[brrrump] cha cha cha.

It may be unexpected, but I have actually been wanting to purchase and learn to play a piano accordion for some time now.  Seriously.  Not for your polka type music or anything (though a few They Might Be Giants covers spring immediately to mind), but more for the idea of being able to play music for tango, of eventually being one of those charming old chaps sitting out in the sun in a suburban market, beret and rumpled shirt, playing old continental european tunes just for the sheer heck of it and the occasional coin for coffee.   

I was reminded of this until-now-relatively-unspoken-desire* this evening when I caught Radio National's Into The Music programme which was about music and fashion, and which had some really interesting stuff about the tango.  And as I thought they might, they touched on the Finnish love of the style -

What we certainly do know is that the tango first became popular in Buenos Aires in the 1880s, really as a dance of the underclasses in the suburban slums. Only after it had travelled to Europe around the turn of the century was it embraced by the whole of Argentine society. Some of the early tangos had words, and the French-born Carlos Gardel in particular developed the tango song, which was passionate and gloomy in more or less equal measure. Perhaps this is why it appealed so much to the Finns. Because, strange as it may seem, the tango remains the unofficial national dance of Finland.

The tango arrived in Finland from Germany where it had collected traces of the military march and so become a little more four-square than the Argentinian version. At the height of its popularity in the 1920s, the tango was a pan-European fashion, but long after it had receded it still retained its popularity in Finland. It's popular there today, especially in vocal music, having become a sort of tragic Nordic form of country and western. If nothing else, I suppose, this explains why Finland always comes last in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Ahem. An old joke, that one.  I was going to get all huffy and indignant but then I noticed that the programme was first broadcast in July 2005, well before monster-rockers Lordi.  I see also that the researcher has a Finnish name, which perhaps explains its inclusion.

But anyway,  I love that line "a sort of tragic Nordic form of country and western".  There are some Finns who maintain, in typically inscrutable fashion (i.e. is he bullshitting me or not?), that it actually originated there and was subsequently exported to Latin America. 

My only trip there actually gave me an opportunity to inherit my great uncle Mikko's piano accordion with his full encouragement and consent (he and I share a common ear for music, much to his pleasure), but I regrettably turned it down at the time as the logistics of lugging it around the rest of the country and then all the way home escaped me.  

*K's been well aware of my desire to have such an instrument, and, while admirably patient and forbearing in the face of my enthusiasm, was able to thwart it by our then living conditions - shared walls with neighbours either side.  But in our new digs I am now looking at The Shed with an ever so slightly renewed sense of hope.