This is just here to scare ashke/sun... :)7 responses total.
"International Accordion Night," The Ark, Feb. 28 2001: This was the Ann Arbor stop for a short ten-day tour by three star accordion players. The player who was fairly new to me was Daniel Thonon of Quebec, although I am familiar with his band Ad Vielle Que Pourra. The English player, Chris Parkinson, is well known to me from his playing with The House Band, and the Irish-American star was John Whelan. The first set was mostly solo pieces, with duets as one player prepared to leave the stage and another arrived, and an accordion trio to conclude the set. All three players sat on the stage for the second set, playing mostly duets with each other, and a few more trio pieces. The concluding encore trio was a John Whelan piece titled "Celtic Rag" which did indeed have a basic ragtime sound to it. It all has a very dreamlike quality to me; I'm quite fond of the sound of the accordion.
My infatuation with accordions goes back to the mid-1970s and the great English player John Kirkpatrick. I'm not sure if I heard his work with Richard Thompson first, or perhaps it was the Albion Country Band album where he was a member. Either way, I was hooked, and Kirkpatrick kept popping up on lots of favorite recordings. MORRIS ON, the collection of morris dance tunes arranged for rock band, was another favorite from that era, and then Kirkpatrick had a brief tour of duty in Steeleye Span before their 1978 (temporary) breakup. Accordions were so different from the guitars which had dominated my listening up until then; the multiplicity of reeds gives them a more complex sound, while the pumping action of the bellows gives the music a built-in dance rhythm.
I've been dabbling a bit in the Astor Piazzola recordings over the last couple of years. Neat stuff! I don't care for accordion too much ,but in tango music I really love it.
Isn't Piazzola using a bandoleon most of the time? Regardless, I agree that the accordion gets a bad rap. (Let's just hope that bad rap never gets an accordion..) If I were going to slag an instrument for sounding terrible under almost every circumstance, I'd give the accordion and bagpipes both a pass and head straight for the saxophone. A saxophone in the hands of anyone other than Roland Alphonso usually is the shortest route between me and a headache.
I always thought a bandoleon was more or less a big accordion--it certainly sounds like one. What is the difference?
It's the tango version of an accordion. Aside from that it's hard to find out what the heck they are! I think that it's a "button box" instrument like a concertina, instead of a keyboard instrument like a regular accordion. So instead of a little piano-type keyboard there would be a panel with an array (hexagonal?) of buttons for the various notes.
I believe a bandoneon is the same size as an accordion, but with a concertina layout. It's also chromatic, I think, which most concertinas aren't. Most of the accordionists I know play in a British or Celtic tradition, so I've never actually seen one.
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