stuart estell

Sorry, Stuart - if that was Swaledale, it was my fault. No, no, not at all Geoff! I found the sessions at Swaledale really enjoyable this year - but then I know most of the English tunes that get played there even if I couldn't tell you what half of them are called. The Irish ones I was happy to leave to other people - especially given that we had Kate MacNamara playing. What I was really referring to was a session that's fairly local to me. It plays mostly breakneck Irish reels with the occasional breakneck Breton tune interspersed and I just can't make sense of it. Even with dots (which someone obligingly provided me with the one and only time I went down) everything blazed past so fast that my fingers hardly had time to catch up before they'd gone on to the next tune. Not much fun. I was invited to start a tune, so I played Sweet Jenny Jones, fairly steadily, in C. No-one joined in!

I don't know it's history either - I learnt it from the "Morris On" LP. I do think there's room for unadorned filth occasionally though...

All I'll say is that it's a reference connected to the album's dedicatee (as most of the track titles are), and has nothing whatsoever to do with my own mother's bath.

Ye gods, it must weigh a tonne.

Folks, I've finally got round to putting an album together and releasing it as a CD, spurred on by the wish to record something as a tribute to my friend Wild Willi Beckett who passed away earlier this year. It's called Mother's Thinking Bath and is an album of 11 original instrumental tracks, including "Will Beckett's March", which I posted up the dots for in the "Tunes" forum a little while ago. There are concertinas (duet and anglo) and appalachian dulcimers galore on it, plus guitars, bass, piano, harmonium, autoharp... even the dreaded melodeons put in an appearance I've recorded the whole thing myself - so all the arrangements are performed by me in their entirety and multi-tracked. The tunes themselves are very firmly in the English and Appalachian traditions. As a tribute to Willi all profits from the first batch of CDs is being donated to Water Aid, which was his preferred charity, and which received the proceeds from his last gig back in October. If you're interested in hearing samples or buying a copy, there's now a special page for the album on my website. Thanks in advance for your support!

No, it wasn't so much that - the reeds simply weren't very predictable at lower volumes. Couple that with a stridency of tone that my box doesn't have, and it just wouldn't have been a good instrument for song accompaniment.

I play a 67 which is, I think, the same size as the 71 I picked up and played with last weekend at Swaledale. Someone more knowledgeable than me will be able to give you measurements, but in terms of manageability I don't think there's really a great deal of difference. The size difference between that and an 80-ish key box is quite noticeable - they do feel pretty bulky - but it's more the added weight I've noticed when playing the bigger instruments. I don't think it's anything you wouldn't get used to quite quickly though; in fact I passed up an 81 key last year - but not because it was too big or too heavy, it was just too loud!

Excellent - I'm sure you'll find the new instrument will help your playing no end. Best of luck!

I find that I pick up session tunes quite slowly, so if surrounded by people playing an unfamiliar tune at breakneck speed, I'm likely to just look bewildered (or more bewildered than normal) and slope off to find another beer...

Hi Stuart, I’m sorry that you can’t listen to music during work. How cruel. I’m also sorry to say that the Texas session part that is posted on my blog is only one time through the B section of the tune. If you want to hear more just let me know. What a great tune - and yes, I'd love to hear more if possible, thanks Jody.

Harry had his Bastari squashbox with him at the Swaledale Squeeze last weekend, and played it very briefly after his "interesting concertina recordings" session. I had a quick go on it, and hadn't realised how alien the keyboard layout feels, especially for a diatonic instrument - couldn't get anything sensible out of it at all!

It does take all sorts but I actually like the clip very much. There again my dad has his own barrel organ, and I've been to many steam rallies with large fairground organs so perhaps I am sensitised to "mechanical" sounding music . Having listened to a number of these big band peices the Fairground Organ going out of control is a bit hard on some of the very nice playing I have listened to. Sorry Al, when I first made that comparison with a fairground organ I was only referring to the tone-colour; I didn't mean to suggest that the top bands would sound at all mechanical. That excerpt Chris posted up for you really is wonderful though. Now all we have to do is persuade Jenny Cox that the Hawkwood Band needs to meet every weekend instead of once a year

I can't listen while at work but I'm really excited about hearing the clip from the Texas session with Mark Gilston and Stephen Seifert! Will get and listen to that when I get home tonight...

Oh, it's from playing a duet? I thought it was just the beer.

Steve Bradley and I finally got round to doing a little bit of recording together at the Swaledale Squeeze this last weekend; having spent a couple of years saying that we ought to whenever we saw each other, I took some recording gear with me this time. We settled on doing a couple of Pink Floyd songs from the album "The Final Cut" with a mixture of both of our voices, English concertina, Maccann Duet, and a Shruti box (a type of Indian drone box), which Steve plays with his feet while playing concertina! The recordings are here if you're interested

Great stuff Wendy! I don't know the original but the way you play Walking After You, it has a really nice countryish feel to it. And you sing it really, really well.

I have a similar relationship with my adjoining neighbour - he plays a hammond organ at completely random times of day/night, I do likewise with free reeds and everything else, and we get along famously.

Excellent, see you there... By the way, I always thought the received wisdom was that instruments that change shape when you play them aren't to be trusted... that covers a multitude of sins including the really insidious things like trombones

Yes - I think you only need to look as far back as what happened with Punk, rather than Rock & Roll as a whole. For many people it was hailed as a Year Zero for popular music - the DIY ethic meant you didn't have to be technically competent and anyone could do it. Yet now that very idea, as you suggest Robert, is looked back on with a certain nostalgia (remember that dreadful "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker" song last year?), and any number of bands who claim "punk influences" miss the point completely by obsessing over the clarity of their studio sound for months on end. It's an idealised past viewed through corporate-tinted spectacles... My own take on it is that a lot of people like to stick with what's familiar when it comes to music, regardless of what genre they like, so anything that's easy to market ("Barry and the Watering Cans are the new Coldplay!") will be picked up on by the record companies - and I think that it's that that contributes to the steady descent into more and more mainstream blandness. But for all that, I think the democratisation that the internet is bringing about is a really wonderful thing - much good will come of it, I hope.

The sound of a concertina band at close quarters really is like nothing else on earth, I think. I've played in both brass bands and the Hawkwood Concertina Band, and a big concertina band produces a sound you can completely lose yourself in, even more so than a brass band. It's a wonderful thing.

Certainly in the UK the "fringe" Rock scene has never seemed so healthy - at least in part fuelled by the Internet and the ability for niche performers to sell online direct to their fans. I think that's true. MySpace, for all the fact that it's owned by Mr. Murdoch and his henchmen, is a great way of discovering them. However, it can also be a thoroughly depressing way of finding hundreds of bands who all want to sound like Coldplay. I don't agree with that, personally. To pick two examples that are familiar to me, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are fantastically entertaining, and not just because they plump for music that wouldn't normally form part of their instrument's repertoire. As for concertina bands, to my mind they're more like brass ensembles than a "single instrument" band; the tonal differences between, say, the top trebles and the baritones and basses are huge. It's a good, coherent sound. Whether it appeals to you or not is largely going to depend on whether you like the sound of a large and angry fairground organ

And on some better-quality small Lachenals that I've seen as well.

I'd been thinking of posting up a "roll call" for next weekend actually. Looking forward to it immensely as always. It must rank as my most sleepless weekend of the entire year

Cause trouble, me? Surely not. I'm a good boy, I am, to misquote Ms. Eliza Doolittle... To sidetrack briefly, I remember that piano-keyboard duet well. It's a curious beast, and if you play piano it's very disorientating to suddenly not have the use of your thumbs. Although "symphonies" is a bit of an exaggeration; I think I actually just about managed to bash "Constant Billy" out of it To swing back to our original subject, keyboards like the piano-keyboard duet system really bring it home to you how great the design of something like the Maccann is. The Jeffries system is perhaps less so, but is still enormously playable when set against the piano-keyboard box.

Why not?