Welcome!
My name is Jerry… and I play the accordion.
I must admit, the accordion has been a hidden little secret in my life. Having grown up in the 70’s, a time when the accordion was seen as being more a joke than a serious instrument. For me back then, it used to be all quite serious.
Though most of my family know even to this day that I used to play, only one of my closest of friends knew. The rest had no clue of my musical background, yet music, especially my accordion studies, were an integral, powerful and all consuming part of me for a great portion of my early life. As a matter of fact, though I started private lessons at the age of 4, I was blessed with the desire to play the accordion way earlier… seriously, the infection was there by around a year old, thanks to family members who played the accordion and my tiny fingers wrapped around a keyboard well before I turned 2 years old, and if you don’t believe that, checkout the photo taken in December 1962 by my father of me wearing my very first (tiny) accordion, and my very proud mother reflected in the mirror!
Yup that’s a little 17 month old mini-me sporting a little tiny button accordion. I graduated to a proper piano accordion right after this one… ha-ha!
The private lessons continued until I was around 18 years old and I had even spent several years at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto with some of the greatest accordion instructors in the world. Then, for many reasons, I cut the accordion completely out of my life for over 38 years and only recently (February, 2016), once more reopened that door and felt the desire to play and study a little music… but this time, I knew it would be in a much more relaxed, less stressful manner. This time, the music would be for me and my pleasure!
That brings us to this little blog that I started back in April 2016.
I am opening this little door to my psyche and tossing out an invitation to the universe with the intent to document this special part of my life by writing down my little experiences, show a few pictures and heck… maybe even post a little of my music that I played both such a long time ago and something a little more recent.
To be honest, the passage of time, the addition of arthritis and total lack of practice for many decades has caused near all of those musical skills to fade in to nothingness. With time, and life’s consent to not throw too many challenges my way, I hope to recover some semblance of that ability to play the accordion again. I know that I shall never attain the technical levels of the past, but I hope to enjoy it more this time around and that’s a fair trade! Now, though this is a publicly visible blog on the internet, this place is really more for me than anyone else. It is just a way of documenting my path back to music after such a long absence. I know that at the start and for quite a long time later, it is going to be pretty ugly. My goal now is to try in a small way to document my path back to some level of competence and on this site, toss in a few interesting things like stories, links to accordion related movies and videos on the web, discuss some of my small projects and so on.
An important note about this blog… this being my site, I’ve made a couple changes from the norm. If you wish to read my stories in proper chronological order, you start at the top of the STORIES page and work down. I also often add addendums to posts at a later date that give updates or additional info.
I know that this is a little different from the “traditional” blog format where one sees the latest posts on top, and additions come in the form of a new post, but my way is just the way we like it around here, so please enjoy.
Should you wish to return back to this page (which is the site’s HOME page), click on the “Accordion Memories” banner at the top of all pages at any time.
Truly my music is not about any kind of destination, but all about the new journey along an old path. I am eager to see the places it shall take me!
Welcome to my Musical Memoires blog site!