Push back the tables, toss out the chairs and cordon off Tinker Street. It’s not a sale, it’s not a bomb threat, it’s Tangoman!

Locals who remember ecstatic Latino boogie nights inspired by this charismatic guitarist and singer from Argentina and his band of very merry men at Bearsville Theater and Joyous Lake a few years back will understand the excitement triggered by his return. Tangoman’s performance this Friday, October 23 at Thinker Street Cafe will be an all-soul blow-out reunion, embracing a collective of elite area jazzmen including Paul Duffy on keys and Steve Rust on acoustic bass, joined by drummer Artie Dixon, an evolved trappist who’s gigged with Ahmad Jamal. Reedman Howie Brown and electric guitarist Mike Demicco will be slipping in for a second set. Saturday night, at Joshua’s, it will be Tangoman up close and personal, sharing his philosophy of life and love in intimate ballads, accompanying himself on acoustic with keyboard luminary or two, maybe even Garth Hudson.

We glean this information from Tangoman’s alter-ego, Jorge Heilpern, over a cappuccino at Bread Alone, Sunday at high noon. Heilpern, who’s been living with his family in the seething metropolis of Buenos Aires for the past to years, flying all over Argentina as economic consultant to the country’s small business, thrives on the bustle, perceiving the life-force potential in every passing body.

What, you may wonder, is a musician who charmed his way into the hearts of dancing Woodstock for a decade, commanding the respect of his musical peers before he tripped off to play mayor club venues in Manhattan, doing as an economic consultant? Well, Heilpern was an economist with the Argentinian government before he left the country during a period of unrest, when his immediate department superiors were among “the disappeared.” (In Gabriel Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, his Colonel Marcus Aurelius remarks that die of a gunshot in South America is to die of natural causes; so, too, is it natural to be “disappeared” by the army or the police.)

Coming to Woodstock and starting a family, Heilpern had both the leisure and the opportunity to realize a dream that Buenos Aires tango fever disturbs in every man who feels the pulse: to become a musician full-time, celebrating the rhythms he’d absorbed all his life. We remember exciting first nights at the hilltop steak house near the Kingston traffic circle, before Tangoman played Woodstock (including the Woodstock II Festival) and eventually moved on to the Big Apple, gigging at Tramps (where he shared the bill with Charmin Neville of Neville family fame) and playing over National Public Radio. Why ever did he go back to Buenos Aires, we ask, a city we’ve never seen and yearn to visit. Heilpern says his mother expressed a wish that her son and grandchildren could live and grow up near to her, so, in a better political clime, he made the move home.

“Just this past year, I have made 47 trips out of the metropolis, to all kinds of out-of-the-way places, seen my country, met my countrymen for the very first time,” says Heilpern. “I play with different tango bands when I’m home, and write songs, but at first I missed the expansive communication through my own band very much. Then this rock musician friend – Buenos Aires has a big Spanish rock tradition – explained to me [that] reaching people through the music or through your work, going out to help people connect with their lives with economic help, it’s the same thing – communication.”

The work, he adds, has also expanded his prospective; he sees the “one world” ideal happening before his eves. “I’m in the outback, I go into some tiny bar, and there are the Chicago Bulls, on the television set,” he says. “There is a clicker you flick that brings up a Spanish translation. Mountain boundaries, national boundaries between people will all pass away.”

Heilpern sees further proof of this global unity in his son’s approach to life in a “foreign” country. “I’m walking with my 10-year-old, and he says Look, there’s a McDonalds, let’s go!” he laughs. He accents the name of the restaurant as if he were saying “Madonna”; that wonderful accent is one of the things that makes Tangoman’s songs so affecting.

As for being uprooted from Woodstock, Heilpern says his boys keep in touch with their friends by e-mail, so their feelings about being in a new country involve adventure, not loss.

The compassion of the man, the tenderness of the father and kindness of the son suffuse the immense psychic energy of Tangoman the performer. The flip side of the bandstand charismatic is the ballad singer who touches the soul. This reach is the true heat of tango, where men and women understand that the amorous yearning of the music is expensive of intangibles beyond flesh. Heilpern writes about these intangibles, in an earthly sense, in his own songs, moving whoever hears them closer to the universal through the oldest, non-technical medium in the world, good vibes.

Those vibes will be present on Friday at Thinker Street and Saturday at Joshua’s (Tangoman anticipates the cafe gig will “Run like a locomotive—whaaaa!”), along with the poignance and humanity of both the man and his tango tradition. ++

Cat Ballou