The word tango is most likely of African origin and refers to the popular music and dance celebrations that slaves performed in the coastal regions of the Caribbean and Atlantic. The genre overlapped with milonga, candombe, and Cuban habanera. During the 20th century, around the time urbanized samba emerged in Brazil, tango emerged as an independent dance genre. Rio de Janeiro tango was born in the poor areas known as arrabeles on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevido. The compadrito was one of the first figures par excellence to emerge from the arrabales; his dress and behavior mocked the elite, posing as an arrogant bully. He mixed gaucho and immigrant characteristics and spoke Lunfardo (a dialect with references to the criminal world). Most people considered him vulgar and disreputable but many secretly admired his provocative sensuality. The first phase of tango history is known as Guardia Vieja and lasted until 1920. During this period, tango emerged as a genre of instrumental music based on a three-part form with different sections. The Guardia Veja ensembles had a violin, a flute, a guitar and a bandoneón (an accordion-like instrument of German origin associated with tango and also used in contemporary traditional music ensembles. It has 38 buttons in the upper and middle registers and 33 buttons in the lower register What is considered the most famous tango ever written was “La cumparsita” (“The Little Carnival Procession”) by Gerardo Matos Rodriguez in 1917. The first tangos used rhythms related to the habanera and milonga in double meter ,.but conductors began to slow down the tempo and adopted a quadruple meter with sharp accents during the 1910s. Marked and syncopated characterize...... middle of paper ...... in popular idioms Americans Sonia Possetti is a leading contemporary POssetti is a tango artist who has formed a sextet with the unusual addition of a trombone, she is open to the possibility of assimilating external influences, as she is fully aware of the political implications of creating and performing tango in a country controlled by globalized economic and cultural interests. . Use standard percussion with djembes, cymbals, bongos and wood blocks. Possetti's “Bullanguera” is based on the milonga rhythm that was first played on the djembe, a large African drum. She overlays a salsa clave pattern in the percussion over the milonga backing tracks. Jazz techniques, improvised solos and sixteen-bar progressions add new dimensions to the piece. Its conception remains faithful to the roots of tango, but deals with a sophisticated range of current popular music.