Jaakko Laitinen’s greatest contribution to Finnish culture has been as the singer and songwriter of the band Jaako Laitinen & Väärä Raha. The band experiments with diverse elements in its music, using Balkan music cultures, old Russian romances and Finnish ballads from the golden age. These ingredients mix up a delicious musical cocktail that has conquered the hearts of dancers and music lovers, surpassing all borders.

The band is known to have Finland’s most ecstatic live performances. It has received awards and recorded three critically-appraised albums. Playing around 80 gigs a year, the band has toured Finland from Eira to Inari and from Kajaani to Turku, and also mesmerised dancers in the Baltic region and in Scandinavia as well as in Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Macedonia.

Laitinen moved from Rovaniemi to Helsinki and started his studies at the department of Slavonic and Baltic studies at the University of Helsinki in 2008. The newly-founded Väärä Raha band (Engl. ‘counterfeit money’) got a head start, however, and balancing studies and artistic life eventually overpowered our king of romantic Lapland songs.

After two years of studying, Laitinen was forced to focus on one of them, and chose to leave his studies in Slavonic studies for a while. By 2015 our hero had learnt the tricks of the musician’s trade well enough to make more space for studies again. The future will show how academic life and freelance music touring go together.