Chopin does the tango

The world is so full of strange coincidence that I should stop being surprised. But still. The shuttle which lands on Planet Vinyl is programmed to be random but different. If yesterday we heard a 7-inch 45 rpm playing eighties synth-pop, the only certainty about today is that it will NOT be a synth-pop single from the eighties.

Yesterday, we heard a 7-inch, 33⅓ rpm EP recorded in the sixties, a lovely performance by Vlado Perlemuter of a classical piano piece by Frederic Chopin, “Étude Op. 10, No. 3”.

Today, we have a 10-inch, 78 rpm shellac disc from 1939, the work of the great British band leader, Joe Loss, with his orchestra. I listened to both sides and decided to go with the B-side, a Latin-tinged, dramatic dance number. 3044 b

I had no idea when I heard it – the very possibility did not occur to me – but this piece of 1930s swing, “So Deep is the Night” is an inventive dance arrangement of a song, which in turn was an adaptation of a tune for solo piano, written a century earlier, under the name “Étude Op. 10, No. 3”, by Frederic Chopin.

Once you know to listen for it, you can recognise the connection. Maybe, on some sub-conscious level, that was the tune appealed to me? I don’t know.

Sometimes we travel a very long way to discover ourselves back in the same place.