Chapter 11. Modern players in the old style

Concertina playing in all four countries of this study today is nearly unrecognizable from the music made by most of the early players in this archive. A key reason for this change has been the general demise in social dancing, at least of the types of ballroom dance that were prevalent in the heyday of the Anglo concertina. The repertoire of the Anglo in its heyday consisted principally of the music for these round dances and quadrilles. The general early- to middle-twentieth century demise of concertina playing paralleled the loss of ballroom dance; the two were symbiotic. In some places, like Australia and South Africa, these dance styles lived on a bit longer, and in South Africa these dance tunes were captured at the onset of commercial 78rpm recording. These early recordings from the 1930s seem to have instigated a move toward more complexity in playing styles. In South Africa, this complexity included the use of chromatic notes and improvisation taken from jazz, as well as experimentation with cross-row playing in new keys beyond the two 'home row' keys of the instrument. Although a few players in England experimented with chromatic playing, they were few in number and overall impact. However, with the morris dance revival of the 1960s and 1970s, a move toward complexity in chording and phrasing began that moved the playing of the instrument far beyond its humble two-row roots. In Ireland at the same time, the development of competitions at festivals spurred the use of cross-row fingerings across all three rows to enhance phrasing, as well as the addition of complex ornamentation, to an extent not seen earlier. As we have seen, these changes accompanied an abrupt change in the Irish repertoire, where a renewed emphasis on reels and other step dance tunes replaced the round dance repertoire of an older generation.

For this reason, it is difficult to find concertina players today who can and do play in the earlier style that was so attuned to house dancing during the heyday of the concertina - a style that was known in all four study countries by its simple phrasing, octave playing, and general lack of ornamentation. This chapter presents a few recordings by concertina players found in the author's travels who still play largely and/or convincingly in the octave style. By and large, the musicians of this group play for social dances, either as their main way of approaching the concertina or as a significant adjunct.

Australia

The largest single group of such players are located in Australia, for several reasons. There has never been a significant commercial recording industry or significant competitions to influence concertina playing in Australia, allowing it to remain close to its dancing roots. In some areas, notably the Nariel Valley area of Victoria, old time dancing has continued in relatively uninterrupted fashion to the present day, and many bands contain concertina and one row button accordion players. Also, there is in Australia a very strong 'colonial dance' and 'bush dance' revival movement that has is active and well-researched. The organizations there that hold dances endeavor to preserve older music and dances in relatively unaltered form.

Ian and Ray Simpson are brothers who were raised in Nariel. Their father was Neville Simpson, a concertina and accordion player and regular in the old Nariel band, where both brothers gained their appreciation of Australian dance music. A grandfather, Charlie Ordish, is among the players featured in Chapter 7, and they are related as well to Con Klippel. Ray moved to the Melbourne area some years back for work, and has been very active there in playing for colonial and bush dances. Ian and his wife Diane continue to live in Nariel and play for the old Nariel dances, along with their good friend Keith Klippel (below). Ian makes high quality wooden whistles and builds Anglo concertinas, and plays the button accordion and the saw in addition to the Anglo concertina.

In the following two recordings, Ian plays a C/G Anglo concertina of his own manufacture. Ian's playing is closely related to that of the Klippels and of course that of his father. Tickets, Please is a tune heard by his grandfather Charlie Ordish while attending a circus in Wodonga Australia. As the story goes, an accordion player was playing the tune while Ordish was standing near the ticket booth. Not knowing the tune's title, Ordish called it Tickets, please for the sounds with which he associated the tune. On the way home, Ordish visited the circus encampment and made sure he learned the tune from the circus musician.1

Ian plays the tune at a stately pace so that it closely adheres to the tempo used for the Nariel dances. He plays much of it in octaves, with frequent use of partial chords as well as sparse ornamentation. He plays it all on the C row, dropping the melody an octave at times to enable it to be played all on that row.

Ian plays the slow waltz The Rose of Tralee along with his wife Di, who accompanies a second verse on a wooden whistle made by Ian. He plays it in C, just like he plays Tickets, please. The key of C is a favorite in the Nariel band, because it has always been led by concertina and button accordion players with instruments tuned in C. He plays it all on the C row, at times in octaves, and at times not, as befits the passages in the melody. It is a lovely version, in harmony with the rural setting of their lives.

Ian and DI Simpson

Ian and Di Simpson standing in the entry of their Nariel home, 2011.

Ray Simpson has strong roots in rural Nariel but was separated by the press of employment from that area. He has been a city dweller for a number of years, in Melbourne, and is an accomplished musician for dances in that city. The tempo of urban life is much quicker than that in rural Nariel, and one can imagine hearing that in his playing. It is not often that one can hear music from two brothers, separated and living for years in very different environments, playing the same tune from their childhood. Here is Ray Simpson's version of the very same tune included above from Ian, Tickets, Please. Ray plays it primarily on the C row, as does Ian, but his tempo is quicker, he adds fewer partial chords than his brother, and he adds a considerably larger amount of ornamentation, including very rapid duplets of notes. Ray and his children all play Irish music - popular in Melbourne - in addition to Australian music, and the ornamentation appears to have originated from that experience.

Here Ray plays a Nariel variant of the old minstrel favorite, Golden Slippers. As in the above piece, he plays it in the key of C and all on the C row. In the B part, he raises the tune an octave when a low passage curbs his ability to continue to play the tune in octaves whilst remaining on the C row, thus signaling his Nariel roots; his brother Ian as well as their relative Con Klippel frequently use this technique (as did Scan Tester in England).

Ray Simpson

Ray Simpson at the National Folk Festival, Canberra, 2011.
Ray, with a serape over his suit and a mask, was leading a large column
of masked musicians and dancers to the festival's annual masked ball.

Keith Klippel is a third generation Australian concertina player and fourth generation free reed player who grew up in the Nariel valley, and now lives in nearby Tallangatta. The recordings of his father, Con Klippel, are featured in Chapter 7. Keith has played in the Nariel band for all his adult life, along with his friends Ian and Di Simpson and others, and today he mostly plays the button accordion in that band. For the purposes of this project, Keith has dusted off his father's Lachenal two row C/G Anglo concertina and plays a tune used for quadrille dancing in Nariel, The Little Old Cabin in the Dell. He plays it all on the C row and nearly all in octaves, in the manner of his father.

Keith Klippel

Keith Klippel at home in early 2011.
He is playing his father Con Klippel's Lachenal concertina.

Peter Ellis lives in Bendigo, Victoria and is a founder of the Emu Creek Bush Band as well as a leader in the revival of Australian old time dance, both through his activity in playing for, teaching, and calling dances for the Bush Dance and Music Club of Bendigo,2 as well as for his many books on traditional Australian music and dance published by that organization. He knew Jim Harrison, who was featured in Chapter 9, and here Peter plays the Varsoviana in the Harrison style, complete with arms swinging the concertina in windmill-like circles. The recording demonstrates the sound of that popular old swinging technique. He plays the tune in the key of G on a C/G Anglo, all on the C row, and adds a large number of partial chords to the piece.

Peter Ellis

Peter Ellis waving a concertina, 2011.

Peter also knew the late Harry McQueen (1910-1994) of Castelemaine, Victoria, and collected a number of dance tunes from him, including the Garibaldi's Waltz March. McQueen played the two row button accordion for many a dance, but his father and grandfather played the concertina. Peter here plays two tunes collected from Harry, but which originated from Harry's grandfather. As Peter tells it:

As a child, Harry watched his grandfather play 'Garibaldi's March Waltz' on the front verandah of his miner's cottage in Daylesford. He would walk up and down the verandah playing, and stopping and bowing at certain phrases. The tune has Varsoviana type 'holds', part A is in 4-4, part B in 3-4 and even more Varso style ...

Years later, Harry was visiting an old friend, in hospital dying. This friend, Len Teague I think, hadn't been to dances since when 15 years, with his parents. These dances were held in the 'stone house', ancestral home of the Gervasoni's of Yandoit. Italians settled there in the 1850s or 60s. He asked Harry about his continuing to play for dances and whether they still 'danced the Garibaldi March Waltz'. Harry was ecstatic, he'd never come across the dance except for the snippets of his grandfather when playing the tune. He wrote down Teague's description and we have revived the dance from that, lucky to have Jim's original tune.3

Dave de Hugard grew up on a tobacco farm in rural Queensland, and began playing folk music as a college student in the early 1960s. He has since worked as a folklore collector and researcher, and has published several highly regarded CD recordings where he plays and sings Australian music, including On the Wallaby Track and Magpie Morning. He plays the accordion, fiddle and banjo as well as the concertina, and is a frequent musician at old time dances. Here he plays an old schottische tune called Kate Perrett's learned from his friend, musician Kath McCaughey (1901-1989), who in turn learned it from Kate Perrett, of Guy Fawkes, up in the New England area of Australia. Dave plays the tune in Bb on a Bb/F concertina, and crosses back and forth from the Bb to the F rows as needed to fit the pitch of the melody.

Dave de Hugard

Dave de Hugard, 2011.

England

Most players in England today use a richly chorded style developed by listening to traditional English melodeon players. In the 'revival' of the concertina there in the 1960s and 1970s there were few living role models for the Anglo concertina played in the traditional octave style, and many young concertina players took their musical cues from melodeon players as a result. Scan Tester however influenced several young concertina players during his later years, and still others came by octave playing the natural way: it evolved naturally in their playing as they began to play for dances.

Will Duke lives in Sussex. He began playing the Anglo concertina in 1971, and had the great good fortune to meet and learn from Scan Tester in the last years of his life. He has played in a number of English country music and dance bands, and is also is a traditional singer. He has released several CDs of traditional Sussex song and concertina music, including Out of the Box and Scanned. He acknowledges a great debt to Scan Tester in his training on the concertina, and plays in a modified octave style that builds on the lessons learned from Tester. Here he plays two schottisches learned from Tester, High Low Schottische and another that is Untitled. Will plays tribute to Tester's octave style, and adds in some embellishments and stylistic elements of his own. He plays these on a G/D Dipper concertina.

Will Duke

Sussex player Will Duke. With thanks to Katie Howson
and the East Anglia Traditional Music Trust.

Dave Prebble comes from East Sussex, and bought his first concertina in 1979, unfortunately after Scan Tester had passed away. With no one to teach him, he rather naturally began to play octaves on his left hand, pleased with the fuller sound. After hearing John Kirkpatrick, he began to layer in chords in his playing as well. This mix has served him well in years of playing at pub sessions, with morris and clog dance sides, and for English country dances in rural community halls. He plays a medley of three tunes here. The first, Jackie Donnan's Mazurka No.2, is played in straight octave fashion; the second, The Shrewsbury Waltz, drops out some octave notes to emphasize the beat; the third, Sally Sloane's Mazurka, is a mixture of octaves and chords.

Dave Prebble

Dave Prebble plays his Jeffries Anglo concertina, 2011.

Harry Scurfield, from Otley, West Yorkshire, is another revival era player but with a world music bent, playing blues, jazz, Cajun, and even South African (Zulu) squashbox for over 38 years. With no Anglo players in most of those styles to learn from - squashbox excepted - Scurfield's approach is unique, although he acknowledges octave playing as a thread that has always run through his technique, a trait picked up from listening to recordings of Scan Tester. Harry plays in a five-piece group, Bayou Gumbo, and at times with another Anglo player, Matt Dennis. When playing for dances, he often turns to what he terms the 'power and punch' that octave playing releases, to say nothing of the richness of its sound'. Here he plays three tunes. The first is Si C'était à Refaire by the well known New Orleans musician Sydney Bechet; the second is Kit White's Two Couple Square, named for a Yorkshire melodeon player; and the third is The Bells of Hell, taken from the playing of Jim Eldon of Hull and the late Billy Harrison of the East Riding of Yorkshire. All three are played in the key of C on his C/G Anglo concertina, mostly in octaves.

Harry Scurfield

Harry Scurfield, in a recent concert with Bayou Gumbo. Photo by Ani McNeice.

Ireland

It would seem that Ireland, where the tradition of music and dance is so revered, and which is the well-spring of so much of today's traditional concertina music, would have a number of concertina players who play in the old octave style. There seem to be few, however. Most of the dwindling generation of pre-revival concertina players belong more to the céili era of reels rather than the earlier house dance era of round dances and quadrilles, when playing in octaves in the key of C, usually on German concertinas, was much more prevalent.

Sean O'Dwyer grew up playing in a family dance band in his parent's dance hall in Ardgroom, and is well steeped in the set tunes, polkas, slides and marches of that region. His mother, Ella Mae O'Dwyer, was a big influence; her playing was featured in Chapter 8. Sean now lives in Dublin, and following a multi-decade lapse from public playing, he is now playing again, and has released a CD, Irish Traditional Music from Beara. Although he plays mostly in a single-note fashion these days, along with most of the Anglo players of his generation, he well remembers his mother's octave repertoire used in the Ardgroom dances of long ago. For this project, he unearthed his mother's inexpensive C/G German concertina from his sister's storage, and carefully and methodically brought it back to playing condition. Here he plays two selections on it. The first includes a medley of tunes played by his mother in the Ardgroom dance days: Port na bPúcaí (Tune of the Faeries). For those owners of high-priced hand-crafted Anglo concertinas who are prone to dismissing the German concertina as a 'big step down,' this version of the air may cause reflection. The old instrument has a rich and ancient-sounding tone, that result from the double sets of brass reeds (one set an octave lower, giving a baritone sound) as well as from the octave playing style employed by Sean; at times, four reeds are sounding for each note of the melody. His use of bass drones is worthy of an uillean piper, and adds much to the piece.

Sean O'Dwyer

Sean O'Dwyer, holding his mother's German concertina.

South Africa

The Traditional Boer Music Club of South Africa (TBK) has worked in recent decades to restore the boeremusiek playing styles of nearly a century ago. One of the first steps taken by that club in its early days in the 1980s was the restoration of the classic 78 rpm boeremusiek recordings of the 1930s, and the distribution of these recordings to its members. Two of the chief participants in that effort were Stephaan van Zyl and Danie Labuschagne. A second step was the restoration of the old boerekonsertina, the German concertina of the sort played in Ireland by Ella Mae O'Dwyer, in Australia by Charlie Ordish, George Bennett and others, and in South Africa by Kerrie Bornman, to say nothing of tens of thousands of rural players in all of these countries who preceded these musicians. The quality of current versions of this instrument, manufactured in Germany and China, are not nearly equal to those of a century ago, presenting a problem to those who value the old sound. To solve this problem, South African Danie Labuschagne now builds two row concertinas in the German style, albeit with an improved metal action. A third rung in the restoration of old time boeremusiek in South Africa is the encouragement of old time dancing with live music.

Stephaan van Zyl lives in the Pretoria area and plays both the two-row boerekonsertina and the Crane duet concertina. He has been instrumental in reviving the old Boer style on the concertina, and has released a tutorial for old-time boerekoncertina on Youtube. The old style, as we have seen in Chapter 10, consisted of playing in octaves, with simple partial chords added for occasional emphasis along with phrase-ending full chords. In Oupa se Wals (Grandfather's Waltz), he plays one of Labuschagne's German-like newly constructed boerekonsertinas, in this old style. The concertina is pitched in G/D, and the tune is played in the key of G.

Stephaan van Zyl

Stephaan van Zyl in the early 1980s, holding a boerekonsertina.
With thanks to Kalie de Jager.

Notes:

2. www.bendigobushdance.org.au

3. Peter Ellis, personal communication, 2011.

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