His fame has built the unmistakable folkish and tango profile, forged since 1913. However, Gardel performs in Long Island having got acquainted with the United States music in his own country. Even more: before rubbing elbows with Bing Crosby, listening to jazz in Harlem, going to a show of "Roberta", musical comedy by Jerome Kern, and following Reinhardt's instructions so as to project his image within the discovered code of sound, the creole hero has recorded shimmies and foxtrots in a cosmopolitan and modern Buenos Aires. It has nothing to do with the recordings that represent that "essential" Gardel that discs, tapes, photos and memories have canonized. But it is an interesting material. For the moment, it is worth remembering that we are not talking about a couple of isolated pranks: 19 numbers catalogued as shimmies and foxtrots nurture a discography which also includes 5 French songs –with accompaniment by the jazzman Kalikan Gregor, a French-Armenian who shared the spotlights with the singer on the luxurious nights at Niza–, a somewhat free version of Dance of the dragonflies by Franz Lehar and an exotic chest with fado, pasillo colombiano, Russian ballad, pasodoble, rhumba, jota and that canzonetta publicly despised by Carlos de la Púa.

At a fair appraisal of its sociocultural significance, Simon Collier asserts that Carlos Gardel must be placed at the same level of Maurice Chevallier, Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, all them emergent out of a mass society which undergoes a process of accelerated internationalization and commercialization that subjects its products to the gratification of vast sectors of the world population. Gardel shares with the artists previously cited a standard of quality unaccustomed in the cultural industry. This places him at a privileged site; he controls, as he is not a prefabricated product, its movements within the limits imposed on the consolidated star system. With modern greediness, launched without prejudice towards a constellation of mediations –disc, film, radio, photo, journal article, etc.–, the singer is consciously inserted into a complex cultural fabric that runs between tradition and modernity. If the estilos and the zambas he so well sang at the times of Saúl Salinas and José Razzano, affiliated him with the folk song of the pre-immigratory Argentina when he wanted to be no longer "the little French", the "international" repertory –never set against the others– places that "Gardel-image" on a stand to which not all singers are entitled. Between those extremes the tangos are, always equally distant from Betinotti's echo and Tita Ruffo's friendly lessons.

The situation of the Gardelian phenomenon in the early thirties can be linked to the transformations which took place at different ambits of the popular urban culture.

As valuable repositories of the new cultural state we have the copies of magazines like "El alma que canta", "La canción moderna", "Sintonía", etc. Throughout the twenties it is already noticeable from "El alma que canta" the growing space devoted to "modern" songs. The section "Lo que canta el pueblo" (what the people sing) is a mosaic: together with tangos, themes from zarzuelas and tarantellas. "El afilador" is considered "rhumba-song", while "Fiesta" is introduced as "rhumba-foxtrot" (January 12, 1932). The songs are not alone; the Opera cinema-theater acts as a strong incentive and collaborates in the gradual evolution of the popular taste. Sharing pages with advertisements for bandoneons and tango sheet music, "the best fox-trot tunes and American waltzes of the best movies of the day" are offered.

In Julio Korn's "La canción moderna", fox-trot and jazz-band are the link with a vigorous popular culture, which comes from the north and any resistence against it will prove completely useless. The approval from Paris or Milano are no longer necessary: a certain American prestige has begun to be recognized.

"Bing Crosby, the American broadcasting idol, has become an intimate friend of Carlitos Gardel's" (11 July 1934). The photographs in sepia from the magazines create an illusion of nearness, the reduction of the world: the graphic criteria introduced by Natalio Botana on the pages of "Crítica" make Rudy Valee, Mercedes Simone, Francisco Canaro, Don Dean and Carlos Gardel inhabitants of the same galaxy.

In full vogue of the Radical party, Gardel records his first shimmy, immediate forerunner of fox-trot: "Yo no puedo vivir sin amor", by Garaboche-Perly-Viergol, in 1922. Two years later, "Tutankamon", "Pero hay una melena" and "Oh París" reveal an expert of music-hall, the chansonnier José Bohr.

En 1925, Gardel cuts "Reyes del aire", "Honolulu", "La canción del ukelele", "Hola señorita", "Circe and Amor (Gran buda)", all shimmies in vogue. Three years later, fox-trot definitively displaces its forerunner: "Manos brujas", by Aguilar and "La hija de aponesita", by Montes, De la Vega and Maroni, inaugurate a line of repertory that will peak in 1934 with "Rubias de New York", fox-trot by Gardel and Le Pera, on the record with the musical background of Terig Tucci's orchestra. Some years before, in 1930, in Buenos Aires is recorded "Yo nací para ti, tu serás para mí", by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed (authors of the songs of the famous film "Singing in the rain"), a tune through which the matchless sound of a Gardel's baritone-like voice passes emphasizing a line above the poignant accompaniment of a curious "team" of guitars, piano and violin.

Born as a passing dance around 1910 –Vernon and Irene Castle introduced it into saloons and theaters–, fox-trot was always considered by "jazz fans" as a commercial derivative of Afro-American music. It is certainly a binary rhythm (4/4 and sometimes 2/4), with more than one indication of possible tempo, from the fast and the "slow fox-trot", and it appeared in the prolific Tin Pan Alley environment, New York neighborhood of Pop sheet music in the early days of the century. If for jazz it is only one of the many thematic excuses on which to improvise, for the comedy and the revue of the 10s and 20s, fox-trot means a way of grasping the dizzily fast passing of metropolitan life.

Gardel, a pioneer of so many things, is the first renowned Argentine singer who pays attention to that song form which talks about inconstant blondes, banned whisky and furtive love affairs on Dad's sedan. Besides the original foxtrots in Spanish versions –services performed by Cadícamo, Numa Córdoba, Avilés and Caruso–, Gardel turns to composers of the country who have some kind of inclination towards other musical meridians (the guitarists Guillermo Barbieri and José María Aguilar, the theater musician Arturo de Bassi, Esteban González, Emilio Iribarne and, especially, José Bohr) and drives away from provincialism to which many want him to be submitted. It is logical that today, more than a hundred years after his birth, we still remember what he sings best: those tangos, infinite variations on the loves and misunderstandings of town and its people. But there are other pages in Gardel's book. We might as well think of the "international" singer, that daring cosmonaut of a modernity he foresaw and brought forward.