Daniel Melingo - the man who's making tango seriously cool

When I ask the Argentine tango singer Daniel Melingo, ensconced in the dressing room of a suburban Parisian theatre, for a few details about his past, he turns to his friend and producer Eduardo Makaroff – guitarist for Gotan Project – arches a theatrical brow, and asks if this is about the music, or something more innocent, like a police interrogation. Melingo has one of those voices that sounds more lived in than a rooming house, and his tango is not simply a dance or a style of music, it is a way of life.

Though he is renowned across the Latin world and in France, where he is touring a critically acclaimed new album, Maldito Tango, the 51-year-old is little known in the UK. That could soon change when he makes his UK concert debut as part of today's Tangopolis on London's South Bank, on which the singer shares the bill with tango fusionists Bajofondo. Their concert is one of the first in this month's La Linea Latin music festival.

Melingo is not the only newcomer to the party. Afro-Brazilian legends The Ipanemas also make their UK debut, a mere 50 years after they first formed. Though they released their debut in 1964, it would take another 37 years for that difficult second album to appear, but time – and the return of their drummer Wilson Das Neves – has served them well. Their fourth album since their 2001 reformation, Call of the Gods, is a vintage slice of Afro-Brazilian magic, and confirms Brazilian music's elder statesmen as a potent equivalent to Cuba's Buena Vista success story.

La Linea likes to mix things up, with the grand old Ipanemas marking their dance card with young electronic fusionists Zuco 103. Elsewhere, flamenco guitarist and composer Paco Pena reunites with sitar giant Nishat Khan for their Spirit and Passion show, an Indo-Iberian exploration of the roots of flamenco in the deserts of Rajasthan, and Lalo Schifrin, the impossibly cool film composer behind the likes of Mission: Impossible, Bullitt, and Dirty Harry makes a rare concert appearance with the LSO.

As seems to have happened over the decades since "tango" was first coined as a word and a musical form in the packed immigrant slums of Buenos Aires in the 1890s, the form has been revitalised in recent years, in particular by the international success of both Gotan Project and Bajofondo, large-scale groups who take a more or less postmodern approach to the art, mixing it with electronics, rap-style lyrics, glistening string arrangements, and international club beats.

Melingo comes from Argentina's rock scene, but steers closer to the core tango grouping of bandoneon, double bass, guitar and violin, to which he adds touches of exotica – a saw, kazoo, birdsong, clarinet. On stage at the André Malraux Theatre in the Paris suburb of Bondy, he brandishes a primitive voice-changer that has him barking like an Argentine Tom Waits as his four-piece band, Los Ramones Del Tango, rustle up a lean and intoxicating tango backdrop.

Melingo is a headlining draw in France, and the umbilical links between Paris and tango go back to the 1920s when it was elevated from the bordellos of Buenos Aires into the hearts of Parisian high society. The singer has the audience in the palm of his hand as soon as he sweeps in and dramatises, often comically, tango's vagabond poetry with a Chaplin-like instinct for the telling mime, the revealing gesture. It's the only concert I've seen where the singer mimes the snorting of stray grains of cocaine from the stage floor. He has the face and features of a silent movie star, and possesses the arena of his stage like a figure lurching from a feverish dream of Tom Waits's, his smoke-and-mahogany voice and hall-of-mirrors-style of delivery summoning up the essence of tango poetics.

Though Melingo's family history is embedded in tango's traditions, he became famous in Argentina as leader of rock group Los Twist, who combined a kind of Latin American rockabilly with bitingly satirical lyrics. In the early Nineties, Melingo decamped to Spain, grew dreadlocks and wrote film music for Pedro Almodovar. It was his return to Argentina at the end of the Nineties that brought him back to tango, and when he cut his first tango record in 1998, a lot of people tuned in and paid attention – including the likes of Eduardo Makaroff, who formed Gotan Project in Paris a year later. "He was the first to reclaim tango," says Makaroff. "After him, a lot of rock artists wanted to do it."

"I opened the doors and it was very good," agrees Melingo. "I was not a tango player, I was another kind of artist, and so my fans were happy to follow me through to take a new look at tango. At the time, tango was a little dusty."

In his dressing room an hour before the show, Melingo steers me back to his musical roots. His mother's side of the family were all dancers, in what he describes as "a very tango neighbourhood called Parque Patricios". He started off at 13 studying the bandoneon, the staple instrument of the tango repertoire. "After two years I couldn't get a proper sound from it, so I turned to the clarinet."

He studied composition at the university in Buenos Aires and for much of his career was known as a writer and instrumentalist. His first foray into tango was the first time his hoarse, rasping voice took over on lead vocals, and a more richly seasoned set of pipes you couldn't hope to find wrapped around tango's inky-black songs of circumstance, dissolution and fate. It's a voice marinated in whisky, black tobacco, long nights, clear spirits, and one that's perfectly suited to Maldito Tango's gems of tango poetry from the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s. Much of it is written and sung in tango's first language, the Lunfardo slang of Buenos Aires, which for Melingo, as for Makaroff, serves almost as a second home and mother tongue.

"Lunfardo began in the prisons and went on to the streets," explains Melingo, "and then it was picked up by the poets. You have a very closed Lunfardo, which is really only spoken by the criminal classes, and what's called cool Lunfardo, where it's mixed with Spanish and that's more or less the language I talk with my friends. "

Maldito Tango is Melingo's fourth release for the independent Manana record label co-run by Makaroff, and it shows a maturation of his vision and voice. Much of the recording was put down live with his regular band and assorted guests at his home in Buenos Aires. "I have been there," Makaroff interjects, "and it is a very magical place, with the kind of wood on the floor that's like a great guitar. And the area is a very tango neighbourhood."

But what makes a very tango neighbourhood? Makaroff leans forward conspiratorially. "Tango, my friend, is cocaine, women, horse racing and whisky." Melingo makes a broad sweep with his hand and grins raffishly, the vagabond poet of a new, 21st-century tango readying to take the stage. "And a good tango neighbourhood will have all these things on tap... a hundred yards from home."

La Linea runs at Southbank Centre, London SE1 (0871 663 2500) to 22 April; Daniel Melingo plays the Royal Festival Hall tonight

Latin Accents: Highlights of the La Linea Festival

Among highlights of this year's La Linea is the collaboration between musical heavyweights Paco Pena and Nishat Khan (right) in their Spirit and Passion concert on Sunday 20 April. Flamenco guitarist-composer Pena and sitar legend Khan bring together the ancient roots of flamenco; the genre's Gypsy pioneers who arrived in Spain in the 15th century were said to be descendents of Rajasthan's nomadic tribes who settled in Europe.

Guitars, cajon and tabla drums, sitar, drone and singing bring to life the bohemian character of the Gypsy culture through improvisation, and the extended time signatures and structures favoured by both traditional Indian and Spanish music.

The Lontano ensemble and pianist Clelia Iruzun perform works by the classical Brazilian composers Villa-Lobos (Bachianas Brasileiras No 9) and Mignone (Fantasia No 3 for strings and piano) and tangos by Nazareth – Brazil's first composer to write Afro-Brazilian classical music – on 9 April.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, whose first book, The House of the Spirits, back in 1982, heralded her as Latin America's foremost female writer, reads from her new memoir, The Sum of Our Days. The memoir begins with the death of her daughter in 1992 and draws on her experiences living in California.

Elisa Bray