Eleanor Dubinsky met Dario Acosta Teich in 2019 while scoping out a Candombe jam at a Uruguayan restaurant on the Lower East Side. “Candombe is Afro-Uruguayan,” Dubinsky says. “It comes from where Uruguay and Argentina meet.” The music is drum-focused and often played during Carnival in Uruguay.
At the restaurant that night, Acosta Teich was playing guitar. He and Dubinsky discovered they lived in the same neighborhood, so she gave him a ride home. “We started spending time together,” she says. “And we started playing music together.”
Circumstance sped up their relationship: just months after that meeting, Acosta Teich moved in with Dubinsky, a singer and cellist, because the pandemic had stalled construction on his apartment. From there, the two moved into Dubinsky’s family’s home in Truro for the spring and summer of 2020.
Quarantine meant that Dubinsky and Acosta Teich couldn’t get together with their respective bands. “That’s when we formed our duo,” Dubinsky says. “We had repertoire in common: jazz and a lot of music from Latin America.” They began playing at Wellfleet’s Fox & Crow Café, billing themselves as Eleanor and Dario.
“It was kind of a refuge for us,” Dubinsky says. “It was the first time we were able to play live for people during the pandemic. It opened up a whole new world for us.”
Eleanor and Dario will perform a holiday set, “Noche de Paz” — Spanish for “silent night” — at Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Friday, Dec. 15. While the program is not fully set, Dubinsky has a blueprint: “We’ll play some original songs with a theme of hope,” she says. “We’ll play some bossa nova, and some holiday songs.” The duo won’t focus on religion but on musicality with “a carefully selected collection of original music and songs from around the world that bring a message of hope and peace,” she says.
When they perform, Acosta Teich plays guitar and the charango, a traditional 10-string instrument from Argentina. “It looks like a mini guitar,” Dubinsky says. “And it sounds like a steel-string harp.” Dubinsky has studied cello since age three. She also plays hand percussion, shakers, and charango. She’s the primary singer of the two, with Acosta Teich adding harmonies, though they share “a duet or two.”
During the pandemic, the duo started a weekly livestream concert series called “Jazz and More.” “We had Cape-based audience members as well as people tuning in from all over the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and Africa,” Dubinsky says. The two got engaged during their New Year’s Eve livestream concert at the end of 2020. In October 2021, the couple moved back to New York City, though they still spend summers on the Cape.
Dubinsky, who grew up in Missouri, learned French in school and Spanish in college. She started visiting Portugal regularly in 2013, inspired by Portuguese musician Sara Tavares, “a major musical influence who uses a mix of African traditions from Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinee Bissau, and Angola to write original songs,” Dubinsky says. Acosta Teich grew up in Tucumán, Argentina, a small province in the north of the country that has a strong culture of folk music. He spent five years in Israel.
Between the two of them, they’re fluent in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew. Their multilingual backgrounds have aided them in becoming worldly musicians. “Speaking these languages has opened up a new world poetically,” Dubinsky says. “I’m able to more deeply understand and embody the music.”
As for what exactly they play, Dubinsky says it’s “music that speaks to us, from the cultures we have grown up in or lived in — music that we love and admire.”
The genres include jazz, French classic songs, seminal songs from Latin America, tango, popular Latin American songs, and bossa nova. They also play their own original music. “Dario’s originals are rooted in Argentine folk music, but with his own interpretation,” Dubinsky says. “When he plays music from Argentina, I feel that he goes home.” Her own music is “multilingual with components of jazz, pop, and soul.”
When they play songs that aren’t originals, they make their own arrangements while retaining the songs’ distinct qualities. “Latin music has rhythms that French music doesn’t have,” says Dubinsky. “There’s a danceability to Spanish music, and bossa nova has a breezy ocean quality that you might not find in Cuban music.” Each style is different and brings out a different side of the duo as musicians, she says.
Dubinsky says the holiday concert in Wellfleet should be thought of more as a gathering than as a performance. “In Latin culture,” she says, “music is much more a part of life. There’s not such a distinction between who’s playing and who’s listening.”
This musical sense of togetherness translates to a broader sense of the word. “We’re living in a difficult time,” Dubinsky says. “I want the songs to connect us to our universal humanity.” Eleanor and Dario plan to include songs that people will know so that everyone can sing along in holiday-party style. “The music can bring us to a place where we are aware that there is so much suffering,” Dubinsky says, “but also there’s the joy of being together. That’s healing.”
Love Languages
The event: Eleanor and Dario: “Noche De Paz,” a global holiday concert
The time: Friday, Dec. 15, 7 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.
The cost: $25 at wellfleetpreservationhall.org
