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Written in Folk Roots issue 192, 1999
 

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Finnischer Tango - Tule Tanssimaan
Trikont US-0250 (1998)

This is the definitive album to explain and illustrate the strange history of Finnish tango.
      The choice of its twenty-four tracks from a range of labels and sources is spot on, from a 1915 pastiche song about the new foreign dance then sweeping Europe, through the boom years from the thirties to the fifties, the heyday of Olavi Virta and others, steep decline during the late sixties after a brief tango-fever centring on the hit Satumaa (which has become Finland's unofficial national-anthem tango), the arrival of Topi Sorsakoski & Agents’ beat-group tango in the eighties and a new upsurge with the birth of the huge tango festival at Seinäjoki, right up to a couple of 1998 field-recordings made by Stephan Maier, the compiler, who is also the writer of the booklet (in German and English) full of atmosphere and extraordinary stories including shooting, suicide, and some sad declines.
      A first hearing of Finnish tango, or sight of the often stolid dancing and MOR performance styles, is likely to give an impression of a music with little of the fire or brilliance of its Argentinian forbear or that tradition’s later evolution led by Astor Piazzolla, but it has been the expression of a great deal of otherwise rarely seen Finnish passion, and this album leaves one in no doubt that, like it or hate it, though it’s a relatively recent arrival in traditional terms it’s a genuine folk-music form, and a window on Finnishness.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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