Black Diamond Accordions at the Mersea Session's 2nd birthday celebrations

Our thanks to the lovely Chrissie Westgate for these photos of Black Diamond Accordions at the Coast Inn, West Mersea , where the acoustic music session celebrated its second birthday on Thursday 20th October.

More of Chrissie's photos from the birthday party can be seen on the session's own blog.

BDA's No. 1 Lady Customer

When Greg brought back the first-ever Black Diamond Accordion (a 72-Bass) from China in June this year, he had barely removed it from its carrying case before it was quickly snapped up by Cynthia Miller of The Lantern Band - one of the busiest and best-known ceilidh bands in Essex.

Greg met up with Cynthia earlier this week at the Tuesday Session at the United Brethren pub in Chelmsford, and took these pics of her and the 72-Bass BDA in action.

Catalogue nearing completion

The final photoshoots have taken place - hooray for the prolonged summer weather! - and the catalogue is in the final stages of design. We hope to have finished copies printed by early November. Here's the cover design, and a sneak preview of some of our lovely models - Debbie, Leafy, Iona, Sam and Barry - in action. Huge thanks to all for their patience, good humour and general wonderfulness in giving up their time and talents for the BDA cause.

Black Diamond Accordions take the stage

Another busy week preparing for the launch of Black Diamond Accordions: more catalogue photoshoots on location in West Mersea (sneak preview here very soon); and another public appearance for our 72 bass accordion, this time at a fundraising shanty evening in aid of Friends of West Mersea Parish Church , featuring Keith Lovell and four members of the Mersea Session  - John, Bill, Barry and Greg, performing as 'The Coast Inn Players'.

(In fact, not BDA's first gig for FWMPC - Greg played the 96 bass at a short outdoor ceremony last month, pictured here with Fred Borges from Saltdog on fiddle.)

Pic above © Chrissie Westgate .

Sam Pirt, master squeezer!

On our trip northwards to Lindisfarne, we called in on my old mate Sam Pirt, who lives the wrong side of two railway tracks in Gilberdyke, East Yorkshire.

I first encountered Sam at the Wooton Fiddle Club ceilidh in about 1997, when I was a deckie learner accordionist, and tentatively launched into 'Lucy Farr's', only to be played out of the session by this amazing 17 year old squeezebox maestro. His style was quite simply astonishing, I'd never heard the accordion played like it, and it ignited my admiration for Sam as a player and a teacher that remains undimmed.

Our musical lives occasionally overlapped, I took Sam's place in Bill Sables' Shenanigans ceilidh band when he was off starting up 422, then I started the Foolish Virgins with Eric the Viking and Carol Dawson, with Bill as caller in residence. Pressure of work and playing gigs all over the north of England got to me, so I resigned and formed the Black Diamond Ceilidh Band (which just played locally and more occasionally in the Hull area), Bill took over the Virgins, and replaced me with ......Sam!

I think it was in 2001 that I attended one of Sam's accordion courses in Goole (and put on half a stone that weekend, enjoying his mum Gill's cooking), which gave me another leap in my playing style. I can faithfully recommend Sam as an inspired teacher as well as an all-round good guy. He has worked tirelessly for his mum's Kenyan charity, Sengwer Aid, having visited seven times, helping with various projects and teaching accordion to youngsters there.

Sam's musical collaborations have grown widely, whilst still a mainstay in 422, he now has a combo called The Hut People, with former Beautiful South percussionist Gary Hammond, and several other incarnations, visible at his website.

Right, back to the story. We called on Sam to arm him with a 96 bass Black Diamond Accordion, which he wants to get the feel of prior to recording some studio tracks that we will use on the website, so potential customers get an idea of the sound of these instruments.

So, we're looking forward to hearing Sam's workout with a BDA, and we'll get it online as soon as practicable.

Meanwhile, to give you a taster of his playing style, here's Sam playing in The Hut People:

Why can't England be more like Northumbria?

When you're an Englishman (or a woman, but I don't know what that's like) and your passions are traditional boats and traditional music, there is no finer place to combine the two, within the borders of the country, than Northumberland. And that's where we headed for our holidays, a four day break away from the febrile Indian Summer parching south-east England.

We stayed at an outstanding B&B, the fantastic Fenham Farm, which is run by a delightful couple called Wattie and Gill, and enjoys magnificent views of Lindisfarne, without all the hassle of getting seawater up to your car windowsills on the causeway (which us Merseaites know a thing or two about).

It was hosing it down on the Saturday, so we drove up to Edinburgh and had a look at the Royal Yacht Britannia at Ocean Terminal, then enjoyed some Deuchars in the Cafe Royal.

Sunday was a bit brighter, so we headed down to the Tap & Spile in Morpeth for their Sunday afternoon session. We were warmly greeted by Keith Besford, an oustanding session fiddler, who kept his wonderfully named band under his Homburg. I'm sorry I can't remember the names of all the terrific musicians there, but the assembled company also included smallpiper Maureen Davison and uber-fiddler Bennett Hogg. Juliet made the aquaintance of Jean and Craig, visiting from Connecticut after a three-year absence, who were delighted to be remembered at the session (Craig is a mean 5-string banjo player, sadly unarmed on this trip), and their friend Sharon from Warkworth. The craic was 90 (I never have understood that phrase) and the tunes were fast, furious and mostly Northumbrian (except Morpeth Rant - so passé!).

All too soon, we had to up and leave, as we wanted to see a boat in Blyth, some dozen miles distant, on behalf of a friend down south. The irony of the banter in the Tap and Spile ("there isn't a boat in Blyth that isn't rotten, lad") was brought home when it turned out that the owner of the boat had been on a bus, sitting next to Keith Besford, chief Blyth maritime detractor, the previous day!! Small world. Especially considering the boat owner himself would normally have been playing at the session!

BDA FAQs

There are many excellent websites that offer in-depth explanations of all things accordion - just typing ‘accordion FAQ’ into any search engine will produce a plethora of fascinating web pages.

But here are a few Greg's come up with for our [still under construction] website: 

• What is a piano accordion? A musical instrument of the aerophone family of free reed instruments, where sound is generated by the movement of air across steel reeds, producing vibrations or sound waves.
• When was the accordion invented? The cows will be home and in meat pies before this argument is settled! The first free reed instrument was the sheng, a Chinese instrument not dissimilar to pan pipes. The free reed was developed in the nineteenth century in Germany and Italy, and the world centre-of-excellence was established in Castelfidardo (near Ancona on Italy’s Adriatic coast). The most astonishing feature of the modern piano accordion is the Stradella bass system, an extremely complex series of rods and levers in the bass end of the accordion that could lay claim to be the world’s first computer.
• How does a piano accordion differ from a melodeon? Think of the accordion as a vertical piano, and the melodeon as a mouth organ/harmonica. Basically, the accordion plays the same note (when pressed) whether the bellows are squeezed or pulled, and the melodeon is diatonic (two toned) which produces a different note on the draw than the push of the bellows. The piano accordion is a far more versatile instrument (well, I would say that, wouldn’t I?!) because it can play in any key, whilst the melodeon is restricted to two or three keys
• How long have the Chinese been making accordions? In our factory, the oldest-established in China, since 1952. The accordion is the most popular instrument in China, and expensive imports from Germany and Italy were soon copied for cheaper domestic production. The BDA factory employs craftsmen and women that have perfected their craft for longer than probably any other factory in the world.
• What’s so great about Black Diamond Accordions, then? Good question. I have played many modern and older Chinese accordions, and they differ markedly. The older ones had extremely dated designs, looked ghastly but played well. The ones that sounded bad were frankly let down by their players. The modern ones look a lot better, but many have cheaper, mass-produced reeds and take a lot of air to produce sound and subsequently don’t have fast playing action. Many modern Chinese accordions have bogus Italian-sounding names (anything ending in ‘i’ will do!) but have few reeds, don’t weigh much and don’t deliver a pleasing player experience. Let’s face it, if money was no object, we would all have a brand new Castelfidardo squeezebox every year. But as the old song goes, it’s too tight to mention, so what’s the next best thing? Finest Italian hand-made reeds , put into a quality frame by a time-served craftsman in China, covered in a modern shell that pleases the western consumer eye. In other words, the best of both worlds, the sound and look of the west, but at the cost of the east.
• How come they’re so cheap? They’re not, relatively speaking. The same factory produces accordions for the domestic Chinese market at roughly half the price, which use domestic mass-produced reeds. These are top-end accordions, played by professional classical musicians in China who are every bit as demanding as their western counterparts. Our instruments are affordable because of the disparity in labour rates for craftsmen in Europe versus China.
• What do they sound like? We'll soon be posting recordings on the website of the top Chinese accordion orchestra that plays exclusively Black Diamond Accordions, and they stand their ground against the world’s finest players and manufacturers. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, but we think they’re outstanding. 

The World Accordion to Greg

Did everyone see the excellent BBC Scotland programme 'The World Accordion to Phil'? Well, if ye didn't, you missed a rare treat, and box heaven to us accordionistas.

In the first programme, Phil Cunningham (who is a marvellous TV operator, pleeeze, pleeeze, pleeeze, BBC, give him more work) visited China, where the free reed instrument  was invented during the second millennium BC in the form of the Sheng.

The programme focused on sheng players to start with, but then revealed the little-known fact that the piano accordion is the most popular instrument in China, played by literally millions, it is reckoned. Accordion bands abound, classical music accordion orchestras, even X Factor contestants, not to mention the girl accordion band in the skimpy black numbers.

One orchestra caught my eye, and my ear. They sounded fantastic, and were all playing a particular brand of squeeze box I have never seen. I had a good old Google, and discovered that the factory is in a Chinese city I know well from previous visits to agricultural trade fairs and, what's more, I have a good friend who is a translator living there. She also turned out to be - you guessed - an accordion player!

A quick phone call later, she agreed to visit the factory and, long story short, I was out of Heathrow within a month on a 46-hour round trip to Beijing.

There's a dozen funny stories about that trip, and one scary one when  a delayed planeload of vodka-deprived Russian nationals were threatening to riot at Moscow Airport, but they'll keep. Suffice to say that I cut a deal with the Chinese factory to manufacture a range of piano and button accordions, using high-quality Italian reeds, to our own design under the Black Diamond brand.

Feverish activity soon followed, importing samples of different models to decide on the range we would offer, and masses of research into piano accordions generally. Apparently many of the Italian accordion manufacturers now have the bodies of their accordions made in China, but with the all-important finishing done in Castelfidardo.

Black Diamond Accordions have the sound, the all-important reeds, manufactured and exported from Italy to China. Which is sort of the same. Only about a quarter of the price to the consumer.

And that is the story so far.

Black Diamond Accordions catalogue photoshoot

For our first photoshoot, Iona (10) - no stranger to the camera, she - played the Black Diamond Button Box on the beach at West Mersea in the golden sunshine of an October evening.

Shooting the catalogue

First catalogue photoshoot - on an absolutely glorious evening on absolutely glorious Mersea Island earlier this week:

Lots more to follow soon.