Osvaldo Montes: An Afternoon with the Marinero of the Bandoneon

In a conversation with Jorge Fernández, the Rosario bandoneonist Osvaldo Montes explained the stories behind his own tangos, his nickname el Marinero and forty years spent with the bandoneon.

At a glance

  • Bandoneonist from Rosario, born in 1934; called el Marinero because he came to play in Buenos Aires while serving in the navy
  • Nine years in the orchestra of Mariano Mores, touring the Caribbean every year
  • Marked forty years in tango in 1988 with 40 años con el tango, twelve bandoneon solos including his own compositions

Fuente original: «Una tarde en Buenos Aires con el Marinero Montes» (Jorge Fernández, Revista Club de Tango n.º 24, 1997) · Resumen en español ↓

Osvaldo José Montes is one of the bandoneon players Rosario has given to tango, and among musicians he was simply el Marinero, the Sailor. In a long conversation with the writer Jorge Fernández, who signed as “Jorfer”, he talked about the stories hidden in the titles of his own tangos, about the orchestras he had played in and about forty years spent with the instrument. Montes was a busy man; he liked to say that music is the art of combining timetables. The interview was printed in Revista Club de Tango in 1997, although what Montes says places the conversation itself in 1988. This page in our artists section retells it and adds what independent sources record about his career.

From Rosario

Montes was born in Rosario, in the province of Santa Fe, in the family house to which he dedicated his tango A los míos (To my own). His parents and sister still lived there at the time of the interview. The label notes of Winter & Winter, which later recorded him, give his year of birth as 1934. They also tell how the boy, already devoted to the bandoneon, wanted to play where the best music was heard, in the cabarets; his mother forbade it until a nightclub owner offered him a salary of 1,200 pesos. Even then, the notes say, he was not allowed to stay in the lounge and left by the back door after playing.

Montes saw himself as part of a Rosario school of bandoneon players led by Antonio Ríos, whom he called a great master. He named Julio Ahumada, Néstor Marconi, Príncipe, Nito Farace and Fernando Tell among its members. The Rosario newspaper La Capital confirmed the idea of that school in 2021, when the bandoneonist Cholo Montironi listed Montes alongside Marconi, Ríos, Víctor Lavallén, Ahumada and Tell (Edgardo Pérez Castillo, 19 November 2021).

Why el Marinero

The nickname came from his military service. Montes did his compulsory service in the Argentine Navy and, he said, sailed around the world. When he was off duty at the Río Santiago naval base, he came to Buenos Aires to play as a substitute bandoneonist in the city’s orchestras. Fernández describes the scene: he took off his white sailor’s blouse, put on a borrowed jacket and set the bandoneon on his knees. His colleagues never called him anything else. Alberto Heredia, in his Todotango biography of the guitarist Aníbal Arias, also refers to Montes by this name.

With Mariano Mores

Montes spent nine years in the orchestra of the pianist and composer Mariano Mores. Every year, he recalled, they travelled to the Caribbean, going four or five times to the Dominican Republic. He named some of his colleagues: Roberto Pansera on keyboards, Aldo Nicolini on double bass, José Correale on percussion, Ramón Eusebio Barrionuevo on guitar, and the singers Nito and Claudia Mores. Asked whether tango was welcome in a region so rich in its own rhythms, he answered with Carlos Gardel’s legend: a radio station in the Dominican Republic, he said, played Gardel’s music for twelve hours every 24 June, the anniversary of his death.

The Winter & Winter notes list the other orchestras and groups he joined: those of Leopoldo Federico, Atilio Stampone, Carlos García and Raúl Garello as well as Mores, with tours of the Caribbean, the United States and Europe. At the time of the interview he was about to leave for Japan as bandoneon soloist of a string ensemble of 24 musicians, seven or eight of them soloists of the Teatro Colón, led by the Rosario-born violinist Antonio Agri.

The stories behind his tangos

The occasion for the conversation was Montes’s album 40 años con el tango: twelve bandoneon solos, arranged by himself and by Roberto Pansera. Fernández asked about the titles one by one.

Montes also ventured a prediction: just as Pedro Maffia, Pedro Laurenz, Piazzolla, Leopoldo Federico and Aníbal Troilo had led the bandoneon in their day, by the year 2000 the leaders would be players such as Binelli, Pane and Marconi. He himself, he added with a laugh, had no intention of retiring.

Forty years with tango

The album was celebrated on Tuesday, 27 September 1988, at the venue La Nostalgia está de Moda, at a gathering called by Siro San Román, another Rosario native. More than 200 friends came, among them judges, university teachers, musicians and poets. Montes’s father, aged 82, travelled from Rosario with his guitar. In his speech Montes told how, as a young man, the father of a well-to-do girlfriend had offered him marriage on condition that he give up the bandoneon, or he would starve. The friends in the room, Montes said, proved the man wrong. Then father and son played the tango Jueves together. The pianist Carlos García joined him, a trio with Giaimo on piano and Rubén, son of Delio, on double bass followed, Orlando Punzi recited his poems, and the evening ended with the group of Raúl Garello and the Uruguayan singer Gustavo Nocetti.

Later years

After the interview Montes remained active for many years. Heredia writes that he was one of Aníbal Arias’s colleagues in the Orquesta del Tango de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires from its foundation in 1980, and that the two close friends formed a duo playing tangos of every period, with constant improvisation. Arias made many trips abroad, twelve of them to Japan, and Heredia says they were above all with this duo. The Winter & Winter notes date the duo Montes y Arias to the 1980s and say it toured Japan, the United States and Europe. An invitation from Musiques de Nuit in Bordeaux led to the album Tango para todo el mundo (Winter & Winter 910 123-2), with works by Troilo, Gardel, Juan Carlos Cobián and Ángel Villoldo, and the duo also appears in the film Buenos Aires, días y noches de tango by Andrés Mayo. In Paris, Lautaro Kaller writes on Todotango, Montes played bandoneon in a quintet with Cholo Montironi, the guitarist Ciro Pérez and the pianist Gustavo Beytelman at the café Trottoirs de Buenos Aires, and at a tribute to Gardel in Amiens. Montironi himself remembered playing with Montes at Trottoirs (La Capital, 2021). We have found no reliable source for the date of Montes’s death and therefore give none.

Sources