Tango Has Found New Home in Finland

Far from the bright lights and bars of Buenos Aires, the sexy, sinuous syncopations of the tango have found a new home as the national dance of Finland.

Along the way, the raw rhythms have acquired a softer, wistful character--an almost Nordic melancholy.

“The tango has become a Finnish folk song. It is our national dance, the dance of the ordinary people,” said Jaakko Salo, a record producer and arranger with the Fazer Music Co., which owns some of the country’s biggest record labels.

“Our tangos tend to be love songs,” Salo said. “They are slower and sadder than the Argentine variety, influenced by Russian folk songs and by our own national streak of melancholy.”

The tango came to Europe from Argentina in the early 1920s and is still a popular ballroom dance, but it did not catch on in Finland in a big way until the mid-1940s.

“Tangos seemed to capture the mood of the wartime audience. The lyrics were tender and spoke of the longing for a better place, a better life,” said Pekka Gronow, head of the record library at Finnish Radio, who is acknowledged as the country’s foremost authority on the tango.

“It was the birth of a specifically Finnish idiom,” Gronow said. “The South American dance of sex became the Nordic dance of love.”

Gronow reckons he has about 2,000 tango records in his collection, which spans five decades. Some written in the 1940s and 1950s are still popular today, but more are being written all the time.

In Finnish dance halls, the tango is the most popular item played by bands with a violin, a couple of wind instruments, a bass guitar, drums and, most important of all, an accordion.

A tango-singing contest run by the commercial television station attracts several hundred entrants each year.

Salo believes that in a reflective, introspective nation where people sometimes have difficulty expressing their emotions, the tango plays a unique social role.

“The main point is often in the text,” he said. “It says things that Finnish men have difficulty in saying. The tango is an important part in the Finnish courting ritual.”

The doyen of the Finnish tango is composer Toivo Karki, who wrote his first hit in the 1940s. Now in his 70s, with several hundred tangos to his name--no one seems to know exactly how many--Karki is still churning them out.

The Finnish tango reached a high point in the 1960s, partly in reaction to the rock ‘n’ roll invasion from the United States and Britain.

“Many young Finns loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but many hated all this foreign music,” said Gronow. “What they wanted was more and more tangos.”

He displayed the Finnish top 10 list for December, 1963. No. 1 was a tango; No. 2 was Elvis Presley’s “Devil in Disguise;” No. 3 was “Lucky Lips” by Cliff Richard. Then came several more tangos.

The tango went through a lean period in the 1970s but sprang back in the 1980s. Now, Salo said, a good tango record may sell up to 20,000 copies--enough for a comfortable profit.

“The Finnish tango is our equivalent of American country and Western music, with the same kind of social background and the same kind of charm,” said Gronow.

“It’s not always very fashionable, but there’s some very good music. It’s sincere and serious, which you can’t say about all popular music.”

The latest twist in the story of the Finnish tango is that musicians are going back to Argentina to study the original. Salo has made some recordings there using Finnish singers and Argentine musicians, and Finns are learning to play the Argentine accordion, the bandoneon.

“The public seems to like these new tangos, so we are looking to develop this more artistic tango,” he said.

And what was the Argentine response to the Finnish tango?

“At first, they were totally bemused,” said Salo, “but they said they liked it. That’s what they told us, anyway.”