Two virtuoso musicians, bandoneón player Ben Bogart and pianist Winnie Cheung have recorded a beautifully constructed contemporary tango album titled La Próxima Traición, scheduled for release on May 15th, 2020. The duo celebrates passionate, innovative tango, inspired by the masters in Argentina.
We communicated with Ben & Winnie to learn more about their excellent album and background.
What do you consider as the essential elements of your music?
Winnie Cheung: The honestly live elements in tango playing, either on stage in person or preserved in video/CD — the physicality and its limits in playing tango, and the psychological limits when revealing one’s soul through the act of playing tango.
Ben Bogart: The re-contextualization of a once wildly popular music in our environment and culture today. We play music from the early 1900’s through the 2020’s. It’s all now, but deeply rooted in the Argentine Tango tradition.
How did you come into contact with tango?
Winnie Cheung: By chance, through tango dancing offered in a yoga studio. My husband and I were looking for a new, crazy thing for desk-bound workers like ourselves to do. It was a nice studio in Portland, OR, so we figured no one would mind that we didn’t know where our own two knees were exactly, or how to make them touch…Then I went to my first tango party, and I saw a band playing tango live… “I want to do that!” That was it.
Ben Bogart: My first encounter with tango was also a dance class. I was enthralled. I was ecstatic to have found an activity that fit me so well. At the end of the class the teachers announced they were moving away and that there would be no more classes. It was many years before I found tango again, but that moment planted the seed of what eventually lead here.
And how did the two of you meet?
Winnie Cheung: By chance again…tango finds everyone by chance. One year, my composer-husband needed to hear the legendary bandoneón in person, so he can re-create the aura of the bandoneón with traditional symphonic instruments for an Argentine-inspired orchestra piece he was composing. And Ben was, and still is, the only bandoneonist within 300-mile radius from where we live. It was very generous of Ben to come to our house upon our invitation and showcase his beautiful instrument in its full glory – that day, I could only give him homemade muffins in return. Two years later, by chance of course, I ended up in the band Cuarteto Tanguero with him. We have been playing together ever since.
Are you keeping in touch with the current tango scene in Argentina and Uruguay?
Winnie Cheung: We are keeping in touch with the current tango scene in Argentina, where many of our musician and dancer friends live. I have been going to Argentina every year since 2017; Ben lived there for 6 years. Our Argentine friends have been absolutely welcoming, genuine, and heart-warming to a foreigner like myself — a regular 100-pounder Chinese pianist from Hong Kong who giggles her way around town just fine with her homemade Spanish. Through these deep friendship and late hang-outs, we get to understand better what challenges our tango compatriots face in these modern times.
The Tanguero Workshop that Ben started in 2014 is a perfect example of how we keep in touch, and how these connections are shared with our fellow colleagues outside of Argentina. Every year since 2014 we have invited our great friend, composer-pianist-pedagogue Julián Peralta as faculty for the workshop; every year all of us learn so much about how tango music is learned, how tango history is told, how important maté is, and much more. This July will be the 7th annual Tanguero Workshop; we hope to stay tighter than ever as a tango community across borders.
Why the format of bandoneon and piano?
Winnie Cheung: “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” — is that what they say? Our violinist and bassist in our band Cuarteto Tanguero moved away; Ben and I wanted to continue to rehearse regularly and frequently. So we started playing by ourselves, filling in missing lines. Ben made a dare for both of us to memorize whole concert programs whenever we perform; there was no way I would shy from that dare. So here we are, two of us playing songs originally scored for whole tango orchestras, fully-memorized, with eyes on each other and the audience as opposed to the music stands.
Tell us about your album, La Próxima Traición.
Winnie Cheung: La Próxima Traición is the Next Betrayal, the upheaval we initiated, that we promise to bring on again and again. We began our “upheavals” with the people. We volunteer live performances for people who couldn’t come to us — those in assisted living centers, schools, prisons (that opportunity got cancelled because of the Pandemic).
We share our stages with children and beginner musicians. We use every bit of our charisma and musical power to inspire social action, to flight climate change, to raise social awareness and sense of community on platforms virtual and real. We usually raise funds for carbon-offsetting projects; now we are raising funds for our starving tango colleagues by commissioning new artwork for dancers and musicians in Argentina and in the US. Musical excellence is what we enjoy; using that musical charisma for social good is what we insist and strive for. Our title track is a new original tango composed by Indiana University’s composition professor Aaron Travers. It is his vision of where contemporary tango is, here, now. It is an absolutely striking piece, with a scandalous not-yet-released second version with young beginner musicians playing along with us!
The title, which is in Spanish, has a very tango-sounding name. How did you come up with the title?
Ben Bogart: Like many great names, it came from a discussion at a bar. We were sitting at a table with old and new friends at a bar called La Vermutería in the Almagro neighborhood of Buenos Aires. We were in Buenos Aires to record this CD. I mentioned that I didn’t think the working title of our new piece was a good fit so we began to explore names. A couple bottles of wine later, as we were discussing the concept of the group, the song, and the album, Julián Peralta spit out the name “La Próxima Traición.” We all gasped. It was such a perfect fit that it immediately became the name of the song, and later the name of the album.
How’s the tango music scene in the United States?
Winnie Cheung: We are in very exciting times. Pedagogical material has been flowing more freely between Argentina and the US for some years now — no small contribution from our own Ben Bogart, who facilitated and brought and taught a lot of those materials back from his studies in Buenos Aires.
Professional and amateur musicians, many of them have been tango dancers for years, have now “caught the bug of live music” and appropriated their musical skills into the tango genre. It’s a small and tight family, centering around cities like New York, San Francisco, Portland and Washington D.C.. Tango musician communities are growing very rapidly in smaller and medium US cities everywhere. We are strategically based in Indiana, connecting everywhere and everyone (smiles).
How has the corona virus affected you as musicians?
Winnie Cheung: Tango needs warm bodies. We had over 23+ event cancellations just from March to May. Performance dates for June and beyond are “pending”. Our spring CD release tour is cancelled; CDs and other merchandise sales come to a halt. Ben and I cannot even rehearse under the same roof. Basically we are fired from our self-employed gig-based livelihood. Then there is the rest: we each have young children at home to nurture, the new quarantined household to re-balance. We are doing our best in this time to find mental and physical space to continue with our work, which is to make music and to connect many who are more isolated than before.
What are you doing these days while people are asked to stay indoors and maintain social distancing?
Winnie Cheung: Artists have been “doctors for the soul” in every civilization for thousands of years. Until we are “sunk” ourselves, we have the moral obligation to pick people’s spirits up in times of need. Right now, we are motivated to feed our starving tango colleagues by inviting them to create new artworks virtually, commissioning longer-term projects, making use of this rare period of calm in everyone’s performance calendar to collaborate across states and continents.
Currently, we have begun to hire musicians for a new Ben & Winnie + choir piece, to commission a bandoneon quartet, a piano duo, and a new bandoneon/piano piece for Ben & Winnie. If funding permits, we will begin to hire dancers to collaborate with musicians, perhaps involving Ben & Winnie’s tango orchestra, La Tormenta. Feeling compelled to further our cause? go to https://ko-fi.com/benwinnie
And to keep ourselves sane and sharp, Ben concocted this masterly network of technology that allows us to rehearse live everyday in real time! In that way, we are also able to maintain our regular online performance routine, where we connect with our wider audience from all over the world. (Here is an example)
How do you distribute your music?
Ben Bogart: With the quartet, we distributed in all the traditional ways. You can find those albums on Amazon, Spotify, Apple Music, CD Baby, and for order in any bookstore. But the music world is changing and while there are more and more opportunities, it is not clear that they all benefit independent artists. For this album, we are going to release some of the tracks to streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc), all of the tracks to pay-to-download platforms like iTunes, Amazon. We will sell physical CDs only from our own website at shop.moretango.org. We don’t know what the right answer is, but this is our plan this time around.
Mainstream media does not provide an outlet for tango music, in what ways are you promoting your music?
Ben Bogart: We talk about this a lot as a duo. I tend to think that it is an advantage that we are in a niche that isn’t heavily populated with lots of artists. We have two main strategies. The first is play for people. Until the coronavirus hit the US, we traveled to play a lot. We find that getting in the room with people and sharing a music experience lets people get to know us. And if I were to guess, I’d say many of our fans came to like our music through us rather than coming to like us through our music. We try to talk to every person who comes to our show. It is not always possible, but the personal connection is immensely important.
The other thing we do is we try to entice people to give us a chance by giving them something. Often we offer a free music download like this one. Many people come back for more.
If you could gather any additional musicians, or bands, to collaborate with, whom would that be?
Winnie Cheung: Our tango orchestra, Tormenta Tanguera, would be fantastic!
Ben Bogart: Yes! Tormenta Tanguera is a full 11-piece tango orchestra with our favorite musician friends from around North America. It is going to be amazing when we finally get everyone on stage together. The debut performance is scheduled for June 6 at the Alegría Tango Marathon in New Britain, Connecticut, of course pending the public health situation.
Right now we are also looking to collaborate on recordings with other tango bands, because right now, we really need public displays of community. The list of who we would like to collaborate with is long. Pablo Aslan (bass), Pedro Giraudo (bass), Hector del Curto (bandoneón), other touring tango bands like Cachivache, Romántica Milonguera, La D’Arienzo, Charles Gorczynski of Redwood Tango, Per Arne Glorvigen (bandoneón). I could list people I would love to collaborate with all day.
Aside from the release of La Próxima Traición, do you have any additional upcoming projects to share with us?
Ben Bogart: I think we are like most artists. Narrowing down the list of upcoming projects is hard. We do know that our next CD will be the one we recorded live at PianoForte Studios in Chicago with a fantastic audience and a fantastic piano that Winnie has named Fazi.
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Pre-sale orders (fundraiser).
Author: Angel Romero
Angel Romero y Ruiz has dedicated his life to musical exploration. His efforts included the creation of two online portals, worldmusiccentral.org and musicasdelmundo.com. In addition, Angel is the co-founder of the Transglobal World Music Chart, a panel of world music DJs and writers that celebrates global sounds. Furthermore, he delved into the record business, producing world music studio albums and compilations. His works have appeared on Alula Records, Ellipsis Arts, Indígena Records and Music of the World.
Wonderful interview! Thank You Ben & Winnie!