DON WEEDA ON KLEZMER ACCORDION

Some months, Rubinchik's Trio plays every Wednesday evening at Flipnotic's on Barton Springs Road in Austin. I interviewed accordionist Don Weeda at one of these events on May 24, 2000. It's too bad you cant hear the tape, because you'd hear the local color of Barton Springs Road traffic. I also recorded most of the unamplified performance, on impulse, using a borrowed Sony professional stereo recorder with only one mike plugged in. (I think the recording sounds amazingly good for what it is.) The Trio was joined this week on some songs by a local trombone player and on others by a klezmer guitar player named Seth who had come down from New Hampshire to visit his in-laws.

The better of two recordings was done two weeks earlier using a Sony MD Walkman, which I guess is when I should have done the interview!

Besides Don, Rubinchik's consists of Mark Rubin on tuba and I assume double bass, and Ben on clarinet. You can find Rubinchik's here

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What makes it different for you playing...you were playing Balkan before...

Yeah...but this is also in the European diaspora, so that's the essence of this particular music, too. For example the one that I played, the solo dance known as the Greek dance [=Grieischer Tanz], that is very much like a Greek sirtos. The doina is very much a Romanian form. Again, a lot of these tunes come from Eastern Europe but they have additional characteristics of the cantorial tradition of the Jewish religion. A lot of the ornaments, salutes, and chirps, come in through this tradition, some of the tune conventions, also some of the ways they're organized. What I do on accordion essentially give some sort of harmony...sometimes thirds up, sometimes thirds down, sometimes more dissonant. We played a song tonite that seems to be organized in terms of diminished chords...that was the Hochman Russishe Sher...and I was giving that back and of course it did sound a little more dissonant than some of the other tunes. So there's harmony. There's fills, that's basically when the tune stops, the accordion comes in and just tootles and tootles and tootles.

So when you're doing solos you're tootling? [what a dumb question...]

Well, no, its like when the clarinet stops because its time for it to rest then the accordion comes in and does a fill. There's another version of that that's like a call-response that we did in one of the pieces tonite, so the clarinet will play something and I will play the same thing, or some sort of response to the thing that he plays. It's not specific to Jewish music at all, that's in music all over the place. I don't think we...some people tend to rely totally on that, we don't, that's just one of the things that we use. I do get a lot of solos, especially in the trio setting. For those its kind of a combination of what I know as Ashkenazic Jewish and Balkan and whatever else I can throw in. I tend to use additional ornament because Mark wants this quantity called schmutz in there, which is, the accordion is sort of in the ensemble as the thing that fills in the dirt that the people dance on. There's the rapturous clarinet part and there's the accordion...

So you're the dirty instrument?

Yeah, I do the dirt. I'm the earthy instrument. But I touch both planes because Mark is ground-even bedrock-- most of the time because he's doing the tuba and he's the rhythm, and the clarinet is pure heaven. I'm in both planes at once because I have my left hand and right hand going, so its kind of an interesting thing to be contributing to both.

You said you took lots of your cues from Mark...

I took a number of my cues from Mark in terms of ...I take cues from everybody because I'm basically playing off people, but the structure I'm getting from Mark is in terms of velocity, in terms of intensity, definitely in terms of volume.

In comparison with other accordion players who would be playing in a klezmer band...would you be doing more Balkan music than a "normal" accordionist?

I probably AM doing more Balkan music than a "normal" accordionist, at least the ones I've heard.. The older people might tend to be closer to the way I play than the way I see people play in modern klezmer groups. I'm trying to take my cues from the some of the older accordion players like Misha Tsiganoff as opposed to some of the other ones.

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If you are coming from somewhere other than my web page...

Judith Gennett (myself) has hosted English/Celtic and broad range folk radio shows on KEOS Community Radio in Bryan, Texas for the past five years. You can go back to her web page if you like, there are many radio playlists posted if you like reading radio playlists.