For further information or to donate directly, point your web browser to www.accordionnoirfest.com! And now, the demonstration clip:
(And a mazel tov to Ana Grace for her November bat mitzvah! Der Royshiker Krokves helped her celebrate with an earful of heavy shtetl!)
This was one of the very first (the kazoo is a dead giveaway... originally scat, but that attempt was better left unshared) song arrangements the Planks made (as opposed to simply printing out such tabs as could be found online and hoping that they were semi-legit) and its pacing shifts were inspired by the various klezmer rhythms we were formally exposed to while learning the songs for Melinda Gidaly's "Jew! A Musical" at the Fringe Festival (gulp) eleven years ago.
What with the morose synths and the somber female vocal section intoning "doo doo doo!" soulfully, we felt that the original was elegiac... but what the world needed at that moment was a barn-burner, with the feel that "if the world is coming to an end, let's see it out with one hell of a party!"
Whether we were successful or not is up for some debate, with one friend perplexedly inquiring after witnessing an early set if my musical aspirations really were set on doing Leonard Cohen covers as Cookie Monster? Well... that sounds at least as viable as Macaulay Culkin's Pizza Underground!
If you like, you can hear us perform this song live tomorrow night (!) at the Accordion Noir 10th anniversary cabaret!
Anyway, here we are. By which I mean, here I am -- Daisy-Jones and Ludwika wouldn't fit in the hammock, so I believe they were "huh, huh"ing along while packing up their instruments at this point in the set. I don't know how many of the annual Horace Phair parties in Portland we've managed to play -- I like to think that we've at least hit as many as we've missed, but it's hard to prove as they're often not terribly well-documented in the interest of maintaining our ability to freely cross the US border.
It was Daisy-Jones Locher's first visit in capacity as a Creaking Plank to Portland, Oregon (or "Disneyland for grown-ups" as we like to call it) for our longstanding annual engagement at the Horace Phair party and it was a humdinger! Not only did we have RoJo(tm) the Therapy Llama as our opener, but this performance was just the second act to a will-our-set-happen-won't-it-happen (turns out, it would!) wedding the previous day up at the Kiwanis Camp on nearby Mount Hood. (And a Mazel Tov to Samantha & Chase!) But as much splendid amenity infrastructure as was present at the wedding (zip lines, board games, pizza and yurts), it lacked a hammock in the basement. Happily, the Saluthaus basement addressed that omission, and so our Portland experience managed to be a complete one! Will performing in a hammock become a thing that we revisit endlessly on-stage? I doubt it, but wouldn't that be nice! Supposing we can't perform in a hot tub (I can think of a few obstacles to making that happen) it's a nice compromise. (Nowhere to sling a hammock? How about beanbag chairs? Wait, could anything be less ergonomic?)
(And a big thanks to Josh for capturing (most of) the performance on his phone!)
(Vancouver Squeezebox Circle: 1931 edition.)
The Squeezebox Circle Orchestra is an outreach project of the long-running Vancouver Squeezebox Circle (a slow-fruiting part of Blackbox Squeezebeard's plan for total world domination) and this year they wanted to go Noir in honour of the Accordion Noir Festival's 9th anniversary! But it turns out that it's hard to keep things edgy and noir while playing purely instrumental repertoire on the instrument of champagne music. Often the twist of the lyrics are what makes a song noir, and they're hard to replace in instrumental arrangements. But sadly, no one in the orchestra is a confident public singer. If only they knew of someone who might rise to the occasion...You can probably see how this one turns out! Happily, the Creaking Planks volunteered four vocalists for nearly a half-dozen songs in their set! It feels almost indulgent and lazy to be singing without also playing our instruments, but sometimes it's just not all about us, y'know?
Anyhow, we'll be joining the Squeezebox Circle Orchestra for two performance dates coming up (hopefully more in the future), first at Artful Sundays (where we recently performed) up this week, Sunday September 4th, somewhere between 2:30 and 5 pm at the Napier Greenway just off of Commercial Drive... and then again a week later, at the closing event of the Accordion Noir Festival at Spartacus Books, "Accordion Crimes", from 2-6 pm. The first performance is free, the second is by donation (and boasts a ton of other entertainment to boot), so please don't hesitate to come get an earful!
What can I say? It should be fun.
