Click here to view a panoramic photo and listen to a recording from the 2005 party.

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Forty-nine accordionists and about 95 folks in all attended the 2005 Party. We ate and drank and talked and played. The week before the party, musicians received parts for the Mystery Music, scored for eight part accordion orchestra. We rehearsed and performed it in half an hour. The program for the party:

2005 was the year of many firsts, and Henri read a few remarks about the development of this accordion community over the year. The text of that speech:

I am very excited that all of you have been able to make it here, and particularly excited that there is a here to make it to. A here here, first of all: this great setting. Thank you, Ilona and Jamie, for hosting this party. And a here in the larger sense of this accordion playing community: all of you, all of us.

A year and a half ago, when the first Punk Rock Accordion Workshop was held, most of you didn’t know each other and some of you had never played accordion. All of you know something about the growth of this community, but none of us, including me, knows all, but I’d like to recount a little bit of the story as I know it over the past year.

Saturday, December 18, 2004 just about a year ago, I counted seventeen people at the Punk Rock Workshop. I got greedy then and reasoned that if we could grow from 2 to 17 in the first six months, then we should surely expand to three times the number of workshops, and become multinational within five years. But that didn’t happen, we got temporarily much lower attendance, and a few months ago some of the Board members explained to me why: by creating multiple sessions, I had inadvertently fractured the community, and people didn’t know which session to attend to find their friends who they wanted so much to see. I learned a similar lesson recently from Moss in the after-school accordion class, who wanted to learn accordion simply because his good friend Clem is playing accordion. That’s just about the best reason I can think of to learn music.

On March 28 I advertised a new class, an accordion ensemble playing the music of Tom Waits that would have open rehearsals in a café in Alameda. By March 29 the class was full. By June the class was over, but a band was born, now called Discordion. Discordion began with the overflowing and uncontainable excitement of Eric, Natashia, and Julie, who set up our first gig. They wanted to perform so badly that they handled the venue, booking, costumes, advertising, and money, and I just showed up when they told me to.

In August was our first annual Camp AccordionLand. My second strongest memory of camp was when I asked for recommendations for next year’s camp, and the strongest recommendation, loud and clear, was that we have women teachers at camp. We will. You may have noticed that over half the performers today are women, most of my private students are women, -- I am beginning to notice a trend here, an interesting changing of the guard perhaps. (My first strongest camp memory was of that goofy graduation dance and ceremony, but we can’t talk about that here.)

In the summer, I began making contact with some of the accordion clubs around, and I’ve been especially welcomed by the two Sacramento area clubs. What a lot of the younger and newer players don’t realize is that there are established accordion clubs in the area. I’m very grateful that Dave Chelini and his ensemble have come out to be here and play with us and for us, I’m looking forward to some joint projects over the next year -- and in fact I have a little idea I want to talk about privately with you Dave for next December’s Holiday Party.

Working with the Sacramento folks means, in some cases, learning from people who have been playing way longer than I have. At the other end, we have the Malcolm X Elementary After-School Accordion Playing Class and Club, some of whom may yet end up playing accordion longer than I will. That once-a-week class just started in October. Moss, Clem, Mikey, Moses, Bowen, Andrea, Norma, and Rosie, it is so cool to be playing music with you. And yes, we will be learning more Wallace and Grommit music for our performance with the Circus Arts class.

In September, I reconfigured the Accordion Works Ensemble to just the more experienced players. We will have some Piazzolla tango performances coming up in the spring. After that, we will play Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and investigating whether he mis-titled that work. It is exciting and more than a little challenging to be playing with you.

Since October, an Advisory Board has begun meeting to help guide and steer this accordion thing as it gets more and more out of hand. I’d like you to know who is on this advisory board: Julie Chen, Briahn Kelly, Laura Norin, Eric Saxby, and Alysha Naples.

And in the past month, from the Punk Rock Workshop has come a new format, currently called “Accordion Practice Nights”, in which players get together to learn from each other and just be with each other. I have no idea where that idea will lead us.

In fact, these days I have less and less idea where all of this uncontainable exciting accordion thing is going because it is more and more you who are creating it, and less and less me, slowly. It is wonderful to be a part of this, and I look forward to finding out what we will create in the year upcoming.

Click here to view a panoramic photo and listen to a recording from the 2005 party.

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