Four years ago, Argentine-American tango composer Débora Simcovich was getting off a bus in her native Buenos Aires when a stranger asked for help with finding a nightclub. But when Simcovich walked the woman over to the address, she was skeptical.
“It just looked like a private home,” the composer said during a telephone interview from her home in San Francisco. So she was startled when the foyer unexpectedly opened up to reveal a lively concert hall.
Simcovich had unwittingly stumbled upon the popular tango club Café Vinilo. There she heard, for the first time, a live performance by Orquesta Victoria, a 14-piece band that was playing its own modern take on the music. “My jaw dropped,” said Simcovich, who is in her 60s.
When she had lived in Buenos Aires decades ago, tango orchestras tended to be composed of older men, dressed in suits and ties, with a somber demeanor. But members of Orquesta Victoria were young, casually dressed and vibrantly interacting with one another onstage. A number of them were women. “I was blown away,” Simcovich said.
When she showed her sheet music to the orchestra’s conductor, Ezequiel “Cheche” Ordoñez, the admiration was mutual. The very next day, he agreed to record a CD of Simcovich’s tango songs, titled “The Immortal Half Block,” which was released in 2015.
From Nov. 18-20, the orchestra will arrive in Los Angeles to perform fare from a second album of Simcovich’s tangos, “El Mundo Is the World,” at three venues around town: the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Nov. 18, the Pico Union Project on Nov. 19 and at the Centinela Valley Center for the Arts in Lawndale on Nov. 20.
The composer was inspired to create these songs as she was sitting on the beach in San Francisco some years ago. As she gazed out over the ocean, she recalled how far she had traveled from her childhood in a famous Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where klezmer bands played both tango and Jewish music at weddings and bar mitzvahs.
“I was thinking that the place where you’re born is not necessarily the place where you stay,” she said. “Roots are important, but people are not trees. We can be like birds and fly.”
The CD’s title song, “El Mundo Is the World,” reflects Simcovich’s thoughts about one’s homeland as a “port” to parts unknown. The album also includes her translations of songs by the celebrated late tango composer Carlos Gardel, who wrote his lyrics in Spanish.
“I thought, ‘This is such a sacrilege. It’s almost as if “Don Quixote” had never been translated into English,’ ” Simcovich said. “I also did that because there is this incredible separation Americans have from the meaning of the tango. Many people think that a tango is just a dance.”
But the genre doesn’t only refer to the march-like, sensuous dance depicted in Hollywood films; tangos also can be romantic songs whose lyrics describe “the soul of the people,” she said. “The lyrics talk about things that are deep, and truths of everyday life. The tango has been called confessional, and you can compare it to blues in a way.”
Simcovich’s forebears fled anti-Semitism in Europe to Argentina during the great wave of Jewish immigration to that country around the early 20th century. By the time Débora was growing up in the predominantly Jewish area of Villa Crespo, the émigrés already had contributed much to the tango genre. For example, Jewish violinists introduced that instrument to tango orchestras, Simcovich said. Other Jewish performers, as well as composers, producers and music publishers, helped promote and develop the emerging musical form.
Simcovich, for her part, began writing tango songs while in her teens, when she also sang with a tango orchestra, performed with her Jewish school, attended the Yiddish theater and became fluent in Yiddish, Ladino, Spanish and Italian. At 20, she recorded her first tango single, “New Year’s With the Argentines,” for RCA.
That same year, she decided to move to the United States to escape what appeared to be an imminent military coup; she went on to become a teacher and author of children’s books while continuing to write music over the years.
Her first CD, “The Immortal Half Block,” began when Simcovich visited her old home in Villa Crespo five years ago. “The house hadn’t changed, and neither had the houses in one half-block [area],” she recalled. “But when I looked to the right and to the left, I couldn’t recognize the street. All of the old houses had been demolished and were replaced with high-rises and other buildings.
“At first I was [inspired] to write a short story, but then I started hearing music in my head and I realized, ‘This is a tango.’ ”
The songs on “The Immortal Half Block” reflect Simcovich’s experiences of growing up in a neighborhood that was very Jewish, but at the same time had multicultural elements, she said.
The upcoming Orquesta Victoria concerts will demonstrate how far the tango has come from its male-dominated origins. “I used to be perceived as an oddity,” the female composer said. “Tango was traditionally a male form.”
Not anymore. When Simcovich creates a love song, for example, she draws from her distinctly female point of view.
“I tell the story the way I would talk with my girlfriends,” she said.
Orquesta Victoria will perform at the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Nov. 18, the Pico Union Project on Nov. 19, and at the Centinela Valley Center for the Arts in Lawndale on Nov. 20. For tickets and information, visit facebook.com.
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