MONTREAL, Quebec — To Quartango’s first Olympic Peninsula concert, Rene Gosselin suggests bringing a handkerchief.
That’s because tango music, in all its drama, has a way of drawing tears — but in the hands of Quartango it’s also comedic, Gosselin promises.
“We like to talk to the people, and make them laugh,” added the double-bass player.
Gosselin, a Canadian from Quebec City, takes tango music in many directions — to China, New York City, San Francisco — with Quartango, the band he formed 26 years ago with the late Uruguayan violinist Adolfo Bornstein.
Quartango comes to the Port Ludlow Bay Club, 120 Spinnaker Place, this Sunday for a 7:30 p.m. concert, presented by the Port Ludlow Arts Council. Tickets are $20 and available by phoning 800-838-3006 or visiting www.BrownPaperTickets.com and searching for Quartango.
Quartango’s albums, which include “Espresso,” “Compadres” and most recently “El Fuego” (“The Fire”), commingle jazz and traditional tango, and pulse with Denis Plante’s bandoneon and Gosselin’s double bass.
Port Ludlow Arts Council members saw Quartango play to entranced audiences in British Columbia, said Barbara Wagner-Jauregg, the council’s booking co-chairwoman.
“They express their passion for tango with such enthusiasm and humor,” she said, “causing each audience member to be transported to another time and place.”
Take Gosselin’s instrument, one of the unusual elements of Quartango’s sound.
His double bass has a larger-than-average register, so it goes higher and lower than your typical bass.
“It’s like adding another instrument,” to the band, Gosselin said. “Sometimes people are surprised,” that there are just four men on the stage.
Another distinctive element of Quartango is in Plante’s hands.
The bandoneon, a concertina that has its roots in German church music — players carried it outdoors where a pipe organ wasn’t practical — is a complex thing, Gosselin said.
Besides the bellows, it has two keyboards and 71 buttons, each with an independent sound.
European production of bandoneons stopped during World War II, when their factories were devoted to making arms. The prewar instruments remained precious, and are still being played by the top tango musicians, added Gosselin.
“There is a new generation, building new instruments,” he acknowledged. “But the best players stick with the old.”
Gosselin knows just four bandoneon players in all of Canada. Plante is among them, “a fabulous young guy,” who Gosselin says sounds like a man who’s given many decades to the music.
Quartango’s members, rounded out with violinist Antoine Bareil and pianist Stephane Aubin, find tango-fired passions know no geographic boundary.
They toured China last year and found milongas — dance parties — in full swing when they arrived in Shanghai.
“Those people are crazy about tango,” Gosselin said.
The group plays with symphony orchestras now and then in Canada and the United States, wooing critics such as Harold McNeil of Buffalo, N.Y.
“The story these four musicians tell on Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Adio Nonino’ is breathtaking,” he wrote in the Buffalo News.
“The violin and bandoneon are like plaintive lovers, with the piano narrating the scene as the double bass wickedly plays the devil’s advocate.”
Tango “is a very strong music … like a folk music,” said Gosselin. “The push, that’s what grabbed me. The beat is not one-two-three-four. It moves, like a wave.”
Gosselin started out in music as an electric bassist, playing rock’n’roll in clubs at 15. He remembers feeling “desperate” to make music his life.
He studied the classics, joined the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, and then met Bornstein, who introduced him to tango.
The pair teamed with Richard Hunt, an Englishman, pianist and composer who invented the Quartango sound by stirring together Celtic, ragtime and traditional tango influences.
Hunt led the band into nuevo tango, the jazz-infused form, and even into jigs and waltzes. And though he retired last year, his arrangements will always inform the group’s performances, Gosselin said.
As the sole original member of Quartango, Gosselin continues to adore, and stretch, his sound. The double bass “has never let me down,” he said.
Gosselin has a confession to make, however.
“I don’t dance. It’s a shame. I should dance,” he said. “I love the music so much.”
While Quartango’s music is made for sitting and listening, Gosselin doesn’t mind at all if members of his audience leap to their feet.
“Feel free,” he said, to do some tango.
