Hurricane
Ivan, a dying monster, blew itself out in rain and thunder over western
Massachusetts the weekend of September 17-19, 2004. It poured and
it roared. But inside the Lodge and satellite buildings at rustic
Bucksteep Manor in Washington Mass., several score of free-reed enthusiasts pumped
back as good as they got, answering the storm with a musical
tohu-bohu. It was the 16th Annual Northeast Squeeze-In
(fondly known as NESI). For accordionists and concertina players
and their stringed accomplices, nothing dampens the sheer fun of this
retreat from the world of woe, this foretaste of a stormless world to
come.
Produced
by The Button Box, the free-reed emporium recently relocated to
Sunderland, Mass., NESI is, appropriately, a free-form revel largely
improvised by its revelers. It consists of workshops, musical
caucuses, jam sessions, eating and drinking, spontaneous tutorials and
can-you-top-this virtuoso challenges, culminating in the Saturday night
Cabaret and Contra Dance and an open-ended pub sing. Most workshops
are scheduled on the spot and anyone may teach, lead, attend or simply
hang out at the Manor House, where the cash bar is always open, or in the
Button Box sales room located in the Barn.
Bucksteep’s motel-style accommodations are comfortable and clean; less expensive
bunk-housing and campsites are available, with or without
comestibles. Speaking of food, the viands have leapt an octave in
quality since being entrusted to Rich Nawrocki and Creative
Catering. Saturday night’s garlicky roast beef, rare and sliced on
the board, and ginger glazed salmon filets were especially notable.
Vegetarians did not go undernourished, but late risers did, as breakfast
was withdrawn promptly at the appointed hour.
Friday
arrivals drifted among old friends. Sessions organized (and
disorganized) themselves in the Manor House and on the porch as the weekend’s
reckless race to pleasure cranked up. A few familiar faces were
missing, chief among them Lynn and Tony Hughes – Tony is recovering from a
health crisis precipitated by an attack of yellow jackets – and Isabel
Eccles, also meeting a health challenge. They were missed, and we
send love to these and other absent co-conspirators and hope they’re all
still crazy and back with “their people” next September.
At the
Button Box sales room, the emporium’s new and used instrument
inventory,
tapes, CDs, books and instruments on consignment sale were all
available
for inspection, testing and purchase. Featured offerings included
not only vintage Wheatstones and Jeffries but the contemporary Morse
line of concertinas, whose creator, Rich Morse (founder of The
Button Box, and one of the few Morris dancers able to jig to his own
melodeon accompaniment) was on hand.
Workshop
and session venues included the spacious Barn, two gazebos, two tents
(unusable in the Saturday deluge) and the acoustically brilliant stone
chapel near the Manor gate. Players could attend Scottish, Irish,
Morris and Quebecois workshops, a class in instrument repair offered by
Frank Edgley, and an introduction to the Duet concertina. Midway
through Saturday’s tempest, a tremendous blast shook the Manor House to its
foundation. Stewart Dean announced the world had ended. After
a short prayer, the music resumed. (Stewart was later discovered to
have been misinformed.)
Free-reedniks
are an incredibly friendly breed, and NESI sometimes seems like a
congress of golden retrievers. Players thrust their instruments on
one another, urging everyone to have a go at it. Tunes are rendered
and slowly re-rendered for instruction, taping or notation. Experts
initiate novices into the arcana of Irish or Quebec ornamentation,
progress is noted in returnees who were beginners a year ago, kids are
welcome and included if they play. Banjoists, fiddlers and
guitarists are regarded as fellow-travelers. In fact, the whole
weekend is promiscuously sociable, but we won’t go into the seamier
(unbuttoned) side of the free-reed scene other than to say that it has
been a number of years since it’s been warm enough to fire up the hot
tub.
The
balance of power among instruments varies from year to year. Button
accordions predominated in the 90s, but in recent years concertinas,
particularly English, have proliferated. The sometimes-disrespected
piano accordion – with its eleventy-thousand basses (making it possible
to play in keys with more sharps than a poker table) and its unfortunate
association with pencil moustaches, “Lady of Spain” and R.V. rallies at
Shoney’s – flourished this year in all its mother-of-pearlescence.
But no free-reed goes unflourished at these pandaemonia. Bob
Godfried has introduced antique harmoniums (brought for display from his
formidable collection); melodicas, once regarded as a mere step up the
evolutionary ladder from the hair-comb kazoo, were on exhibit (ask me
sometime and I’ll sing you the TV jingle used in Hohner’s first and only
melodica ad campaign); and who can forget Ken Sweeney at past Cabarets
playing with himself on concertina and harmonica?
Craig Hollingsworth (of The Gypsy Wranglers)
leading an accordion band in “My Blue Heaven,”; South African native Sean
Minnie and friends playing a Boer polka; Ken Sweeney bringing down the
house with Shel Silverstein’s mermaid song; the Squeeze Play accordion
band; national treasures Deanna Stiles and Bob McQuillen (steady left
hand of New England contra dancing); Rachel Hall both in solo and with a
concertina band; and Allison Aldrich sharing a musical tribute on the
Jeffries concertina to her late partner, Byron Smith, known and loved as
a dancer, musician and founder of Kairos Audio.
After
sixteen years, the NESI Philharmonic, convened annually “for all who
will” under Craig’s “one-and-a-two-and-a” for the Saturday contra dance,
has acquired creditable chops and a core repertoire. Called by
Ethan Plunkett, the dance picked up where the Cabaret left off,
concluding at midnight with a performance by a late-arriving Cape Verdean
accordion ensemble. The stamina-blessed could go on to the pub sing
and session (fueled by bowls of M&M’s) at the Lodge, which did not
adjourn until the small hours were getting large.
Staggering
into a bright, rinsed Sunday morning, squeezers converged on the
sumptuous brunch table and then, as if to see how much fun the body can
take, plunged into more workshops and sessions before reluctantly
packing
up and returning to the drab, squalid world. But the weekend
produced in this participant, anyway, a rush of endogenous opiates that
helped me survive the blows of November, and I look forward to renewing
that musical high at the next NESI (scheduled for September 16-18,
2005). Heartfelt thanks to Rich Morse, Doug Creighton, Craig
Hollingsworth and the Button Box staff for making it all happen.
Rich
here .... I'd like to add a PS about the very special concertina band
workshop we had this year. Typically we work on some multi-part piece,
usually a Sousa march or other popular "tune-of-the-day" - but this
year we had a piece
created for us!
Last year I got to know Mike Knudsen through the r.m.ragtime newsgroup
(being a ragtime aficionado myself) and was quite taken by his
rendition of
City of Ships which is a tribute and booster song for
Bath, Maine USA, to advertise the virtues of this three-century-old center of New England shipbuilding. My idea of reworking the
City of Ships
into standard concertina band format was quite appealing to him - which
made for an interesting, fun, and often time-consuming summer project.
We finished up only a week before NESI. Our collaboration yielded 6
parts including two new sections Mike had created just for our
presentation.
Unfortunately the recording we had made during the concert didn't work out....
Here's an mp3 of our midi score
(227KB). Close your eyes and sense the ships rocking on the ocean,
watch out for the "Fog Horns and Shipwreck" section (secretly
sub-titled "More work for our shipbuilders"), the lamentation during
the depression when times were slow for the shipbuilding industry, and
the hopes for better times. In the piece the sequential instrument
entry and simple melody was shared by all parts from piccolo to both
treble and baritone parts to the bass. The favorite of all was to be
Monty the bass concertina, played by Rachel Hall.
Mike can be reached through his
home page which features many of his compositions.
