Whenever I pick up the Accordion, the first thing I do is start improvising , this is the way I warm my fingers and get into a musical mood. This is the best exercise – practice all the scales you learnt and all the left hand patterns and create magic, find yourself meditating while you play, almost like forgetting that you are currently playing while taken away by thoughts, emotions as if you are in a dream.
Everything I play on the Accordion sounds Gypsy, even if it’s a classical Mozart piece, this is why I call my lessons: Gypsy Accordion Lessons. I teach world music: Blues, Tango, Waltz, Kleyzmer etc… but they all sound: GYPSY
Sometime I wonder if people know what the word ‘GYPSY’ means. We all know about those musician tribes who immigrated from Turkey, originated from India. They are known as the Romani people. Musician tribes who were hired by the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire and traveled around Asia. The Europeans thought they looked like Egyptians so they called them ‘Gypsies’.
Many songs from many traditions sounds like ‘Gypsy Music’ and that’s because the unique scales that are common for Turkish / Persian / Arabic / Sephardic / Indian music.
Once you know those scales, once you know what to do with them, how to improvise with them, how to insert them into the world music compositions you can make the Accordion sound exotic, and that’s what we want if we like this mystical magical sound that this amazing instrument can produce.
One of the most common scales used is called Hijaz. I teach this scale in the first course for beginners, because I believe beginners should dive right into the real thing and start playing exotic music , just like a Gypsy kid would do when he first picks up the Accordion. If we start learning Yankee doodle or Marry had a little lamb we might loose interest after a few lessons.
