The instrument I call the diatonic button accordion is known to Portuguese players simply as a concertina. This is kind of confusing because there are various kinds of concertinas, such as the chemnitzer, which is closer to a bandoneon, the duet concertina, the English concertina, and the Anglo-German concertina. The instrument the Portuguese call the concertina isn’t called a concertina by any of the other cultures that use it. In this post, I’m going to show similar instruments used to make music from different cultural traditions.

That was David Frias playing a traditional Portuguese tune. Now here’s the late Rockin’ Dopsie playing Zydeco on a similar instrument. It looks like Dopsie’s playing a three-voice instrument, which, amplified, has a much different quality of sound than the Portuguese material. Dopsie is only playing the melody side of the instrument, and he’s playing it upside-down because he was left-handed. Of course he’s also backed by a whole band.

The next video features the great Conjunto player, Steve Jordan. Like Dopsie, Jordan only plays the melody side of the instrument. He uses electronic devices to filter and change his sound, and he plays a very jazzy feeling Conjunto. He’s an exceptional, fantastic player.

Here’s one more style of folk music that developed around essentially the same instrument. This is a band from LA that plays Colombian Vallenato music. They’re called Very Be Careful.

These players all use instruments with a common structure. Some musicians mess with the tuning, but the standard tuning for these instruments is in three keys, such as GCF, for instance. Imagine three diatonic harmonicas set up on top of one another. ADG is common and so is FBbEb. There are some custom tunings that are sometimes used to make it easier for the player to play the music of a particular culture. The biggest limitation of the instrument is that it is not fully chromatic. If you don’t use the left side, you can expand the range a little past the three keys represented by the three rows, thanks to some helper accidentals added to the button board.

It’s amazing the rich variety that can be pulled from instruments that have a simple set-up with strong physical limitations.