Sitting on a couch right across from you with his accordion on, talking and playing his influences: the maestro known for creating the ‘New Musette’, Richard Galliano.

“The accordion is a traveling instrument, and that is why it is found all over the world.” opens the interview. An organ, Galliano calls it, and then plays an excerpt of a Bach toccatta.

With his accordion in hand, Galliano describes and performs the influence of music of North Brazil, the Carpathian, and Piazzolla’s Tango (which he says possess a link to our collective emotional memory.)

But most of the interview is spent by Galliano explaining the musical origins/history of musette (Italian, French, Gyspy) and then his own way history of adding and creating the ‘New Musette’. How he created the sound and has kept it evolving into something today much more than ‘New Musette’.

The interview cannot be longer than 30 minutes, but it is enormously fascinating. The live concert is brilliant and wonderful as well. But this interview is very intimate and rare.

Another post about New Polka

Another post about Punk Rock Accordions

Another post about Busking

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier and Renaud Garcia-Fons

Another post about Be-bop Accordion

Another post about Accordionist Richard Galliano

Another post about Accordionist Maria Kalaniemi

Guy Klucevsek and Alex Meixner played a great concert at Barbes, Brooklyn on Friday night,  August 21st. Half of the show they played together on many of Guy’s fast and furious compositional exponents of polkas and other such odd-meter dances. The other half of the show they played solo, Alex performing some of his favorite polkas and folk tunes from Eastern Europe. Guy played original compositions spanning his past 20 years as a performer.  It seems like this might become a bigger thing for these two giants of accordion. Both originally from Pennsylvania, both with early traditions in polka and the like. If there’s Nuevo-Tango and New-Musette, is this New-Polka?

Another post about Punk Rock Accordions

Another post about Busking

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier and Renaud Garcia-Fons

Another post about Be-bop Accordion

Another post about Accordionist Richard Galliano

Another post about Accordionist Maria Kalaniemi

Another post about Learning the Accordion

Another post about Argentinian Accordion Music

Another post about Accordion Youtube Videos

Here is a poster for an event Seattle, Portland, Vancouver. Shows August 26th through September 1st.

The west coast has a certain je ne sais quoi about their accordionists. Perhaps its the tattoos. The west coast, and particularly the Pacific North-west, stretching up into Canada have a thriving alt-accordion scene. The weird, the punk, the scary, the dark. Here is just a small measure of performers and shops.

Henri Ducharme of Oakland, CA who is “Your source for accordion music by: Clash, Dead Kennedys, The Ramones, Sex Pistols.” At his online shop you can purchase accordion sheet for these punk bands and he has couple samples of music. Like Blizkreig Bop by the Ramones. And you can play your music with other alt-accordionists at the Punk Rock Accordion Workshop.

Even the shops on the west coast are alt. Accordion Apocalypse, San Francisco’s most intense accordion sales and repair shop. And also, according to their site, the summer home of the Punk Rock Accordion Workshop.

The Vagabond Opera of The West Coast

Esmerelda Strange

Jason Webley - West Coast Mad Man of Accordion

Kielbasia of San Francisco

Another post about Busking

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier and Renaud Garcia-Fons

Another post about Be-bop Accordion

Another post about Accordionist Richard Galliano

Another post about Accordionist Maria Kalaniemi

Another post about Learning the Accordion

Another post about Argentinian Accordion Music

Another post about Accordion Youtube Videos

Busking is the ancient art of street performing. Americans often confuse buskers with pan-handlers or the homeless. Buskers are artists who have taken the world as their stage. They are intrepid entrepeneurs, corageuosly battling so many things in order to make a few dollars at what they do. Busking takes pride, patience, courage, talent, 100 times harder work than you would think. Busking is incredibly difficult.

The real shame of our American culture is that we are so anti-performer. We have by way of legislation and police policy made almost every supposedly public area into a walkway between commercial storefronts. Buskers are, with rarest exception, always forbidden in these supposedly communal spaces. And by whose authority and why?

Ignorant town boards and business councils, isolated and philistine local legislators collude to keep out what they think of as riff-raff. Tax payers supposedly don’t want to see people sitting on the street. Buskers are hard working entertainers, not hobos or vagrants. They are waking up and making alive the placid streets of any town. Bringing real culture where sidewalk signs cannot.

Freedom and liberty are more than just the big ideas. They require a free market and a bill of rights. And that means at the smallest level. A free market place where artists can interact with people in public and participate in the milieu of daily life consecrated by the Constitution.

I challenge every town in America to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are preventing buskers from exercising their liberty as Americans and humans.

Wikipedia entry on busking

Buskers Advocates

To find more information on busking, search h the name of your town and busking, or the name of your town and street performing.

Busking in New York Subway

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier and Renaud Garcia-Fons

Another post about Be-bop Accordion

Another post about Accordionist Richard Galliano

Another post about Accordionist Maria Kalaniemi

Another post about Learning the Accordion

Another post about Argentinian Accordion Music

Another post about Accordion Youtube Videos

The recording Fuera by Jean-Louis Matinier (accordion) and Renaud Garcia-Fons (5 string upright bass) is simply incredible. The two perform compositions which are full of driving rhythms, odd time signatures, quiet passages which retain an urgency, humor (Le Byzantin)  and amazing orchestration from those two instruments. Here are my thoughts on a few of the tracks and their arrangements:

Bari – If Bach wrote flamenco/appalachian organ music.

Mer Blanche – Steve Reich/Trent Reznor
Born to Play – WTF!  Stanley Clark and Al Dimeola from Renaud. I don’t know what from Matinier…Chick Corea.
Upepidde - I hope those are overdubs!! Sounds like 5 guys making a bossa nova record. I hope those are overdubs!!
Munecas Animadas - Tour de force.
Perpetua – A chamber orchestra.

In short, full of that constantly unerring energy that makes great music, great music. These guys have something very special and rare. I am always astounded by the level of musicianship and perfection on the recordings of these two musicians and this is no exception. To listen to Fuera is an education in all things musical.

Fuera

Jean-Louis Matinier – accordion

Renaud Garcia-Fons – bass

2001

Enja

Another post about Jean-Louis Matinier and Renaud Garcia-Fons

Another post about Be-bop Accordion

Another post about Accordionist Richard Galliano

Another post about Accordionist Maria Kalaniemi

Addressing the question of whether or not one can separate the artist from the artwork? Especially in instances of great moral/emotional depravity (anti-semitic). The New York times has an opinion piece by Anthony Tommasini which addresses just this topic as it relates to the composer Richard Wagner.

I agree with Tommasini when he says:

As people go, Wagner was pretty vile. Yet awful people have produced sublime art, and many honorable people, even those with real talent, have produced a lot of faceless and boring art. This paradox would seem obvious by now. But there it is.

It is my belief that Wagner is peculiar as an artist whose emotional/social views are evil, because his anti-semitism is so great and his art is also so great that it has been, over the past thirty or so years, and is now being confronted.

Also from the article:

When James Levine accepted the invitation to conduct the centenary performance of “Parsifal” at Bayreuth in 1982, some wondered how an American Jew could appear at the temple of Wagner. Mr. Levine answered that he was compelled to confront the question of Wagner on the composer’s turf. How could such a creep write such a spiritual and piercingly honest work?

And Daniel Barenboim conducting Wagner works in Israel.

The BBC Great Composers film about Wagner features Barenboim addressing just this issue, as it obviously stands roiling us all. And not shying from an admiration of the artwork itself also shows Stephen Hawking giving his praises for the works of Wagner.

When most people think Argentinian music they think of that passionate music from the seedy milongas of Buenos Aires. But there is another iconic music from the north of Argentina, it is called Chamamé.

Chamamé is a rich cultural mix of indigenous and immigrant peoples to Argentina’s northern region. Not urban like the tango, but rural. But both musics share a free-reed aerophone. Tango has its bandoneón and chamamé has its accordion.

There is a recent documentary from Australian Radio which you can listen to free online. This is from the abstract:

Like tango, chamamé is rooted in a dance-form, but it’s wildly different in spirit although equally evocative and beautiful. First traces can be found in the music of the indigenous Guarani Indians. Then came the Jesuit monks in the 1600s who set out teach the Guaranis to play baroque music. Together they built the largest instrument factory in all of Latin America in Yapeyú, now a sleepy village. Spanish immigrants brought the guitar. Later came the African rhythms of the freed slaves who travelled in from neighbouring Brazil. The late 1800s saw an influx of European immigrants and with them came polkas and the accordion — now a quintessential chamamé instrument.

Chango Spasiuk is one of the most notable of this music. Some call him the Piazzolla of chamamé.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tlE_MmLfkw]

Here is Spasiuk performing in duo with another famous musician of chamamé Raúl Barboza.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCHWognarE]

Chamamé is on the web, in many vital formats. Check out this great chamamé blog (Portuguese and Spanish).

A few accordion comics.

Click for the whole comic book.

Always the punchline.

This post from Let’s Polka Blog is a great compilation of different sites from around the web that offer accordion instruction. Some are good paid resources and some are excellent free ones like this link to free online accordion lessons for beginners.

… Duane Schnur’s online accordion lessons may be the next best thing. Recently retired, Duane taught accordion for nearly forty years and has decided to “give something back” in the form of these free downloadable lessons. There are forty-six lessons available so far; each includes a PDF with sheet music and an MP3 of Duane leading the lesson.

You can also find some instructional accordion videos I have come across on my Youtube page.

Check out Swedish band Katzen Kapell. Composition, jazz, accordion, piano, violin, marimba, hand drums. Its all a beautiful intertwined work. I feel the music takes from baroque sources like Bach, bebop and Piazzolla, world and jazz rhythms, intertwines eastern folk melodies and very interesting arrangements full of thought and depth. I would love to see their iPods.

An accurate description from their label’s site:

Katzen Kapell is virtuoso music, sentimental and humorous. Infallsrikt and powerfully led you into the scent of variété large numbers, the film’s violence and sentimentality, rock and jazz incompatible mixture and tango madness. They own compositions depicts both suburban boredom to oriental romance or a handlös journey through a night detail Bucharest … Everything that you did not think was possible to reconcile the chapel plays up to you with much humor and darkness.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Iejr17O2Wg]