Trio brings new diversity to traditional tango in Sebastopol

When you hear the word “tango,” several thoughts probably come to mind: It’s dance music. It’s played by men. And it’s strictly a Latin genre.

San Francisco pianist Sumi Lee challenges all three assumptions with her new trio Las Almas, three classically trained women musicians from different backgrounds who play tango music in concert only.

Performing as a group since February, the threesome will make their first Sonoma County appearance Friday at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

“We are not just playing the music. We have studied it,” Lee said. “We are diving deeply into the genre.”

The three met in Buenos Aires in 2019 while studying at La Orquesta Escuela de Tango Emilio Balcarce, Argentina’s leading tango orchestra school.

The trio includes Chinese American violinist Teagan Faran from New York and Heyni Solera, who was born in Panama and lives in Washington, D.C. She plays the bandoneon, a type of concertina particularly popular in Argentina and Uruguay.

For Lee, the trio is the realization of a dream that started after she moved to the United States with her family at age 19. She began to seek musical frontiers beyond the traditional classics.

“I decided I wanted to build something different into my repertoire. I really liked the Latin rhythms,” she said.

“I was born and raised in Korea, and I was trained in European classical music,” Lee explained. “In Southeast Asia, it is normal for musicians to start playing their instruments when they are very young. I was 4.”

She found that her early musical education was an asset as she strove to master orchestral tango compositions.

“It focused me in terms of structure. You need to be well-trained to play good tango music,” she said.

Yet she yearned for a more spontaneous and personally expressive sound.

“In classical music, you have to play every note as written. It’s very rigid. Tango has many different rhythms and this was exotic to me. In classical music, the pianist plays a lot of melodies, But in tango, the piano is the rhythm instrument,” she said.

“I realized there are many different types of tango music. I was drawn to the Latin composers, and I really like the neo-tango compositions after the ’80s. I tried to look for teachers and schools, but there were no resources.”

That led her to Bueno Aires, where she found like-minded collaborators. Each member brings solid credentials to the trio.

Lee has performed with Bay Area opera companies and grade-K-8 school programs and at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. She produces her contemporary tango music performances and has toured across the United States and Canada and to South Korea.

Faran studied in Argentina on a Fulbright grant, exploring the fusion of tango, jazz and classical music. She has performed with philharmonic orchestras, the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra and in jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater’s Woodshed Network. She recently was named a full professor at DePauw University in Indiana.

Solera has introduced the bandoneon into chamber music settings, brought tango into musical theater cabaret performances and hosts a YouTube series “Today’s Tango with Heyni” of music and interviews with performers.

The Sebastopol concert is the trio’s first venture to Sonoma County, and it will be a concert, not a dance party.

“This music is much more complex,” Lee said. “In general, dancers find it difficult, because there are so many tempo changes.”

Not only does Lee want to break from rigid musical limitations, she sees other barriers to shatter, too.

As recently as 2018, the year before Lee and her colleagues met in Buenos Aires, two other women tango musicians there were recruited to fill in for some ailing male musicians in a tango band. They were required to wear men’s suits and hats to disguise their gender.

“One of the reasons I decided to perform with an all-female group is that there has been a huge disadvantage for women in tango music. It has been a hugely male-dominated genre. Women were often dismissed,” Lee said.

“People would say that women could not play tango. Also, they would say if you are not Argentinian, you can’t play tango,” she said. “We are women and we are international, and we want to play tango, so we play tango.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.