Tango
The 8 Best Tango
Tracks of All Time
The music of the Río de la Plata, assembled in the port districts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo from habanera, milonga and immigrant song. Defined by the bandoneón — a German church instrument that ended up in Argentina by accident.
- Origin
- Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1880
- Tempo
- 50–130 BPM
- Also known as
- tango argentino, tango nuevo, rioplatense
- Tracks
- 8
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: Gerardo Matos Rodríguez / La Cumparsita
1916
Written by a Uruguayan student and now the tune every tango evening ends with, everywhere on earth. Its authorship was litigated for decades, which is very much in the spirit of the thing.
Number 2: Ástor Piazzolla / Adiós Nonino
1959
Written the day after his father died, in a hotel room in New York. Piazzolla was hated in Buenos Aires for what he did to tango, and this is the piece that eventually ended the argument.
Number 3: Ángel Villoldo / El Choclo
1903
From the guardia vieja, when tango was still disreputable and played in places respectable people did not go. Cheerful, filthy, and structurally the blueprint.
Number 4: Carlos Gardel / Volver
1935 · Odeon
Gardel died in a plane crash months after recording it, which has not helped anyone hear it clearly. Strip the myth away and the phrasing is still unmatched.
Number 5: Ástor Piazzolla / Libertango
1974 · Carosello
A riff rather than a song, and the most covered thing he wrote. Tango nuevo at its most exportable, and it lost him the last of the traditionalists.
Number 6: Osvaldo Pugliese / La Yumba
1946
Pugliese's orchestra played with a lurch — heavy on the first beat, dragging the second — that dancers still call by his name. Rhythm as a signature.
Number 7: Carlos Gardel / El Día Que Me Quieras
1935 · Odeon
The other side of Gardel: no irony, no port-district hardness, just a tune of enormous warmth. Written with Alfredo Le Pera, who died in the same crash.
Number 8: Ástor Piazzolla / Balada para un Loco
1969
Half spoken, half sung, and booed at the festival where it premiered before becoming a standard. Horacio Ferrer's lyric is deranged in the best way.