POB
Mar-19-2004, 3:28am
Hi all.
I'm a long-time lurker here, so I figured it might be time to try my hand at posting:
Is it just me, or does anybody from musical genres other than Bluegrass ever feel that fellow musicians think they're slightly daft for playing mandolin-family instruments? Has anyone got any stories they'd like to share, to illustrate this phenomenon?
My favourite happened about 12 years ago when I had just bought a gorgeous new Joe Foley bouzouki. I was, and still am, very proud of this machine. Now, in many circles in Irish music, there is a belief that the button accordion player is THE MAN. And within some of those circles, the louder and harsher tuned the accordion, the happier people are. (As someone once said "The worse, the better".)
So, it happened that I ended up sat beside such an accordion player at a session in Tralee, Co. Kerry. He was a nice bloke and between tunes we were having a chat. He asked me what my instrument was and I told him, explaining that I had recently bought it and it was hand-made. So he asked me how much I paid for it and I told him - IR£650 (a very good price, in my opinion).
"Six-hundred and fifty pounds?!!!", says he, "Are you mad?!!!" I politely pointed out that, yes it was a lot of money, but he must surely have paid far more than that for the multi-coupler mother-of-pearl Paolo Soprani accordion that was sitting on his lap. He considered this for a moment and then pointed out the obvious flaw in my logic...
"I know," says he, "but this is an accordion!"
I'm a long-time lurker here, so I figured it might be time to try my hand at posting:
Is it just me, or does anybody from musical genres other than Bluegrass ever feel that fellow musicians think they're slightly daft for playing mandolin-family instruments? Has anyone got any stories they'd like to share, to illustrate this phenomenon?
My favourite happened about 12 years ago when I had just bought a gorgeous new Joe Foley bouzouki. I was, and still am, very proud of this machine. Now, in many circles in Irish music, there is a belief that the button accordion player is THE MAN. And within some of those circles, the louder and harsher tuned the accordion, the happier people are. (As someone once said "The worse, the better".)
So, it happened that I ended up sat beside such an accordion player at a session in Tralee, Co. Kerry. He was a nice bloke and between tunes we were having a chat. He asked me what my instrument was and I told him, explaining that I had recently bought it and it was hand-made. So he asked me how much I paid for it and I told him - IR£650 (a very good price, in my opinion).
"Six-hundred and fifty pounds?!!!", says he, "Are you mad?!!!" I politely pointed out that, yes it was a lot of money, but he must surely have paid far more than that for the multi-coupler mother-of-pearl Paolo Soprani accordion that was sitting on his lap. He considered this for a moment and then pointed out the obvious flaw in my logic...
"I know," says he, "but this is an accordion!"