Quartango revisits The Golden Era at the Arden Theatre

Just last year Quartango’s album Encuentro won the 2015 Juno Instrumental Album of the Year.

Fiery, passionate and elegant, Quartango’s four classically trained musicians are the epicentre of Montreal’s tango scene playing a hybrid of sophisticated arrangements that leave audiences wanting more.

Never one to stand still, Quartango spent the year recording their ninth album. The Golden Era evokes the energetic, unbridled and sometimes shady universe of the cosmopolitan city’s nightclubs and cabarets.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, MontrĂ©al was dubbed the “Paris of the North” with its fizzy nightclubs attracting French artists such as Charles Aznavour and Ă©dith Piaf while cabarets hosted jazz legends Oscar Peterson and Charles Biddle.

“We wanted to evoke the golden age of the nightclub scene. With prohibition in the 1930s, may Americans came across the border to drink. As a result, clubs were thriving. They were also seedy with some mafia elements. Some of the history is quite lurid,” said bandoneon player Jonathan Goldman.

The other virtuosic musicians are founder and double bass player René Gosselin, pianist Stéphane Aubin and violinist Antoine Bareil.

The foursome is on a five-stop Les Belles Années tour of western Canada and will appear at the Arden Theatre on Saturday, Nov. 5.

“The idea behind the album was to take inspiration from different geographic locations, different spaces and different halls that have a lot of Montreal’s history,” Goldman explained.

One tidbit that attracted their attention was Jean Rafa and Ă©mile Prud’homme’s 1949 popular hit (J’aime) Les Nuits de MontrĂ©al, a number that is “tangoized” producing a more lush sound.

A current concert hall dubbed La Sala Rossa grabbed Goldman’s attention. Back in its heyday it was the headquarters for The Workers’ Circle.

“It was a Jewish organization. There was a large Jewish population working in sweatshops of Montreal. The population was big enough to support three Yiddish newspapers and they would meet for meetings at La Sala Rossa. In Sala, I try to evoke that world,” Goldman said.

For the tour, Quartango also teams up with Argentinean tango icons Roxana and Fabian Belmonte, two international dancers with a passion for the stylized partner dance and its perfect lead-follow rhythms.