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Thread: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

  1. #1
    hang on a sec... Connor's Avatar
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    Default Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    HELP! My friend's HS daughter has been asked to put together a group to play an hour of "Paris Cafe" music for a wedding reception. She is a decent violinist, and I'm a mostly melody mandolin player. We have a concertina player and a bass player. I'm trolling for music sources. So far, she's found some voice/piano arrangements that are pretty dull. I'll keep searching for good stuff, but I'm tossing out this - just in case someone has a bunch of old musette stuff to share.
    Connor

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    Registered User Bruce Clausen's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    Sounds like a fun project, so long as there's no big hurry. If you want published music in lead sheet form, the six volume series of musette repertoire put out by Paul Beuscher is apparently still in print. Total of 660 classic French accordion items! I see them advertised at about 25 euros per volume. It's great stuff if you know how to turn a lead sheet into a performance.

    A few Piaf songs in the mix would be nice.

  3. #3
    Registered User SincereCorgi's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    That will be tricky... mandolin and concertina will have to do their best accordion and guitar impressions. Musette stuff is hard and notey, but beautiful. If it's short notice, I'd see if you could rope in a guitarist for rhythm, and then just pick ten or so easy Django-approved '20s-'30s standards, and then some stuff like Ma Vie En Rose (hat tip to Bruce).

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  5. #4
    Registered User Martin Jonas's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    There are a few nice musette-style tunes out there that work fine on mandolin and that should suit your mandolin/violin/bass line-up. Here are two old threads:

    Link
    Link

    I see Bruce Clausen has already responded -- his recording of "Rivalité" is really nice and I have the sheet music lying around somewhere (it's not as easy as Bruce makes it sound).

    A few that I play are:

    1) La Petite Tonkinoise: A French polka written in 1905, but now mostly associated with Josephine Baker's big hit in the 1920s. I have an arrangement for two mandolins and guitar (see attached -- tune and arrangement should be in the public domain by now), which I recorded last year:



    2) Domino: a French song written in 1950 by Louis Ferrari, and a hit for Bing Crosby in English translation. There's an arrangement for two mandolins with guitar chords in Sheri Mignano's book "Mandolin Melodies", which should suit your line-up. I made a video of me playing the first mandolin part a few years ago (Link) -- it's much richer once you add the second mandolin part and rhythm, too.

    3) La Valse Bleu (Alfred Margis): Fairly well-known tune usually played on piano, which I have in the attached mandolin duet version. There probably was a guitar part as well for that arrangement, but I don't have it.

    There is quite a bit of free music online that will suits you. My suggestion would be that once you have some actual French musette tunes you can mix it up with a few tangos and Italian waltzes and nobody will mind -- a French Cafe music set would probably have a fair few of that type of tune anyway. Sheri's book is a great source for them.

    Martin
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  7. #5
    hang on a sec... Connor's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    Wow! Thanks for the great suggestions. We do have a few Edith Piaf tunes, but I'm going to have to do some arranging to make 'em work. The biggest chunk of that work will be to write out enough for me to substitute for guitar - I'm more of a note player than an ear player. The concertina player used to play piano accordion, so I'm going to dig out mine and see if he will give it a try after 20 years. The additional tunes look and sound great. I will take them to our next practice and see how they fly. I also agree that if we are discreet about it we can slip in something from Italy or perhaps French Canadian. We did find a few things in the Waltz books (damn, I love playing from them!). Sous Le Ciel De Paris (Under the Paris Skies) is another tune that will work well, I've found.

    As my friend's daughter accurately pointed out, we are playing music that people who have probably never been to a Paris cafe think would be played there... our job is to find stuff that sounds like they think it should.

    Again, thanks for the quick suggestions! They are appreciated.
    Connor

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    hang on a sec... Connor's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    An update:
    Martin - the two PDFs you shared were GOLDEN! You knew exactly what we were after. I'll have to confess to a "DUH!" moment, though. I had totally forgotten that I have Sheri Mignano's "Mandolin Melodies" on CD. My music accumulation is so large, varied and chaotic that I forget some of the stuff I've had around for a while. At any rate, between everyone's suggestions and the rest of our gleanings, we are set for the cafe music.

    The nasty bit is that the bride now wants Christina Perri's "A Thousand Years" for the processional music. (Processional??? I thought we were just playing for the reception!) Her mother wants a few Beatles tunes, too. That won't be so bad - they wrote nice lyrical stuff that we can work with. Perri's song, though... I can totally understand why a young, pop-culture-savvy bride-to-be would want this song, but YIKES! she'll expect us to sound just like the video. I'm gonna have to stew on this one. Of course, we also need to play the Pachelbel Canon (lovingly dubbed by us as the Taco Bell Cannon). At least there are a bazillion arrangements to choose from.
    Connor

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  10. #7

    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    Quote Originally Posted by Connor View Post
    The concertina player used to play piano accordion, so I'm going to dig out mine and see if he will give it a try...
    Your best bet!

    I saw that you said you're not primarily an ear player. However, FWIW, there are many easy but good-sounding musette and cafe-style tunes recorded by accordion and melodeon players--perhaps transcribe some for your purposes? In fact there's a thread over on melodeon.net listing some resources for "easy musette" tunes.

    Just looked to see if I could dig it up--can't seem to find, sorry
    Last edited by catmandu2; Apr-27-2014 at 10:29pm.

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    Registered User Mandobart's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    My go-to reference for swing and gypsy jazz is the Django Fakebook. Here it is again, 200 songs. There has to be something that will work and appeal to you:

    2008 Django Fakebook

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  13. #9
    hang on a sec... Connor's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    Thanks, Catmandu2, I found an accordion site with lots of musette lead sheets - http://www.818daily.com/musette.html - there are other good musical styles there, too. If I have the melody sheet I can do some improvising and fiddling around to liven it up. Unfortunately, the other players for this gig aren't going to do well working from a lead sheet.

    Mandobart, thanks for the fakebook. I will have fun exploring it.
    Connor

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    Registered User Greg Stec's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    I'm not promoting the band, only the tune.
    Dancing on the Moon.
    I think this is a great musette piece.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeGHr3swuOc

  16. #11
    hang on a sec... Connor's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    I just finished playing for this gig and thought I'd put a coda on this thread. Had to skip one Beatles tune (arranged for cello, violin and mandolin) - no regrets there. 1000 Years went OK - arranged a version with arpeggios for mando, cello bass line and violin swinging away on the melody. Didn't suck too badly - people said it was beautiful. The Pachelbel canon as a bridal processional was hilarious - they only wanted 30 seconds of music (the aisle was short). We convinced them to take a little more time, cut all of the build-up part out of an arrangement, started at the high point of the piece and played about a minute and a half's worth. Lovely.

    I worried more about the French Cafe music for the wine and cheese reception than I needed to. We had about an hour of content worked out, with painstakingly arranged instrumentation changes (lots of angst in the development of the arrangements). The reception was so loud that we chucked it all after the first tune and had everyone play melody except the bass. Thank the music gods that we had an electric acoustic bass and an amp. The accordion player actually got out his earplugs! Needless to say we provided just the right level of "wallpaper music". Cheery, in the background, and pretty much nobody actually listened to what we played.

    To build a sufficiently long playlist we cheated a bit and played some Celtic (Breton) French and Quebecois music, plus a few Edith Piaf tunes. Late in the reception we actually slipped to old Irish favorites we all knew, too.

    My favorite for the whole show was the Petite Tonkinoise. We worked out a violin, accordion, mandolin and bass arrangement. I played the 2nd mando part and let the violin and accordion take the melody. We played it at a dance polka tempo, unlike the Josephine Baker arrangement (and Martin Jonas' version). The thing I love is that the 2nd mandolin part at the coda is a splendid counter-melody, a lot like the baritone horn counter-melody in a Sousa march. I played it on the octave mando neck of my double-neck and had a gas! I'm going to see if the group will get together and record a video of it. It was worthy. Thanks again, Martin for sharing the two pieces. We used both. Thanks to all for your advice. Now I want to set up a reader's session and work through a bunch of other music we didn't touch.
    Connor

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  17. #12
    hang on a sec... Connor's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    Quote Originally Posted by Greg Stec View Post
    I'm not promoting the band, only the tune.
    Dancing on the Moon.
    I think this is a great musette piece.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeGHr3swuOc
    Hey, Greg. I missed your post earlier. Nice tune! Really cheery.
    Connor

    Check out my new double-neck Mandolin:
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  18. #13
    Sheri Mignano Crawford Mandophile's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    Being an accordionist, I've got a hundreds, if not thousands of Paris musette tunes. But she's probably already performed for the event. Let me know if she has another. Violins were v popular during they hey day of les guinguettes!

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  20. #14

    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    Quote Originally Posted by Mandophile View Post
    Being an accordionist, I've got a hundreds, if not thousands of Paris musette tunes. But she's probably already performed for the event. Let me know if she has another. Violins were v popular during they hey day of les guinguettes!
    I am still looking to find a big book of these tunes. I want to use it to work on my sight reading. Do you have a collection?

  21. #15
    Sheri Mignano Crawford Mandophile's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    yes, I sent a pm to you.
    Sheri Mignano Crawford

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  22. #16
    Mando-Accumulator Jim Garber's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help with Paris Cafe/Musette

    WARNING: ~8 year old thread.

    However I love musette and wish I could keep up with its frantic and relentless pace. I think the chromatic button accordionists have an instrument designed for that music. I remember there was a Belgian guy who posted a bunch of these tunes for accordion quite a few years ago and downloaded many of them. However Sheri is an excellent source I am sure.
    Last edited by Jim Garber; Mar-21-2022 at 5:34pm.
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