The distant origins of what eventually became the tango are probably to be found with the French colonists of the Caribbean Islands in the 18th century. Here slaves were made to play for their owners as they performed the 'contre danse', a derivation of the English country dance, which gave the music with its strange contrapuntal rhythm. It also picked up some of its Spanish flavour at this time, the syncopated rhythm of the Cuban 'habanera' (of Havana) being particularly evident in some of the early Argentine tangos.

The music entered the poorer districts Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the mid and latter part of the 19th century, where it readily combined with the African 'candombe' and the Argentine dance the 'milonga'. This was a time when the male population hugely outnumbered the female, which led to the development of the complex, aggressive, sexually-charged dance that has come to be associated with the music, as men danced belly to belly with each other or in groups as they awaited their turn in the brothels of the city, a style retained when women joined the mix, their backs usually arched in faux, or possibly actual, supplication.

By 1910 tango had spread into Europe and become a craze, particularly in the salons of Paris, from where it spread to London and New York at the same time as another vibrant musical form, ragtime, was moving centre stage in the United States. As well as being linked in time, these two musical forms are also similar (and opposite) in the fact that both employ a marked syncopation (of the rhythm in tango, of the melody in ragtime).

The classic tango sound is often associatied with a unique musical instrument, the bandoneon, a concertina/accordion hybrid invented in Germany in the 1920's, the breathy qualities of which help to give the music a kind of fatalistic sadness. In 'roots' tango the bandoneon is most often accompanied by one or two guitars and possibly piano, flute and violin.

Tango's most famous melody is probably La Cumparsita, written in 1917 by an architecture student named Gerardo Matos Rodriguez. Its chief rival is the equally dramatic Jalousie, which, quite surprisingly, was written by a Danish composer, Jacob Gade, in 1925. Vera Bloom put lyrics to the melody in 1931. A third famous tango is Vincent Youmans' superb composition Orchids In The Moonlight (lyrics Gus Kahn and Edward Eliscu), written for the Astaire/Rogers movie FLYING DOWN TO RIO in 1933.

When it comes to artists, undoubtedly the most acclaimed is Carlos Gardel. He was the style's first superstar, bringing it to a much wider audience and lifting it from its 'gangster' roots to fashionable respectability. Gardel wrote several classic tangos, including Volver, Por Una Cabeza and Mi Buenos Aires Querido with Alfredo Le Pera before their tragic deaths in a plane crash in 1935. He was the precursor of tango's Golden Age, which is said to be 1930 to 1952, the era of the Big Band. Tango followed down the big band path, re-adopting, adapting and expanding the traditional 'orqesta tipica' of up to twelve members, usually made up of string and rhythm sections and up to three bandoneons, fronted by a band leader.

Eventually, almost inevitably, tango broke free from its Latin bonds and was subsumed into North American and European orchestral arrangements and instrumentations, becoming a constituent of mainstream ballroom dancing, and like so many other musical styles had succumbed by the late 1950's to the onset of rock & roll. One notable exception to this is Astor Piazzolla's 1959 composition Adios Nonino, a re-working of his earlier song Nonino, which has been widely covered in many contexts and remains as popular today as when it was written.

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