The Accordion Report

While I was busy celebrating my birthday last Saturday, others were

celebrating the accordion at the 8th Annual Northeast Accordion

Festival in Minneapolis. Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek sent me this scan [244KB JPEG image] of a local newspaper that covered the event (click it to see it at full size):

I haven’t been practicing as much as I should lately. Getting married

and getting Wendy moved in really disrupted all sorts of routines,

wonderful as both were. I’m slowly in the process of resuming all sorts

of things, not the least of which is a little regular keyboard practice.

Living in a condo complicates the matter; prior to getting married, I

lived in a house that was very well acoustically isolated from the

neighbours. I’m quite sure that even at medium volume, all three

adjacent units would be able to pick up the sound of me working on my

rendition of Neil Diamond’s Cracklin’ Rosie.

I can at least keep my keyboard chops sharp thanks to a pair of

headphones and my collection of old-but-trusty synthesizers — a Korg Wavestation A/D rack and a even more old-school Korg Poly-800

that Steph Fox gave to me a couple of birthdays ago. Perhaps I should

take a peek at some software synths as well — I figure my PowerBook

(1.3 Ghz 12″ AlBook, 1.25G RAM) should be up to the task. Anyone out

there have any favourites?

I’m also getting a little more accordion practice now that I’m back to regular attendance at Kickass Karaoke at the Rivoli.

Wendy likes the opportunity to exercise her lovely singing voice in

public, and those who know me know how much I love being on stage.

Last Sunday’s session was a special treat. We got to take Dave from

Chicago over to his first Kickass Karaoke, and I also got a chance to

meet Bob “Let It Bleed” Tarantino,

one of the better and saner voices in the local right-wing blogosphere.

Carson covered mine and Wendy’s drinks as a birthday present to me

(thanks for the Jagermeister, Cars!) and the wind storm kept the crowd

to a minimum, giving me a chance to go onstage often and experiment

with a few numbers. I tried a couple of new ones, including Wheatus’

high school whine-anthem Teenage Dirtbag and the moshtacular Thunder Kiss ’65

by White Zombie. How Rob Zombie can vocalize through an entire concert

using that voice is beyond me; my vocal cords were shredded after that

one.