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 DANIEL MELINGO - vocal, guitar, clarinet
RODRIGO GUERRA - mandoline, musical saw • RUDI FLORES - guitar
NINI FLORES - bandoneon • PABLO PENSAVALE - double bass
Daniel Melingo is an Argentine multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer, with a background in rock and tango. Born in Buenos Aires in 1957, he studied music and composition - his main instrument was the clarinet - in Argentina, but left the country at 21, fleeing away from the repressive military dictatorship in 1978. He relocated to Brazil and eventually joined Milton Nascimento's group. Melingo returned to Argentina in the early '80s to take part in Los Twist and Los Abuelos de la Nada, seminal bands that would play a key role in renovating Argentine rock. A ubiquitous presence in the Argentine rock scene of the 1980s, by the turn of the century he had managed to reinvent himself as a tango artist and launch a successful new career in the European world music circuit. At the same time, Melingo turned out to be an important figure in the process of updating and rejuvenating the musical and lyrical codes of such a traditional genre. In 1997 he hosted a TV show, in which he invited rock musicians to perform classic tangos with him. Melingo's peculiar style of approaching the standards, as well as his idiosyncratic new compositions, attracted enough interest to lead to the release of a first all-tango album, “Tangos Bajos”, in 1998. The record was warmly greeted and it took him five years to release a second tango album, the equally remarkable “Ufa”. In 2006 he paired with guitarist Eduardo Makaroff, the Argentine member of Gotan Project who runs the label Mañana, which is aimed at the world music circuit. For Mañana, Melingo and Makaroff put together “Santa Milonga”, a compilation of tracks culled from Melingo's two tango albums, that will open the door to his European career. His bewitching take on the tango coupled with a histrionic live persona have earned Melingo a rising reputation as a world-class entertainer, as well as comparisons to Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Paolo Conte. “Maldito Tango”, comprised entirely of new material, appeared in late 2007 to worldwide rave reviews, providing him a status of “the man who's making tango seriously cool”.
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