The Frankfurt band plays Finnish master tango

Frankfurt band “Bändi” won the German Rock and Pop Prize for its new CD.

Musician Christina Debelius says with a laugh when FR photographer Renate Hoyer and colleagues Thomas Salzman and Tobias Fresh ask her to take a photo under the palm trees at the entrance to the palm garden, while thin white scales fall from the sky.

The passion of the three is the Finnish tango, along with musicians Volker Dinkel, Martin Lejeune, Johannes Kramer and Andre Berthold, as they form a bandy in Frankfurt. This blends music from the cold north with hot South American beats so well that his second CD, “Unikuva”, has now won a German Rock & Pop Award in the “Best World Music Album 2020” category.

“We love the Finnish tango, but we are not Finnish,” says Christina Debelius from Bandi (the band’s Finnish band), the only German band in Germany that plays Finnish tango. “This is why we do something of our own.” She and Tobias Frisch sing the classics of Finnish tango in Finnish, catchy tunes of the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s that almost everyone in Finland can sing. Tango is practically national music there. It narrates the intense sadness and deep sadness of an unhappy love.

A fateful meeting between Thomas Salzman, the band’s drummer, many years ago on a ferry carrying from the Finnish port city of Turku to Sweden sparked his passion for this musical style and ultimately led to the founding of Bändi in 2005. Salzmann says: “At that time, The ships still contained small churches. ” A Finnish woman he met there asked the musicians to play the tango for the man from Frankfurt. She sang with her.

“Satoma” was the title the orchestra sang, and it is one of the most famous Finnish tango of all time. This also became the title of Bändi’s first CD in 2007. Last year the band’s musicians sat in the studio again and recorded the award-winning CD “Unikuva,” named after the longing tango dance, which was released under the band’s new name, “Recordings.” Pelargonia. “

“In order to record, we invited musician friends who were friends to play with us,” says Fresh. The nice thing about it is that each guest brought something special. Bändi does not fully play the Finnish tango as it plays in its home country, but musicians enrich it with elements from Bossa Nova, Blues, Rumba and Country.

The mix of colors earned them the “Hesse Creole Prize” in 2011 and now the “German Rock and Pop Prize”. Not only music is given away. The booklet on the CD containing the lyrics and their German translations from Finnish songs won the 3rd prize in the “Best Booklet / Inlaycard 2020” category. Salzman, not only a musician, but also an artist, designed and painted by himself. Imke Staats from Hamburg did the drawings for musicians.

On January 28, Pandey was supposed to perform at the Frankfurt plant, but the pandemic put the band in the planning line. Exercise is also not possible due to the current hygiene regulations, one musician and six musicians together in one room, which is not permitted.

But they still did not succumb to melancholy, not even Finnish. You have a dream. “We really want to play in Finland someday,” says Thomas Salzman. “We haven’t done that before.”