Interview: Grande Orquesta Navarre

KGNU DJ Iris Berkeley chats with Evan Orman and Tom Hagerman from the Grande Orquesta Navarre discussing their long history in music, particularly their involvement in tango, with Evan sharing how he ended up playing the bandoneon (the tango version of an accordion) after a fateful purchase. They touch on the dynamics of their ensemble, including their performance featuring special guest Nadia Hill. (Interview date: 1/6/2025)

Iris Berkeley: I believe I have on the phone Evan Orman and Tom Hagerman of the Orquesta tonight. My friends, have I pushed all the correct buttons? 

Grande Orquesta Navarre: I’m here!

Iris Berkeley: Oh, fantastic. Technology. We’ve got it. Thank you so much for joining us and it is going to be such a treat to hear you all performing again on Thursday at the Savoy. What a wonderful, fun venue. Just wanted to chat a little bit about what we can expect. I know, Tom, Denver folks, and really anyone beyond will know you from Dvořák and composing music for the Wonderbound dance company and Evan, you’re a cellist and you make string instrument bows.

And I guess the first question is how did this ensemble happen? How did you all meet and choose to do what you’re doing now? 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Tom Hagerman): Evan, I’ll let you take that away. 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Evan Orman): Okay, I’ll go for it. Right before we went on air here, Iris and I were talking about the Denver tango scene, which we were both involved with years ago, and playing dance music and traditional tango music. I was in a group called Ecstasies with the violinist Claude Simms, who’s the Associate Concertmaster in the Colorado Symphony, and our bass player in the old days was Ken Harper, the wonderful bassist in the Colorado symphony and Mike Tilly, who is now on the faculty at University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana. Anyway, we just were big tango music nerds and started playing dance music. Varying degrees of success with the dancers. We played a lot of traditional stuff and then we played, some piazzolla which isn’t the favorite thing in the dance world and some other kind of mod stuff. We did a lot of Osvaldo Pugliese, who’s just my very favorite of the more traditional, tango dance composers and performers. He was a pianist. Anyway, over the years, we just started doing other projects. And I, gosh, Tom, like, how long have we known each other? We’ve known each other for a very long time.

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Tom Hagerman)” Oh, man I’ve known Evan since 1995, I think. In Boulder. We met in Boulder decades ago, literally. We go way back, and we know a bunch of the same people.

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Evan Orman): And Tom, had this band that was, starting out back in those days, the Botchka, which is, speaks for itself, but.

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Tom Hagerman): Evan started playing bandoneon, actually I remember the first time I met Evan, he had brought that bandoneon to this party, to this a Boatmaker. In Boulder, Eric Pauly’s house, I remember his party. Yeah, he brought the bandoneon to a party. Yeah, that far side cartoon where they hand all the people in hell an accordion. It’s kinda like that. But, that’s when I first met Evan, is when he first started playing that thing. Now he’s a master. 

Iris Berkeley: And that’s actually a question that I’ve got for you because you were a cellist first, I believe, and you are a very well known maker of stringed instrument bows. For folks who might not know this, the bandoneon is like the tango version of the accordion. It’s this giant concertina button accordion, and it’s probably the most difficult instrument in the entire world to play. So why?

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Evan Orman): Oboe might still be harder, but no yeah. It’s actually a good story, believe it or not. I’ll tell you about it really quickly. But so when I was in graduate school at the New England Conservatory in Boston and I went to Tower Records, if you remember, that glorious place, and bought this Piazzolla album called Zero Hour, which I didn’t really know who he was. His name had come up once or twice in conversation and it sounded like he was interesting. So, this is the late eighties pretty close to the time that DSL had died. 

Anyway I bought this record and I went home and I put it on my Sony disc bin and listened to it. I’d never heard anything like it was really cool. And my roommate, who was a really good flutist, we’d listen to that thing all the time. And we just listened to it hundreds of times. And I found everything he wrote. Like one cello piece, which we’re actually on Thursday, going to play a transcription that we did of this piece called La Grande Tango. It’s like a big three tangos put together. Big splashy piece that was originally written for Ru Povich, the famous cellist. And it was just for cello and piano. So we like exploded it out into kind of a big piece for our ensemble. Anyway, I played that a few times, and I said “Okay, how much piazzolla is there if you don’t play the bandoneon.” And so I gave up and forgot about it. 

Moved back to Denver. I was working in a violin shop here in town with this good violin maker. And the shop was closed one night and we were drinking and looking at the mail that came that day, and there was an accordion catalog and he said, “Oh man, I’ve always wanted to learn Irish button accordion” and there was one in there, he said, “I’m gonna order that right now,” and so I said, “Here, hand me that catalog,” and I looked through it, and in the back, there was a bandoneon, and it was like 600 bucks. And I just got it. It was like the sort of thing where you had to tear the little page out of the back and, write your order on it and put it in an envelope and a stamp and everything. And a few weeks later I got this thing. 

It was this cruddy, kind of Italian made bandoneon. But it had the right keys and the right notes on the keys. These instruments, there’s probably like 30 different versions of these that have different keyboard arrangements and different numbers of notes on them and things. The Argentine version has 142 notes. And this just happened to be the right one. So it was serendipitous, a little bit. So anyway, I got that. 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Tom Hagerman):I never heard that story before, Evan. I thought you got all your bandoneons off of eBay.

Iris Berkeley: So, you drunk bought a bandoneon late one night and the rest is history. Did I get that right? 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Evan Orman): That’s pretty much it. This is true.

Iris Berkeley: But you’ve got a bandoneon and an accordion in this ensemble. And I guess, in the accordion versus bandoneon battle, who wins? Or do you reach a peaceful harmony? 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Tom Hagerman): Oh, man, I think the bandoneon wins. I remember Evan playing that thing. I always thought the bandoneon was so cool and I always wanted to play it, but accordions are way cheaper and people just give them to you for free. So that’s why I play the accordion. 

Iris Berkeley: Now so you’ve got, so you’ve got this double trouble and you’ve got a special guest on Thursday, right? Nadia Hill. 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Tom Hagerman): Yeah, she’s amazing. I mean. So she’s an old friend of ours and also works with Evan at his violin shop, Denver Violins. But she is a wonderful vocalist and a wonderful violinist. And she actually performed in the Wonderbound Ballet that I wrote back in May. I don’t know if you saw that or if any of the listeners out there saw that. But she is the other violinist slash vocalist for that. So she’ll be singing some songs that Evan arranged. What are we doing? Some Mancini, some Piazzolla. Things from his opera.

Iris Berkeley: That’s going to be great. And so you’ve bookend our conversation with two recordings from, I believe it’s nine or 10 years ago, almost your world premiere live. So this is going to be an evolution of that, right?

Grande Orquesta Navarre: Yeah. 

Iris Berkeley: It seems like almost a different world. And this is in and this was a live recording at the old Bars Candy Factory, right? 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Evan Orman): Yeah, it was. Yeah. And exactly. And that piece that you’re playing Milonga Del on Hell is literally the reason that I play the bandoneon because that piece is just so beautiful, that was the one that stuck with me.

Iris Berkeley: That’s sort of tango distilled. I tend to do about, squeeze in one tango show a year and it’s basically like a bunch of Piazzolla and yeah. So what do folks expect on Thursday night? Should they bring their dancing shoes? Do they have to dance? Do they just get to hang out and have a great time?

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Evan Orman): Thursday’s gonna be just a listening session. And sit down, get a cocktail or whatever. You can dance if you want. If you want to interpret dance, yeah. We’re actually doing quite a bit of Tom’s music, and we’re doing some selections from his ballet Wakening Beauty that he did for Wonderbound, and some musette kind of pieces that we play a lot that are just great and they’re fun. But yeah, it’ll be fun. Feel free to dance if you want. And the accordion does win in most tunes, I think

Iris Berkeley: Fantastic. Is there anything that you would like folks in our arcadian universe, as we like to call it, to know when they show up on Thursday night? 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Evan Orman): I’m just excited. Actually working with Nadia. She’s wonderful. She’s actually an incredibly good violinist too and a versatile player. And we just had a lot of fun working with her and Sarah and Sue are amazing. It’s going to be a blast. Tom?

Iris Berkeley: I’m 100 percent looking forward to all of this. We will wrap up tonight with another one from your recording from a few years back. The waltz from Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite No. 1, and I’m actually going to cheat because I’ll play the rest of Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite from a whole orchestra just for contrast, for fun. How did you put your own spin on that when you were making your arrangement? What’s that like? 

Grande Orquesta Navarre (Evan Orman): Oh, that was I remember that was challenging because it had a bunch, it had three saxophone parts in it, and the transcriptions were really weird because it was off some old Russian manuscript thing that I had. I think at this point it’s been published and it’s been performed a lot. But anyway, it was, that’s all I remember about it was just being perplexed by what the transmissions were of the saxophone part.

Iris Berkeley: We look forward to hearing that. And I do actually have a pair of tickets to give away for Thursday night for one lucky listener. I will let you go because you don’t have to take down all of the listener information for whoever wins those tickets, but I want to thank you both so much for joining us. Bandoneon play Evan Orman and violinist and accordionist Tom Hagerman, among many other things that they do in the respective rest of their lives, here with us tonight in advance of a performance with the Grand Orchestra Navarre will be performing alongside special guest Nadia Hill this Thursday at seven at the Savoy. Thank you so much. Both of you. I feel like there’s a little bit of a family reunion. It’s such a small world in Colorado and especially in the tango world. So thank you so much, both of you for taking the time out. 

Grande Orquesta Navarre: Oh, thank you. Thanks for having us.

Iris Berkeley: I really appreciate it. Take care.

Picture of Evanie Gamble

Evanie Gamble

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