Tonight Melingo performs from his new album Tango Rebetiko (released March 2020) which completes the musical circle of his family’s ida y vuelta from Greece to Argentina.
Melingo’s mother’s side of the family were tango people, but on his father’s side his grandmother sang opera. Melingo’s incessant touring brought him into contact with other ancestral musical roots when a Viennese woman, Daniela Melingo, sought him out at a concert in Austria. She turned out to be his second cousin, descended from a brother of Melingo’s Ravel-loving grandfather, and told him that their family came from the Greek island of Zakynthos, the birthplace of rebetiko, Greece’s anarchic musical movement.
With the precision of Borges and the bluntness of Bukowski, Melingo crafts atmospheric musical statements that transport listeners to a gotan world of lunfardo backslang, drug addicts, drifters, deadbeats and alcoholics. It’s no surprise Melingo’s tango bizarro sound has been compared to that of Tom Waits and Nick Cave.
Support is Andria Antoniou & Roman Gomez who have recently released their debut album Encuentro – a blend of tango and Latin American folklore with jazz. Inspired by themes of displacement and nostalgia set against the experience of love and the power of women to resist and seek freedom.
This show has been rescheduled. All tickets for the original date remain valid for this show.
In partnership with Arts Council of England National Lottery
