The kids are dancing tango again in Buenos Aires, fueled by new styles of tango music that are laced with hip-hop elements, jazz riffs, rhythm and blues licks, and suggestions and samples of rock and roll. You still encounter some younger people in this city that feign a lack of interest, who say that tango is the music of their grandparents and parents. That is so, but one of the glories of Argentine tango, besides the history that it embodies, is its elasticity and its ability to accept and be broadened by so many new musical elements.

Tango is, after all, a child of the great immigrations to Argentina and Uruguay from everywhere in the world. Describing the early 20th century, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano writes that "tango had been born in the corrals at the city's edge and in tenement courtyards. It came from gaucho tunes of the interior and came from the sea, the chanteys of sailors. It came from the slaves of Africa and the gypsies of Andalusia. Spain contributed its guitar, Germany its bandoneon, Italy its mandolin.

"The driver of the horse-drawn streetcar contributed his trumpet, the immigrant worker his harmonica, comrade of lonely moments. With hesitant step, tango spanned barracks and dives, the midways of traveling circuses and the patios of slum brothels. Organ grinders paraded it through shore streets on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, heading downtown; and ships took it away, where it drove Paris wild." In this last bit he's referring to the introduction of tango to the French prior to World War I, who then took it so excitedly to the world.

All those people who had gone to — or, in the case of black people, had been taken to — South America had brought their various kinds of music with them, and the result of all those rhythms and chords, instruments, ethnicities, cultures, and sounds was a fine musical madness, from the moil of which tango came bubbling to the surface. It was that most wonderful of cultural events, a bastardization from innumerable parents, a burst of musical languages and unusual couplings from which sprung a single, yet endlessly complicated, gorgeous flower.

Tango.

So it comes as no surprise that innovation, as always, is still changing tango.

The Confitería Ideal, at Suipacha 380 in Buenos Aires, is a grand barn of a place, musty and quite run-down. It is the epitome of the notion of a fine, aristocratic old swell who has squandered his fortune and come on hard times. Yet there was a time, in 1912, when it was considered the very cutting edge of Parisian splendor. Founded by don Manuel Rosendo Fernandez on the suggestion of his wife, who was French, it was a tearoom originally, and its clientele were among the most favored that Buenos Aires had to offer.