Concert Review

The Independent (UK), Concert Review >>

That all the events reviewed here should be part of the London Jazz Festival says something about both world music and jazz: while "jazz" is defined ever more broadly, "world music" proves ever less suited to ghettoisation. But tango is the great uniter, and certainly was in the civilised ambience of the Dean Street Pizza Express, where Sandra Luna was promoting her new CD, Tango Varon. For this charismatic exponent - who started singing in Buenos Aires clubs when she was six - tango is "cinders" that burn again and again, and her repertoire of songs, including Carlos Gardel classics, confirmed its self-renewing power. Her pianist was Lisztian in both sound and look; her bandoneonist's ice-pure cascades perfectly offset her own combination of coquetry, sensuality and menace.

Michael Church - the Independent, 25 November 2003-UK 11/03/04

Daily Telegraph (UK)

For decades, tango was a joke -the apogee of preening ballroom naffness. But since the rediscovery of its earthy origins among Buenos Aires prostitutes, it's become amazingly cool. Gotan Project's slick digital reworking was hugely successful. And you'd expect top Argentinian singer Sandra Luna's international debut to have been tastefully stripped back for the world music market. In fact it's spectacularly gushing, with all the strutting no-holdsbarred emotionalism you'd expect of an old-fashioned Latin diva. And it's all the better for it. While we think of tango as dance, it finds its highest expression through song, and 37-year-old Luna harks back to the music's 1920s and '40s heydays. Her mid-range voice is appealingly ripe, the melodies rich and full blooded, with the trademark bandoneon complemented by swirling strings and rippling guitar. The more forceful numbers are almost comically over the top, and even the slower numbers have a delirious, overheated quality. This is music that has moved out of the brothels into a fast-living bourgeois world where even the most respectable people go wild under a full moon.

Mark Hudson Telegraph, November 2003 - UK 11/01/03 >> go there