Background
Toivo Pietari Johannes Kärki was born into a large family in Nokia in 1915. His father was a Lutheran pastor from Tavastland and later an MP for the Agrarian Party (Maalaisliitto), and his mother was a pastor to emigrants in North America. All the children in the family were given religious forenames, and Frans hoped that his sons would follow him in his profession. Kärki spent his childhood and youth at his father's parish at Laihia in Ostrobothnia and like his brothers attended the Tampere classical grammar school. Music formed a part of his life from his early childhood onwards.
Toivo Kärki began piano lessons at the age of four and later also took violin lessons. In addition, he played the harmonium when his father held religious meetings. Later the Kärki brothers also played dance music at the Laihia youth association's building, despite their father's disapproval. During his school days, Kärki was a pianist and an organist at the Alexander Church. The venue for a turning point in the young pupil's life was a café where, during the prohibition era (1919 - 32), people sat drinking their tea and listening to new recordings cranked out by a gramophone. There the 13-year-old Toivo heard Louis Armstrong for the first time, an experience which he stated changed his whole life.
In the 1920s, Finland was experiencing a happy and international decade, the arrival of jazz, the birth of the modern popular song, the establishment of the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yleisradio, the founding of a Finnish record industry and the age of the great gramophone fever. Toivo Kärki was one of those swept up in the new lifestyle. In autumn 1933, after finishing school, he signed on with the band of the Funkis restaurant. His plain school clothing was replaced by the restaurant musician's working garb, the tuxedo; the black bow tie and patent-leather shoes were a style that Kärki trusted in until the end of his life.
Kärki moved to Helsinki in 1934, playing the piano and accordion from 1935 to 1938 with the Ramblers, a band that went in for the era's most modern jazz dance. From 1935 onwards, the young musician was to be heard on gramophone records accompanying many of the most popular soloists of the period. With the Ramblers, Kärki had the opportunity to make recordings in Stockholm and play for a month in Oslo. In Norway the young musician played in jam sessions with local players, and in his spare moments on Sundays, he listened to a genuine Argentinean tango band. In this way he became interested in the tango for the first time and gained ideas from this dance form.
In the 1930s, Toivo Kärki was a wide-awake, open-minded and ambitious young musician.Kärki admired the blues music of American blacks and believed that deep down he was at one with them. His dream was to get to the United States and make a career there, at the very source of jazz, swing and blues.
The Winter and Continuation Wars that began with the Soviet Union's attack on Finland in November 1939 took him to the front for more than five years. The wartime losses, the human grief and fear, the constant presence of death and the isolation of Finland from the rest of the world had a decisive influence on Kärki's work as a composer, leading him to turn to his Finnish roots, to sadness and melancholy - though he sought and achieved new ways of expressing this mood.
While serving at the front, in eastern Karelia, Karki wrote his most famous tango melody Liljankukka ('The lily flower'). It work marked the birth of the poetic, specifically Finnish tango. It combined Finnish folk song and Slavic melancholy with Latin-American sensuality and elements drawn from Afro-American jazz. In this way, Toivo Kärki became a reformer of the Finnish tango.
During the Continuation War, Kärki was not employed in the Headquarters entertainment corps, but he played at places including the frontline radio in the Olonets area and on the Karelian Isthmus. After the war, he founded his own band in 1946. Ahead of him stretched endless tours, but he also found the time for private studies with the composer Aarre Merikanto, a man whom he greatly admired.
On the basis of Toivo Kärki's popular songs, nine full-length films - from Lentävä kalakukko ('The flying fish pasty') to Kaksi vanhaa tukkijätkää ('Two old loggers') - were made in the 1940s and 1950s, and he composed the music for fifty films in all. Many of the most popular songs of the time came from Kärki's film music and have become Finnish evergreens. In addition to feature films, Kärki also composed and wrote for operettas, revues and countless radio comedies.
Toivo Kärki was perhaps the first composer of entertainment music to understand the importance of the lyrics in the Finnish popular song. In his collaboration with lyric-writers, he was always thorough and encouraging, but he also intruded in stylistic matters and was teacherish and constantly correcting.
He was an innovator in harmony, and in his hit tunes he used four-note harmonies - a rarity in Finland. He broad-mindedly looked for new material to arrange as popular music - from Finnish folk songs and ballads to melancholy Slavic romances. After his tango period, he shifted to composing minor-key songs making use of triplets.