An evening with Manuel and his accordian

The other evening, Cesar was cleaning the car outside the house - clearly something he has missed doing for the past six months - when Manuel, our neighbour, came out for a chat. Manuel of the piano accordian.

In a very short space of time, during which Cesar had informed him of our own musical backgrounds and interests, he'd popped into his house to fetch one of his four accordians and without further ado, joined us in our new home for a little concert.

Bless him, at times, his right and left hands were working in friendly collaboration but often, the concentration required to play the 'tune' with the right hand meant that the left hand was required to automatically continue the 'squeeze' action which produces the sound  and to somewhat randomly press the chord buttons.



I confess to struggling with my emotions - I wanted to so much to laugh in pure abandon, so wonderfully bizarre and surreal was the music - but actually, we were all very touched by his pleasure in playing for us; his pride in his skills - self taught - and his genuine love of the instrument.

Then he let us all have a turn and we all managed to produce similar mashed sounds - it's really quite difficult to combine three different actions.  The tune is played by the right hand, like a piano - easy enough - but to get a sound, you have to pull and push the two parts of the accordian, the squeeze box bit - in and out at the same time as keeping the tune going. To get the chord accompaniment (the bit I think Manuel needs to work on...) you have to press the appropriate button with the left hand - and whilst on their own, the chords sounded magnificent, it takes a while to find which chord to change to in order to match the tune.

We had such a fun evening - I do hope he comes again. I think he might.