Bayan time (22)

A pleasant early afternoon today: I just played at the Topsham Music Festival (ongoing until 10pm) outside the Lighter Inn at Topsham Quay, in aid of the Macmillan cancer charity. It originally was to be a Blues Festival, but they widened the brief. Nevertheless, I stuck with the original plan and worked on some blues - a new venture for me - and went with Careless Love, a blues-y instrumental of Gershwin's aria Summertime, and the St James Infirmary Blues.

Bayan time (21)

I haven't mentioned the progress on the bayan for a while. It's not through lack of interest, but because it's quietly become a fixture of my life.

Bayan time (20): busy week

Detail from The 'Sham performance

Busy week musically: on Tuesday I played two spots at Matthews Hall for the Topsham Town Fayre Musical Extravaganza (as backing for the singer-guitarist John 'Wafty' Waft, and with The 'Sham, a band put together from regular TOPJAM members) - see the Exeter Express & Echo gallery - and the previous Sunday I was part of a small group providing music for a street picnic in Topsham.

It's a very good feeling. I've been playing bayan for around two-and-a-half years now, and feel I've overcome the performance anxiety that still dogged me a year ago; I can tell it's there at some level (I get very warm, and feel a little hyper after playing), but it doesn't seem to get as far as my fingers. It also feels good to be developing a distinct style and area of specialisation; Ben Beeson, who directed The Mysteries earlier this year, said I was good at "comping" - impromptu and appropriate accompaniment - and I'm enjoying developing this skill as well as solo playing. The 'Sham was an interesting line-up of acoustic guitars, bass, vocals, keyboard, accordion, cello and congas, playing original material by Dan Durdin.

The bayan's compressed right-hand scale enables very rich chord and melody playing, and I've increasingly found that for band work, it's easier to just play the right hand. This is partly because other people are doing bass and bass chords far more audibly, and partly because it's rather difficult to mike up the bass keyboard, which moves with the bellows. I went through a stage of angst, feeling it was an unskilled cop-out to play this way, but I was very encouraged by a spot of Googling and looking at YouTube - it finds plenty of other backing players, far better than me, doing exactly the same (watch the accordionist in Värttinä's Nahkaruoska - below -  who is not using his left hand at all). A static microphone on a stand picks up the right hand pretty well, though I'm investigating the idea of getting a dedicated accordion microphone, a three-element bar microphone that sticks with Velcro next to the grille. They do cost at least £80, however. Decisions ...

I admit, by the way, that it really tickles me being the bald-ish tattooed accordionist at the side of the band. I've never - in life in general - wanted to be at the front of things, but being distinctive and essential in the near background is very satisfying.


Check out the accordionist playing right hand only - clearly I'm not doing it wrong.

- Ray

Bayan time (18) - Mysteries

Panic time,  more like! I've signed up to play in the band for a local production of The Mysteries, Tony Harrison's adaptation of the mediaeval mystery plays - rather strange retellings of Biblical stories where the canonical texts are embellished with folk-myth accretions and contemporary dramatic elements.

Ben Beeson, the musical director, was looking for a slightly off-the-wall band line-up, and asked me if I'd like to take part. It's quite a challenge. The production is on in about a month, and my sight-reading is very slow; plus I've had to rapidly sharpen my ability to find specific notes and chords on the bayan. However, the first rehearsal went pretty well, and it seems more people than I realised are in not so different a position.

From the flyer:

Tuesday 23rd to Friday 26th April, St Margaret's Church
The Mysteries
Tony Harrison's adaptation of the mediaeval mystery plays, presented by Estuary Players: Director Alan Caig / Musical Director Ben Beeson
7.30pm
Tickets £8 from Topsham News or telephone 01392 873043
www.topshamestuaryplayers.org.uk

"The Mystery Plays represent the beginnings of English drama. Performed by the craft guilds around mediaeval cities, they were designed to teach the stories and lessons of the Bible - Old and New Testaments - at a time when not only was the Bible not translated into English, but most people could not read anyway.

"They are a rugged but poetic way of telling stories, and are told with humour, passion, and a relentless devotion to moving the plot along.

"Estuary Players are aiming to make this a big production, with a live band throughout, a large cast and all in the exciting setting of Topsham's magnificent parish church. We are using the adaptation made by poet Tony Harrison for the acclaimed National Theatre production in the early 80's, although that eventually extended to three full plays, and included long plays about the Harrowing of Hell and Doomsday which we are not going to attempt.

"Harrison drew on all the extant cycles, the complete ones of which are the York, Wakefield and Coventry versions, and he retained the mediaeval English where it was understandable still, but where not he retained a Northern rhythm and vocabulary so that the whole is as authentic as it can be and still be perfectly understandable to modern audiences."

Elaborating on this: "I've had to rapidly sharpen my ability to find specific notes and chords on the bayan". It may may sound surprising, pretty lame even, that I haven't practised this as much as I might. But the bayan strongly depends on muscle memory (particularly for the left hand, whose buttons the player can't see) and when playing I'm chiefly aware of the relative positional relationships associated with the key of a tune - tonic, dominant, subdominant, relative minor - rather than what their note names are. I don't often need to (say) hit a G# with no context.

To help with this, I ran up a little reference chart for the white notes.

The convention with button-key accordion note charts is near-invariably to present the keyboard like this as if you were looking at it lying on your side. I don't know why - maybe it's ease of fitting on a page, maybe it's piano accordion influence - but I've never found it very easy to use.

The one I made (right) breaks with that convention, by being orientated the way you actually see the right-hand keyboard if you lean over and look down at it, and I find it a lot more helpful.

- Ray

Bayan time (17): back at TOPJAM

TOPJAM - 28th Oct
photo by Martin Stork

Looking back, I see I haven't posted anything about bayan progress since April. This is not through lack of interest, but just nothing spectacular to tell of; it's been a time of slow consolidation, quite probably stuff I should have done more at the start, such as getting the upward and downward runs more polished (the layout doesn't lend itself to playing runs, unless fully chromatic), finding notes reliably, and bass work.

And - I guess unsurprisingly - I didn't feel terribly motivated in July-August, when the cancer investigations got into full swing. Practice has been a bit hard work since I started chemotherapy: a lot of the time, the bayan seems to have doubled its normal two stone weight. Nevertheless, I've got in some solid practice recently - a bit of a break seems to have done some good - and on Sunday I played at TOPJAM (the local music session run by Martin Stork and David Gander - see Facebook).

Due to a double booking, we had to move from the Globe Malthouse to the Passage House Inn this time: quite a small venue, so numbers were down. But there was a very good line-up. I didn't stay the whole session (I did find it quite tiring) but very much enjoyed the reggae by singer-songwriter Paul Kouatchou, and a guy whose name I can't remember at this instant, playing amazing fingerstyle guitar pieces by Andy McKee.

I played what have become my party pieces: Ochi Chyornye, Koskaan et muuttua saa (aka Adagio Cardinal) and Peg o' My Heart (the Singing Detective theme) in one slot, then Libertango later while another artist was setting up. Grim though I look in the picture, I think it went very well; a couple of people commented that Peg o' my Heart was the best I'd ever played it, and for once I felt so too. I was particularly pleased that the performance anxiety (getting distracted by people talking or moving about - unavoidable at a pub gig) is much more under control.

It was brilliant to be back. They're a nice crowd at TOPJAM, and (I may have said this before) genuinely welcoming if you play something a bit off the ordinary track. Next time I hope to have something new again. A friend has been pestering me for a long time to learn the excellent Beer Barrel Polka...

- Ray

Kimmo Pohjonen and accordion wrestling

My brother-in-law Andrew (who now clearly knows the combination of weirdnesses that tend to grab my attention) sent me a link to a Guardian piece I didn't spot, Accordion wrestling – squeezy does it (Stephen Moss, 29 May 2012).

This concerns a current show on world tour, a "a sport, theatre, dance, music performance art piece" by the Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen, who has been nicknamed ""the Jimi Hendrix of the accordion", which combines accordion with choreographed acrobatics and grappling by Helsinki wrestlers. The concept, he explains, derives from a genuine historical scenario:

How did he get the idea? "Around 15 years ago, I was in the north of Finland and an old accordion player told me he used to play for wrestling matches. I thought it was a joke – but I discovered it was true. It started in the 1920s and was common in the 40s and 50s, when wrestling was the most popular sport in Finland. That was also when accordion players were stars."

Finnish wrestling has little of the camp theatricality of the sport ITV used to show on Saturday afternoons. It is very serious. A bout can take hours as the two competitors grapple for an advantage. The accordion player entertained the crowd the whole time. Another important function, he says, was to cover up the farts emitted by the wrestlers. "One of the old players said he was told to watch the eyes of the wrestlers, and when you see the fart is coming to produce some special effect to cover it." Not something you are taught at the Royal College of Music.

There are several other YouTube examples - search on "accordion wrestling" - and the official site for the performance tour is here. UK performances are:
6 June Manchester Royal Northern College of Music, 7.30pm, £15.00 (£13.50 conc), rncm.ac.uk / 0161 907 5555
8 June, London York Hall promoted by the Barbican, 8.00pm, £20, www.barbican.org.uk / 020 7638 8891

I'd run into Pohjonen a while back, and find his music exciting as another example of where accordion fusion is going. Much of his work is hard to classify, spanning folk fusion, rock, modern jazz, contemporary classical, and avant-garde. Check out, below, Regenerator, a track from his Earth Machine Music Symphony, which combines accordion with raw and percussive sampling from farm machinery.


Again, there are plenty of further tracks on YouTube. For example: Routa and Vala (from Pohjonen's soundtrack pieces for the Kalevala-inspired Finnish-Chinese film Jade Warrior); Emo (part1) played by Pohjonen along with the Kronos Quartet; Animator, a dark solo multimedia performance; Genesis, an initially atonal piece with the Tapiola Sinfonietta; Sumo, a moody piece by the accordion / guitar / percussion trio K Cube; and Keko, a kind of accordion / folk fusion / beatbox improvisation that builds to a frenetic climax and collapse (the implication seems to be that the accordion is finally playing the player until it kills him - it reminds me of  HP Lovecraft's The Music of Erich Zann).

See the Kimmo Pohjonen website for background: www.kimmopohjonen.com

---

Switching from the sublime to the mundane: I am, by the way, scheduled to play an accordion spot on Topsham Quay on the afternoon of June 2nd - provisionally at 2.45 and 3.30.

Addendum: it went ... acceptably. I got very distracted at one point in mid-piece when the T bus backed, beeping, into its parking bay adjacent to the stage, and the ensuing mistakes flustered me for the next two pieces. But the audience reception was very good: clearly it didn't seem as bad to them as it did to me!

- Ray

Bayan time (16): Strange moments

What they call the RRATD at Topjam

How many people find themselves in a small Devon town walking home in a rainstorm pushing a pram containing a large Ukrainian button key accordion wrapped in a towel?

Occasionally I find myself looking at what I'm doing, and boggling at how completely weird, and unguessable as a future, it would have seemed to my younger self (30-40 years ago). I'm sure others must experience these peculiar moments.

It was a very good evening. I played at the Topsham Folk Club: the excellent Por una cabeza (a very nice tango that's appeared in a lot of films, such as True Lies and Scent of a Woman) and Ghost Riders in the Sky ( which I treat as borderline folk, it having resonances with the Wild Hunt and the standard folk motif of a dying/dead rake warning someone to mend their ways). They went down well, as far as I can tell - the organiser commented on the impressiveness of playing the equivalent of a grand piano on your knee - and they're sufficiently ecumenical to take along to the next Topjam (non-folk) session. Then, there being half an hour to spare, I wound down with some friends in the adjacent Lighter Inn.

The Folk Club has moved to Topsham's Route 2 Café Bar from its regular spot in the Globe Hotel for the duration of the latter's renovation. I don't know what, if any, discussions are going on, but I think Route 2 is much superior for music. It has very good acoustics, a pleasant bright atmosphere, and easy access to the bar and toilets during performances. This is in strong contrast to the Globe setup, which was a gloomy dining-room with the furniture shifted to accommodate the event. I think the club would do well to stay at Route 2.

Addendum: although it's not quite the same thing, I find there is precedent for transporting musical instruments on prams. Check out the Busker Organ Music Site, which has many examples of organs transported on what, in many cases, are clearly adapted prams.

- Ray

Bayan time (16): videos

I just uploaded the long-promised videos to YouTube. I'd delayed it because of the recordings coming out very murky-sounding; the solution turned out to be simply to reduce the laptop microphone input volume. (And I recorded these in the bathroom - the tiles give nice acoustics).

I've embedded them in the updated Bayan time (15): Angry Birds (11th April 2012) and Libertango (18th April 2011) posts, and the direct YouTube links are here: Libertango / Angry Birds.

I'm simultaneously very pleased with the progress, and dismayed at how much better others on YouTube are: comparison reveals a lot of weaknesses in my technique. There's a long haul ahead ...

- Ray

Bayan time (15): Angry Birds

Last Sunday I went to the Topsham Folk Club (at its current temporary venue in Route 2 Cafe Bar while The Globe is being renovated). I'm not terribly into folk - at least in its English folk club incarnation - but at the moment I'm getting in as much public performance practice as I can, as I'm due to play on Topsham Quay on June 2nd. There was a full turnout, so I only played one slot, but I took along a couple of Finnish tunes: a very slimmed-down instrumental version of Koskaan et muuttua saa (a.k.a. Adagio Cardinal), and the decidedly non-folk Angry Birds theme by Ari Pulkkinen. They went down very well, and the second one definitely raised a chuckle in the back row.

On the off-chance that you don't know it, the Angry Birds theme backs the Rovio Mobile strategy puzzle game originally developed as an app for Apple iOS devices such as the iPhone:

Ari Pulkkinen’s most famous composition so far, Angry Birds theme reflects the silliness and different phases of anger of the Angry Birds – the first phase is the peaceful phase of the birds when they are happy and have all of their eggs (it’s also famous for its ability to stuck to everyones mind), second phase is when the Birds realise that their eggs have been stolen and the last phase is when the Birds are chasing the pigs for the crimes against birdmanity.
- aripulkkinen.com

I think one can overanalyse! It's a vigorous and witty tune - here's the original - that has inspired a number of arrangements such as Lara's piano version, this klezmer-style Genevieve Trio version for soprano sax and piano accordion, the comic duet by the excellent Pomplamoose, this London Philharmonic Orchestra one ... and, naturally, standalone piano accordion. It's also perfect for bayan.

- Ray

High ...

photo by Martin Stork

Just had a very successful evening, music-wise. First, I went to the TOPJAM session at Topsham Rugby Club. We (the organisers and core regulars) felt majorly low about the poor turnout this evening. I guess the unseasonably warm weather, and the longer day after the clocks went forward, might have something to do with this. It was, weather-wise, a brilliant evening today: a clear dusk, with Venus, Jupiter, and the waning moon in close conjunction. Quite a few people might prefer to be lounging outside a country pub contemplating the planets rather than being at an indoor music do.

Nevertheless, I played the set I'm working on for a forthcoming busking engagement at the beginning of June, and it went seriously well - that is, it had the desirable combination that the audience thought it did, I thought it did, and Clare (my best critic) thought it did. I felt, for the first time there, very relaxed about playing. At some level, I'm sure I was still anxious - by the end of the set, sweat was starting to drip off my nose - but whatever tension was causing it didn't seem to interfere with playing.

Due to the sparsity of attendance, we finished early, and after a useful chat about promotion and similar issues I went down to the rival engagement, the Topsham Folk Club, had a pint there (it was too late to play, as they schedule the lineup very early), then went next door to the Lighter Inn. There I got into conversation with some other people who'd moved on from the Folk Club, and it led to their requesting a brief demo of the bayan. We got dispensation from the bar manager, so I played my party piece, Ástor Piazzolla's Libertango. Again, it went extremely well despite my being a trifle ... errrm, discoordinated ... from the couple of beers earlier. The outcome was a commitment to go and play at next week's Folk Club session - and we have potential attenders for the next TOPJAM.

For a couple of months, I've been feeling pretty disconsolate about progress with the bayan - I'd hit the wall of starting to get middling-good, but being dragged down by repeated fumbles due to performance anxiety - so this was a highly encouraging evening. Good result. I'll get some current pieces up on YouTube soon.

- Ray

Bayan time (14): Peg o' My Heart

I was inspired to learn Peg o' My Heart while watching the current repeat showing of Dennis Potter's musical psychological drama The Singing Detective. It's amazing how old some of these tunes are: long before its re-use as Potter's theme tune, I remember it as being a classic on the radio in my childhood, and it ultimately tracks back to 1913, when it featured in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway.

This is a fairly light busking arrangement; I deliberately avoided the common tendency with accordion arrangements of Peg o' My Heart to bury this very catchy tune in a soup of chords. I loosely based the intro on that of the 1956 Gene Vincent cover.

As with a lot of well-remembered popular tunes from the 19th and early 20th century, the piece known as Peg o' My Heart is actually just the refrain of the original. You can see the original score at the Duke University Library's Historic American Music Sheet collection (item a0021). On YouTube, Ted Kloba plays a very nice arrangement of the full version on a Chemnitzer concertina (Peg O' My Heart - credit to Clare for spotting this). I've been practising it this very evening.

"Peg", according to the song sheet refers to "J Hartley Manners' wonderful character Peg in Oliver Morosco's production of the comedy Peg O' My Heart at the Cort Theatre, New York" (John Hartley Manners  was a London-born playwright of Irish extraction). Manners' original text was a romantic but, in places, fairly polemical novel concerning the tribulations in English society of Peg, a poor but feisty Irish-American girl who is born of the romance between "an Irish agitator" and an English lady. She finds she is to inherit a fortune - but only on condition that she doesn't see her father for three years and is trained in English manners by her mother's upmarket family. See Project Gutenberg, E-Text No. 3621.

Getting this video up was a bit of an encouragement. I felt very depressed after last Sunday's Topjam session, because I messed up two of the pieces (possibly not in ways as painfully audible to the audience as to me) through sheer performance anxiety (previously discussed). I start getting into a funk the moment anyone or anything's observing - even the video recorder on the laptop. My previous YouTube bayan videos have generally required a dozen increasingly irritated takes and splicing the best bits together; this time it just took two goes, with no splicing!

- Ray

Bayan time (13): a year on

photo by Martin Stork, Topjam session

This evening I went to the Topjam Session at Topsham Rugby Club, and it was a bit of an anniversary: it's been a year since the beginning of my involvement with the Орфей bayan. This post about a related instrument, the accordina, has a footnote mentioning that I ordered it around January 23rd). Time for reflection on progress ...

It's been, and continues to be, an exciting but pretty difficult experience. Since I'm not learning via any structured grade system, it's hard to describe what level I'm at, but it must be well beyond beginner by now. I've reached the point of having no great qualms about public playing; I'm beginning to tackle more advanced pieces, such as Ástor Piazolla's wonderful Libertango; and people seem genuinely impressed at the performance, and pleased when I turn up with the thing. The latter I think in strong part is down to my choice from the start to play an eclectic repertoire, and not just the stereotypical folk (this evening, for instance, I played Eye of the Tiger and a self-developed Country & Western pastiche of Barwick Green - aka The Archers theme tune).

I have mixed feelings. On the plus side, I've never before felt actively good at playing an instrument, nor practised without feeling it to be a chore, nor felt such a degree of certainty and committment about devoting large chunks of my day to music (hence the bayan tattoo earlier - it has been that much of a milestone). It wouldn't be exaggerating to say I feel a different person - a real musician, a bayanist - compared to a year ago, and it's slowly soaked in that it's quite an achievement to have got there from starting out in mid-life on an unusual and difficult instrument. (Clare deserves a major portion of the credit for putting up with the daily practising).

But at the same time, I tend invariably to feel very flat after performances: disappointed at how they went, whatever the reception. It's "I can play this perfectly at home" syndrome - some flavour of performanced anxiety. It doesn't stop me playing in public, but I still find that any kind of observation (even trying to record a video alone for YouTube) immediately makes me fumble well-rehearsed pieces. I've seen various advice: some advocate plain experience - perform in public until it's no longer anxiety-making - while others suggest more specific practice at "getting in the zone", learning to focus solely on the music and instrument so that the audience ceases to be a distraction. Both, I guess, are worth trying.

I'm also a little concerned about what bad habits I'm getting into from self-teaching, and I'm sure I'd have learned faster with tuition. Then again, I can hardly complain, as it was my decision to go for an instrument that's highly rare in the UK. As I don't want the expense of Skype lessons, I'm getting as much guidance as I can find from accordion/bayan websites and YouTube (the Bayanina Entertainment channel by Nina Tritenichenko is especially good, because her videos show the fingering clearly). Friedrich Lips's book Art of Bayan Playing is on my wish list, though I'm procrastinating about getting it - I think I'm slightly afraid of what I might find I'm doing wrong.

Otherwise, nothing is specifically bothering me except the vast amount of work ahead. For example, the right-hand keyboard has become thoroughly comfortable, but I need to put in left-hand practice on the counterbasses (the keys that, along with the fundamental bass notes, let you play left-hand scales on the Stradella system). And there's the work of building up a repertoire.

I don't know how good it'll be possible to get; as I've said, music for me is part of a generalism, and I'm well aware that I have less basic aptitude and dexterity than any number of musicians for whom music was their central major talent from childhood. I'll never be at Flight of the Bumblebee level. But I'm still progressing, and the experience has been thoroughly rewarding (both in pride at a skill, and the social opportunities it has opened up). I'm happy to see where it goes, and I just need not to get too despondent about the problems.

I'll put something else on YouTube soon.

This has been an essential piece of kit, which Martin has nicknamed the RRATD (Ray's Russian Accordion Transportation Device). The Орфей in its case weighs about two stone, and the case has a single suitcase-style carrying handle: it's not something you want to cart the half-mile to the Topsham Rugby Club for the Topjam Sessions. Hence the pram, which, as we don't drive, has been handy for a variety of local ferrying purposes: heavy cats to the vet; glass and cardboard to the recycling skips; materials for Clare's Christmas craft fair to Matthews Hall; the buffet and crockery for my mother-in-law's funeral tea at Grove House; and now this. It probably looks eccentric (they say that the definition of "eccentric" is when you don't realise that it is) - but it works.

I recommend the Topjam Sessions - today's was the fifth - though from past experience, I'm a little cautious of sessions. They can very easily turn into rehearsal space for close-knit pre-existing bands, squeezing out the possibility of spontaneous music-making and bringing new combinations of players together. I'm also very alert to, not to say a little paranoid about, the possibility that playing an unusual instrument might get me sidelined as the resident novelty act - I've encountered this happening to people who play something outside the usual band instruments.  So far, it hasn't been like that - it's been a good crowd of enthusiastic musicians, accepting of a variety of styles and skills (and not ageist). They've been a great encouragement and an incentive to explore new genres, pieces to play, and technical developments (such as singing while playing). However, I hope the organisers are aware of the possible pitfalls; I'll see how it continues. Check out the Facebook page - TOPJAM - if you're a musician in Topsham.

- Ray

Bayan time (12)

Not me! - but one of the performances I'm using for guidance.

So I went again to the Topjam Sessions at Topsham Rugby Club yesterday evening. If you saw me pushing a pram down the High Street, that was what it was about (we have an "eco-pram" that we use for carting the cats to the vet for their vaccinations, and it's equally good for transporting a very heavy musical instrument around town).

photo by Bridget Batchelor

I've been practising Ástor Piazzolla's Libertango, and gave it its first public outing. I mentioned working on this earlier this year (see Libertango, 18th April) but I shelved it as I wasn't getting anywhere, and felt I wasn't up to it yet. But I revisited it a couple of weeks ago, and this time found it learnable. It's a difficult piece, chiefly due to the tango syncopation and some unusual jazz chords on the bass (though you can get away with minor 7ths), and I made a couple of false starts - but after collecting myself, I managed straight through on the third try, and I think it went pretty well. I am, however, playing a skeletal unembellished version of it; there's a very long way to go.

If you're a musician in Topsham, I recommend the Topjam Sessions, organised by Martin Stork and David Gander and held in Topsham Rugby Club on some Sunday evenings (see Facebook for specifics). They've been extremely welcoming, considering I play a non-standard instrument; in fact, I've been blown away by the positive audience reaction to the bayan. Apart from their finding it interesting and unusual, I've had more than one person say they find the sound very evocative: of "being at the seaside", and of "being at a steam rally" (I hadn't anticipated this, but there is a kind of Gavioli flavour to some of the voices).

One other piece of good news; I mentioned in April - Bayan time (4) - having problems with being out of tune with other squeezeboxes at Topsham Folk Club, and assuming it was the bayan out of tune. I now think I was mistaken: both at the recent gig with Lily at A la Ronde and yesterday, the bayan was perfectly in tune with correctly-tuned instruments. Evidently at the Folk Club someone else nearby must have been out.

- Ray

Bayan time (11): progress

It's been about ten months since I took up bayan, and I guess I've reached a stage of consolidation: hitting the long-term learning curve. Having got thoroughly comfortable with the instrument (no more arm and shoulder pains), now I'm spending a lot of time on building a repertoire - learning medleys as well as distinctive individual pieces - and various aspects of technique.

It's a strange sensation being at this level. For the first time in my life, I feel truly at home with an instrument; on holiday I missed playing it. But getting to the point of competency opens up a vast and terrifying prospect of what needs doing in order to go beyond just competent - especially as I know I'm not musically gifted. Music for me is just a facet of generalism.

Particular areas for work include developing left-hand technique (counterbass scales and chord work beyond the basic keynote-chord motif I was used to on my old non-counterbass piano accordion); right-hand chord shapes beyond the basic major and minor chords; general right-hand technique (things like how to play triplets); and non-keyboard skills such as bellows control. Lack of tuition, beyond what I can see on YouTube, carries a huge risk of getting into mistaken habits, so I'm ordering Friedrich Lips' The Art of Bayan Playing, a classic tutorial that's only fairly recently been translated into English.

One thing I can work on without needing any deep secret: confidence in public playing.  All there is to that is taking every opportunity to do it. On Sunday I played - two slots of three pieces - at the first of the new TOPJAM music sessions at Topsham Rugby Club (see Facebook). That went very well, though to a small audience who were perhaps as much wowed by the unfamiliarity of the instrument as by the playing of it!  And if rehearsals go to plan, I'm playing a double act (with Lily Neal on violin) at the A La Ronde Community Christmas Tree Festival in Exmouth on Saturday.

I copied this image across from my other blog. I had this upper-arm piece done in April, when I was already aware what a milestone experience learning the bayan was turning out to be. For those into such things and in the East Devon area, I highly recommend Glory Bound Tattoos, on Rolle Street in Exmouth. I'd had a couple of recommendations from others, and their work online looked good. The shop has a nice atmosphere and the staff were very friendly and efficient; they also didn't mind taking on a quite precise self-designed image that didn't offer much artistic scope (the dots are actually round when I'm not contorting to take a self-photo). Regular readers may recognise the older one below as a stylised Isle of Wight.

- Ray

Bayan time (10): Ochi Chyornye

Another work-in-progress from Saturday: Ochi Chyornye (Очи чёрные = Black Eyes). Sorry about the general murkiness of sound; the laptop microphone isn't so good. It's a nice tune with such a huge history of variant covers that it allows plenty of scope for improvisation, whatever your skill level. It shows a couple of the many nice features of the bayan: the compactness of the layout, allowing a 'three-handed' effect (left-hand bass and, with unexceptional stretch, melody on right thumb and a third part over an octave above that using the other fingers of the right hand); and the ease of playing chromatic runs.

As the Wikipedia entry mentions, despite its reputation being stereotypically Russian, the lyrics to Очи чёрные are a Ukrainian romantic poem by Yevhen Hrebinka, and the music probably German. The poem is very Swinburne:

Очи чёрные, очи страстные
Очи жгучие и прекрасные
Как люблю я вас, как боюсь я вас
Знать, увидел вас я в недобрый час

Ох, недаром вы глубины темней!
Вижу траур в вас по душе моей,
Вижу пламя в вас я победное:
Сожжено на нём сердце бедное.

Но не грустен я, не печален я,
Утешительна мне судьба моя:
Всё, что лучшего в жизни Бог дал нам,
В жертву отдал я огневым глазам!

Dark eyes, passionate eyes
Burning and splendid eyes
How I love you, how I fear you
Verily, I espied you in an ill-starred moment

Oh, not for nothing are you darker than the deep!
I see mourning for my soul in you,
I see a triumphant flame in you:
A poor heart immolated in it.

But I am not sad, I am not sorrowful,
My fate is soothing to me:
All that is best in life, God gave us.
In sacrifice I returned to the fiery eyes!

Its tune is an 1884 arrangement of an originally piano piece called Hommage-Valse by a German composer, Florian Hermann. There's a deal of garbling of the composer name and title, but the most reliable sources I can find are in the Library of Congress Records of its Nicolas Slonimsky Collection ...

BOX 285 Gerdal, Sofus (arranger)
BOX 285 Ochi chernyia, ochi strastnyia (na motiv val'sa "Hammage" Germana)
[voice and piano]. Moscow: A. Gutkheĭl', 1884.
Photocopy and negative photocopy.
Based on "Hommage-valse" by Florian Hermann, quod vide.
...
BOX 287-A Hermann, Florian
Hommage-valse [piano]. [S.l.]: [s.n.], n.d.
Negative photocopy of original edition [?].

... and the entry in James J Fuld's The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk (pp 417-418), which notes further that it appeared in collection billed as "favourite songs of the Moscow gypsies".

- Ray

Bayan time (9): San Antonio Rose

I keep meaning to post videos on the bayan progress, but I seem to go into palm-sweating panic the instant the webcam is switched on.  However, here's one at last. I learned this today: the Western swing classic, San Antonio Rose. It's technically New San Antonio Rose, as I recalled the tune from the sung version, not the original Bob Wills instrumental. Check out the excellent Patsy Cline cover. My left little finger: I think it must be some flavour of dystonia. When my other left fingers are doing stuff, it does that.

- Ray

Bayan time (8)

Good result on the public performance front: this afternoon I busked for charity on Topsham Fore Street (it's Topsham Carnival Day, when they close the road to traffic after lunchtime). Being far less in the spotlight than at the Passage House Inn event, I didn't find anxiety a problem. The chief sensation was of needing to concentrate on staying "in the zone"; I did fluff a few notes when my attention drifted on to something else, but I even managed to keep playing when one of the shoulder straps on the bayan came unhitched. That would have thrown me only a couple of months ago. The proceeds came to £14.40: first paid gig - even if it's not for me - and not bad for 40 minutes or so (I have about 20 minutes of rehearsed repertoire now, and did two slots at the beginning and end of the afternoon).

- Ray

Bayan time (7)

The above video is not me playing, unfortunately, but Yuri Charyguine; however, it is the same instrument that I play (bayan - B system chromatic button accordion, that is) and I did play the same piece in public - rather less expertly - yesterday. It was all extremely scary: Martin, one of the organisers of Topsham Rock School, asked me a while back if I'd like to play a short slot for the Topsham Ferryman's Weekend open air music event at the Passage House Inn.

This was a great idea theoretically, but it was very different on the day.  There must have been around 60-70 people, and it was the first time I'd played amplified, but it went pretty well; I did a jazz-based set of Stormy Weather, Stranger on the Shore, and Autumn Leaves. I was majorly nervous, but it helped to go round the corner and play for a couple of minutes to warm up. In fact the anxiety didn't kick in fully until afterward, when I bought a cooling Mojito (below) and found I couldn't pick up the glass because my hand was shaking so much. Still, I can live with that: getting over public performance anxiety ("I can play this perfectly at home" syndrome) is one of the problem areas I'm having to work on, and it's definitely getting less during the actual playing.

(The act after me was Elphick the juggler, who briefly played piano accordion while riding a unicyle. I refuse to learn to do that!).

- Ray

Bayan time (7)

Another outing for the bayan at Topsham Folk Club.  It was so-so. I'd practised a nice arrangement of Cailín Óg a Stór, the majorly old Irish tune used for The Croppy Boy, Lady Franklin's Lament, and many other songs. However, when it came to performing it, about half-way through I managed to complete lose my finger position in the basses, and had to restart one verse. After that, being a bit flustered, I rushed the The Bluebell Polka, and it was far less tidy than I would have liked. It wasn't a complete disaster, but it stresses the need for as much public practice as possible - and a sign that I need to practise more at finding the C bass (this being a B-system accordion, the textured bass button, for locating the key by touch, is a B). There are options: 1) get used to it; 2) glue a rhinestone or similar to the C button;  3) open the bayan and see if the buttons can be swapped. Hmm.

Addendum: And I  played at the Drakes open mike night.  I guess it was a better class of so-so. The majorly good point was that the performance anxiety is decreasing a lot; I got through Stranger on the Shore, and Stormy Weather without mistakes (and even managed to slightly improvise in the latter's mid-section). However, while I feel I played pretty well, the whole gig felt indefinably flat. In large part, I think it was because I was competing with the seriously good singer-songwriter resident artist Sam Green (who also played well-liked rock stuff such as the Steve Miller Band's tiresome The Joker) and a remarkable virtuoso guest performance by a guy playing didgeridoo. Plus I'd be the first to admit I don't have much stage presence.

- Ray

Bayan time (6)

I just took the bayan on its first public outing, and played a short spot at Topsham Folk Club: Jay Ungar's Ashokan Farewell and the traditional Finnish waltz Metsäkukkia (Forest Flowers), both of which adapt very nicely for bayan. I was sufficiently nervous to fluff a few notes, but I was mostly fine and the slot got a very positive response. I ended up playing a bit of Stormy Weather in the car park for some of the attenders who were interested in how the five-row keyboard layout worked. It was reassuring to hear that I'm not alone in well-practiced pieces going wrong the moment you get in front of an audience; the Folk Club organiser told me that at a recent folk festival, he'd seen badges saying "I can play this perfectly at home". Anyhow, I'm not at all unhappy with how it went.

After getting on for four months playing, I found it was impossible to simultaneously keep up to speed on my old piano accordion.  It seemed to be interfering with developing muscle memory for the bayan's bass button spacing.  Consequently, I lent it to a friend who wanted to learn; he got on well with it, so I gave it to him as a birthday present, and he cooked us a Thai curry. Good result all round.

Bookmarked: Left hand chord combining on the accordion, an interesting page at Hans Palms's www.accordionpage.com that lists button combinations for getting moody jazz chords that aren't available on the Stradella basses.

- Ray