Will Holzhauser
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Will Holzhauser’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sure. That sounds great.
Oh, I was just making sure that I had the right register on. Okay. Because you can, depending on which register you have, you can get, you know, in a different octave. Each one has a sort of different sound or different flavor.
All right. This is Swing Vals, written by Baro Ferre and Gus Visser. ¦
Through reissues that came out in the 1990s. There's a great label in France called Fremaux and Associates. So I heard them and I was struck by this music and kind of blown away by how do they get these sounds out of the accordion? And Matt Munisseri, my friend, felt the same way. And that's sort of how we started playing together. We were both interested in French musette.
And it's so expressive, virtuosic. It's an unusual type of – some of these tunes, especially swing-valse, are hybrids of jazz and French music. So when some of these French musette musicians – fell in love with jazz in the 20s and 30s, they began to write these hybrid tunes that were, and hence the name, Swing Vals, inspired by the American records that they were crazy about.
It's true. And especially dissonance on the accordion, playing notes very close together can bring out those overtones. And there is a whole range of effects you can get.
All right. Well, here's some very high notes with special overtones. If you shake the bellows, you can make it shimmer like that. You can do these bending notes like I showed you before. There's sort of nice clusters you can get. I'm letting her hand flop around on the keyboard like a fish. There's rhythmic things you can do with the bellows.
Sometimes when I play for my daughter's class, I'll do a train effect. The kids like that.
Anyway, so yeah, and that's done by shaking the bellows back and forth. So yeah, there are all kinds of things. You can do, you know, you can use the breath, the breathing sound. And you just heard the bellows kind of squeezing, flopping together. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of... The effects you can get.
Okay.
Well, one of the kinds of work that I've really enjoyed doing as an accordionist in New York over the last 20 years or so is accompanying singers. And I've had great pleasure to accompany some singers that do French repertoire from the chanson tradition, which of course just means song. But it's, for example, the most famous exponent of the chanson tradition is Edith Piaf.
And for a while I was playing with a great singer from France named Michel Hermon. And I was the only accompanist. It was really fun because it was just vocals and accordion. So I was the entire backdrop. And he was very good at coaching me in harmonizing. developing these accompaniments. He said a song, one of these songs is like a movie.
So this verse is one scene and you need to create a backdrop. Maybe it's like a sunny day or something. Then the next verse or the next part of the song is totally different, create a different backdrop. So to me, learning about that tradition, which is a little different from the musette tradition. The musette tradition is more the waltzes, the dances, the dance music.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay.
That's right.
You're a very perceptive listener.
Yes, absolutely. And that's really, for me, that's almost the very beginning of my musical life. My interest in music is going to church as a kid. and hearing these hymns and feeling something stirring inside me that I couldn't describe. You know, feeling almost like a kind of truth or something that was a very direct experience and that I really couldn't put into words.
I think so. Yeah, it was, you know, clearly people coming together to be quiet and to think about serious things. My first music teacher was the artist in residence at our church, and he wrote jazz for the services. His name is Douglas Cook, and he wrote very beautiful, very dissonant music. meditative jazz that would be in the services.
Showing 21–40 of 41 · page 2 of 3
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