Edmundo Rivero: The Bass-Baritone of Tango

The golden age of tango singing belonged largely to tenors and high, smooth voices. Edmundo Rivero changed that. With his deep, resonant bass-baritone, he opened a new register for the tango voice and became one of the genre's most distinctive interpreters.^[1]

"El Feo" from the southern suburbs

Leonel Edmundo Rivero was born on 8 June 1911 in Valentín Alsina, a southern suburb of Buenos Aires, where he was steeped early in the music and lore of the gauchos of the surrounding countryside.^[1] Striking and unconventional in appearance — features that, by some accounts, drew unkind jokes — he came to be known as "El Feo" ("The Ugly One"), a nickname his singing comfortably outlasted.^[1]

His principal innovation was vocal. Rivero is widely regarded as the singer who pioneered the deep bass-baritone voice in tango, a marked departure from the tenor and higher-range styles that had dominated the genre, and a sound that lent the tango canción a new gravity and intimacy.^[1]

Troilo and "Sur"

Rivero's defining association came in 1947, when he was engaged by the bandoneonist Aníbal Troilo as a lead singer, then in a notable run of recordings often made with the lyricist Homero Manzi.^[1][2] During his three years with Troilo, Rivero recorded some twenty-two songs — among them "Sur," in which Troilo's melody frames Manzi's elegy for a lost young love and for the old neighborhood itself.^[1] "Sur" became one of the most cherished tangos ever recorded, and Rivero's deep, restrained reading of it is widely held to be authoritative.

Master of lunfardo

Rivero was also a leading champion of lunfardo, the streetwise Buenos Aires argot woven through tango lyrics.^[2] A singer, guitarist, and composer, he became one of its foremost popularizers, and in 1978 he was named a full academician of the Academia Porteña del Lunfardo, where he held the chair named for Carlos Gardel — a fitting recognition for an artist regarded as an heir to Gardel's place in song.^[1]

Concerned for tango's survival amid changing tastes, in 1969 Rivero opened El Viejo Almacén, a tango club in the San Telmo district that became a well-known institution and a refuge for the music.^[1] He died on 18 January 1986.^[1]

Why he matters

Edmundo Rivero matters because he widened the very voice of tango. By making the deep bass-baritone a vehicle for the genre's poetry, he showed that there was more than one way to sing a tango, and in "Sur" he left one of the music's enduring recordings. As an advocate of lunfardo and the founder of a noted tango house, he also worked to preserve the surrounding culture. Alongside Roberto Goyeneche, "El Feo" stands among the foremost interpreters of the tango-canción in the post-Gardel era^[2] — the deep voice in which the old barrio speaks.