Stephen pid=66076 dateline=1563226527 said:
Your knowledge of the history of French musette style is impressive, I love to read about the details in your posts regarding French accordion musette style.
Thank you for this information.
Hi Stephen,
A lot of people wonder why anybody coming from Scotland, a country with its own accordion tradition, would be interested in French musette.
My late grandfather never played, but acquired a long wave radio set, which he used to tune into Radio Lyon and various other French radio stations in the 50s and 60s. We lived with him for some years and during that time I must have developed an ear for the accordion tunes he was also very fond of. One or two Scottish players made albums of older style French musette material, the most famous of them all being Will Starr, who played an instrument similar to that used by Emile Vacher. In the UK they are known as British Chromatic, but they are a version of the diatonic accordion with Stradella basses. Quite a few modern pro UK players are excellent at playing French musette, although I think it has been a very long time since any of them made an album dedicated to the genre. I have never taken much interest in the UK accordion scene at all.
As a kid I was discouraged from playing the accordion, as its main use in my home area was to play sectarian type tunes by members of the Protestant Orange Order, and their enemies, the various Roman Catholic Irish Republican organisations. Most people in my home area of Scotland are of Irish descent, and religion plays an altogether too large part in their lives.
Consequently I never really got interested in the accordion until I was about 32 years of age, and I decided I wanted to learn to play French musette. There were no teachers of CBA in my locality so I had to try and teach myself. I eventually got in touch with an old English accordionist who now lives in Scotland. Frank Mabbutt has an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of French and Italian accordion. His father was a pro player in London and he has met a lot of French recording stars in his time. He was also a close friend of Albert Delroy and Tommy Kettles, two of the very few UK players to have played professionally in France. Frank imparted a wealth of information to me, and got me interested in some of the French media covering the instrument, when those were still available.
Thats where all of my knowledge comes from, as well as reading countless articles on the internet when that facility became available.
So what happened? I suffered a very serious injury to my right hand in 1997, and I never recovered the flexibility I had previous to that. I can still play, but my fingers sometimes dont do what my brain tells them to. It was a hard enough task working on my own without the hand injury, which proved just too difficult to overcome.
Over time I just became frustrated and returned to playing guitar, which I can still manage OK with a plectrum.
I still have four CBAs that I play occasionally, but Ive dropped in and out of the forum over the last few years. Some recent personal family tragedies caused me to develop a negative attitude to music and life in general, so I try not to get involved in the forum too much, as my bad attitude often shows through in my posts.
I enjoy reading your posts, coming as you do from Belgium, where the musette was also King for a good many years.
Few people on here will have heard of Oscar Denys, Hector Delfosse, Adolphe Deprince, Willy Staquet, Rene Ninforge, or Albert Hennebel, but all of those Belgian players, and many more, were as much a part of the French musette as their French counterparts.
I still enjoy listening to the music from time to time, but the frustration of not being able to play as well as I used to means that I often just put the accordions away for months or even years at a time.
Heres Will Starrs version of Vachers Martelette Polka
He takes a bit of licence here and there, but he was probably playing it by ear. In those days the strong Scottish musette tuning wasnt too far away from the French tuning of the time, but the same cannot be said today.
