Introducing: The Greatest Tangos on iTunes Curated by Derrick Del Pilar for Oxygen Tango

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Sit at a milonga table with some Argentines, and at some point during the night (if the DJ is worth their salt), during the opening bars of a song, one of them will probably clutch their chest and exclaim “¡Qué tangazo!” which roughly translated means, “Dude, this is my JAM!”

tangazo (noun)

tango + -azo (augmentative suffix—indicates largeness or greatness)

1) An explosive, heart-kneading, swoon-provoking, bliss-generating tango song.

The criteria for separating tangazos from the pack is, like most tango things, highly personal and intimate. Some songs make virtually everyone’s tangazo list—these are the ones you hear over and over again, milonga to milonga, festival to festival, the ones that pull everyone out onto the floor, the ones that announce, sometimes quite literally, “THIS is tango, baby, and you’re gonna like it.” But with time every tango dancer finds their own favorites: the big lush stringy number playing at your first lesson that got you hooked, the crazy fast song of your first tanda with a stranger at a real milonga, the sweet old melody of a tanda you got to dance with a superstar partner at 4:42am during an all-nighter...these will become your tangazos.

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Oxygen Tango School of LA has invited Tango DJ, translator, dancer, and music connoisseur Derrick Del Pilar to share his favorite ten hand-picked Tangazos of the month, with his own commentary on why each one's so special. It's a perfect way to learn a little bit about the music from a trusted, credible, passionate source. You'll get notes on orchestras, the meaning of the songs, and special parts to listen for.

And, your curator will choose ONLY those "Tangazos" that are BOTH perfect for dancing socially AND ALSO available to for purchase on iTunes. So if you fall in love with a song, you don't need to track down the whole album or bribe your local DJ -- you can just buy it ! So build your music collection, define your tastes, and dance your heart out with songs that matter to Tango dancers all over the world.

Read Oxygen first Tangazos of the Month list by Derrick: "Top Ten Tangos of ALL TIME!!!"