangements. The traditional “Tiempos Viejos,” Francisco Canaro’s piece from 1926, is transformed in a dynamic modern evocation of old tango and its tropes. Rutty creates a dreamy rendition of “Cantando,” a classic of the romantic tango song repertoire and its inclusion highlights the undeniable presence of talented female lyricists, composers and singers during the 1920s and 1930s. Another woman that claimed her space not only among the gallery of tango composers but also among 1960s and 1970s tango “reformists” is Eládia Blazquez. Her “Sueño de Barrilete” is here presented in an introverted intimate dialogue between the voice of Lorena Guillén and electric-bass of Alejandro Rutty.

Rutty unfolds his personal tango idiom through the instrumental track “A Future of Tango: Part 3.” He reimagines the traditional tango-milonga as disco music danced by massive crowds of a possible future.

Finally, “Desde de Lejos” and “Lejana Tierra,” compositions created by Lorena Guillen, Guy Capuzzo and Adam Ricci, embody with their lyrics and music the sensations and recollections of somebody from far-away: blurry images, faint smells, the transformation of things through time. The suspended textures and simple melodies thread these ideas in their musical web.

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Production, Art Design and Recording:

Produced by Alejandro Rutty and Lorena Guillén.

Cover Photography: Felipe Troncoso
Graphic Designer: Francisca Mejía


Tracks 1-9 and 12 recorded by Evan Richey at Ovation Sound (Winston-Salem, NC), edited by Alejandro Rutty, mixed at Tympanic Media by Domenic Sabol (Silver Spring, MD) and mastered by Carlos Laurenz (Buenos Aires, Argentina) between January and July 2017. 

Tracks 10 and 11 recorded and mixed by Alejandro Rutty the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Studios and mastered by Carlos Laurenz between April and July 2017.

Tracks 1 to 7 published by Alejandro Rutty Music (ASCAP)

The recording and publication of this album has been partially funded by grants from NewMusicUSA and ArtsGreensboro.