Tan Pickney

Tan Pickney's own bio doesn't reach for adjectives to describe its sound. It reaches for an image instead: "Die «Rhythm Section» bereitet den erdigen Boden vor, über den Sänger und Bläser schweben können," the rhythm section lays the earthy ground that the singers and horns can float over. That's the whole pitch, in one German sentence, for a band the site itself calls a "neunköpfige Gruppe," a 9-member group, born in Aargau and playing a mix it names outright on its own Band page: Ska, Reggae und Rocksteady.

The site names 7 of the 9. On the ground floor, matching the band's own metaphor: Bénedict Moser on drums and vocals, Ramon Rüttimann on percussion, Alex Walbeck on bass and vocals, Marco Schwab on keyboard. Floating above them: Remo Hagenbuch on lead vocals and guitar, Dominik Kägi on lead vocals, saxophone and flute, and Sandro Müller on trombone. That's 4 people holding the ground and 3 carrying melody and horns, which lines up neatly with the site's own rhythm-section-versus-singers-and-horns split, though the site never draws that line itself in so many words. The other 2 members of the stated 9 aren't named anywhere on the page.

The discography is short and specific rather than padded. A 2019 EP called Soultrain came first. Then, in the band's own words, "Ihr Debütalbum «Plant A Seed», schaffte es 2021 in die Schweizer Albumcharts," their debut album Plant a Seed made the Swiss album charts in 2021. It's still for sale through a linked cede.ch product page, the only retail link on the site. A 2024 EP, Growing Roots, followed, described in the bio as bringing "frischen Sound aus dem Aargau," fresh sound out of Aargau. No chart position is given for the album, no sales figures for either EP, just the claim and the year.

For live history, the bio states a round number and 3 named highlights: "Tan Pickney spielte schon über 80 Konzerte, in der Schweiz und in Frankreich. Darunter legendäre Auftritte beim Reeds Festival, der Badenfahrt und dem Lakesplash Festival," over 80 concerts, in Switzerland and France, among them shows at Reeds Festival, Badenfahrt and Lakesplash Festival. All 3 of those check out against the band's own public show archive, dated: Reeds Festival in Pfäffikon ZH on 23 Jul 2023, Badenfahrt in Baden AG on 22 Aug 2023, Lakesplash Festival in Twann BE on 9 Jul 2022. That bio paragraph also mentions "auch 2025" as still ahead, which suggests it hasn't been rewritten since sometime in 2024 or early 2025, even while the archive underneath it has kept adding dates well past that.

102 dated shows on a public log, run by a plugin, not by a marketing writer

Tan Pickney maintains its own show archive on the site, and unlike the bio paragraph above it, it updates as the calendar moves. Counted directly from the table: 102 dated entries, no duplicates, 96 of them in Switzerland and 6 across the French border. The earliest is a private booking in Grandval in May 2018; the furthest out is a Pfadi Folk Fest date in Affoltern am Albis already booked and ticketed for 29 Aug 2026. That's a fuller count than the "über 80" the bio still claims, simply because the archive has kept growing since that sentence was written.

The 6 French dates aren't spread thin across a tour circuit; they cluster into 2 short runs. In September 2019, 2 consecutive nights through Chantenay-Saint-Imbert and Ainay-le-Château. In July 2021, 4 consecutive nights through Nevers, Bessais-le-Fromental, Valigny and Meaulne-Vitray, all small towns in the Allier department. Going by the venue names on the log itself (a bar, a terrace, a village fête, a moving "Apéro-Bus"), these read as a short regional run rather than festival headline slots, which is a more modest picture than "Auftritte in Frankreich" alone would suggest. The rest of the archive clusters heavily around Aargau and neighbouring cantons, matching the band's own "im Aargau geboren" origin line: Muri, Bremgarten, Wohlen, Lenzburg and Aarau all recur several times across the years, alongside single dates further out in Zürich, Bern, Solothurn, St. Gallen, Schwyz and Graubünden.

18 of those dates are marked Privatanlass, and the site never says more

Of the 102 logged shows, 18 carry "Privatanlass," private event, in the venue field instead of a named club or festival. One of them spells out slightly more: a June 2019 date in Winterthur tags itself "Hyposound Jubiläumsfest !Privatanlass!", a company's own anniversary party. The rest give nothing beyond the bare label, spread from May 2018 through November 2025, mostly in Aargau but reaching into Zürich, Schwyz and St. Gallen as well. Nothing on the archive sorts these by occasion, and nothing anywhere else on the domain, not the bio, not the discography page, not the Kontakt line, not the Instagram feed embedded on the homepage, uses the word Hochzeit or its English equivalent even once. What the log does establish, on its own terms, is that this band already plays private Swiss bookings on a regular basis; what it doesn't say is what kind.

booking@tanpickney.com, and not much else published

Every inquiry on the site funnels through one line under Kontakt: "Booking und andere Anfragen: booking@tanpickney.com." No phone number, no contact form, no separate booking page. Past that email address, the site publishes no price, no stage plot, no PA or lighting specification, no stated travel radius or fee, and nothing describing how a private evening would actually be structured around the band, because nothing on tanpickney.com is written for that kind of booking in the first place. The whole site, bio, discography, show archive and the embedded Instagram feed, runs in Swiss-inflected German. The only 2 English phrases anywhere on the domain are the header tagline, "Reggae From Switzerland," and the Instagram bio's near-identical "Reggae out of Switzerland." There's no /en/ version and no language switcher.

What Tan Pickney actually offers, based on everything the band publishes about itself, isn't a packaged event act with a rider and a price list. It's a working 9-piece band with a debut album that made the Swiss charts in 2021, a gig log with 102 dated shows across 2 countries, and 18 private bookings already on the record without the site ever needing to name what kind of party they were. Getting a straight answer on cost, equipment or how an evening would actually run means writing to one email address and asking, because the band's own site was built to sell concert tickets and an album, not to sell itself as a hired act for a private booking.