So the coincidences keep adding up, because March 11 rolls around and sha-bam, I discover that it would have been Astor Piazzola’s 90 th birthday… Oh come on… you do too know who he is! One of the greatest tangueros and bandoneón players who ever lived. (In the interest of honesty I have to admit that in this case it has far more to do with Daniel Muñoz than with the accordion!)Īnd Klezmer, Balkan, Gypsy music? Don’t get me started! Me, a closet squeezebox fan since childhood.Īnd then I realized that I had shot a bunch of photos of people playing accordion in Italy, which isn’t so surprising, really, except that not all of them were necessarily Italian… and the fact that most of them seemed to be playing “My Way” (why IS that? My Way for Accordion?)įélix Llancafil, Maestro cuequero, 3 x 7 VeintiunaĪnd Cueca! Accordions are no stranger to the oh-so-Chilean cueca either! Oh! 3 x 7 21 (Tres por Siete Veintiuna) what you do to my quivery heart! I snapped to attention… And I had to face the facts… I have been in denial. It’s a dream-inspired, 14-member, all-female, all-accordion group led by a German immigrant (and accordion shop owner) in NYC (go ahead, check out the link!). It started with a piece on NPR’s All Things Considered the other night about the-get this- Mainsqueeze Orchestra. It wasn’t just a belated confession of self-delighted nerdiness, but rather was triggered by a series of coming-togetherness of random events that made me look around and say “Hey! I think I really like accordions!” So what inspired this post? Inspired, you ask? Yes, inspired. Several sites (including Wiki-genius) tell me that the difference is that “concertinas have buttons that travel in the same direction as the bellows, while the keys on the accordion are perpendicular”… whatever that means… which is a long, round-about way of admitting that I know nothing whatsoever about this instrument that has been kicking around in my musical subconscious for many years.īandoneon at the Aníbal Troilo Tango Club in Santiago de Chile

( Wow, I think that is the run-on-iest sentence I’ve ever written in my life!). I probably never gave it much thought again myself until I came to Chile, which is next to Argentina, with whom it shares a love of tango, which uses the bandoneón, which is technically not an accordion at all, but rather of the concertina family, which you can look up yourself on Wikipedia or take my wiki-informed word for it when I tell you that the major difference between these two rather seemingly related bellow and free-reed instruments is that accordions get strapped on and have piano-like keys, while concertinas (including the bandoneón) are smaller and have buttons rather than keys.

Japanese Accordionist in Rome (I promise as soon as I find his card, I will include his name!)

Excelsior accordion de botones