This is an almost verbatim transcript of a radio interview of Alan Kelly, Irish piano accordionist, at the North Texas Irish Festival, March 3, 2000. I had my kids with me, and there is a little more interview, but for all practical purposes the interesting part is transcribed here.

Alan has a lovely Irish accent. There are places in the interview where he uses the wrong tense, which looks funny in print, but is all part of the accent

You can link to Alan Kelly's web page . He has two CDs, Out Of the Blue and Mosaic.

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So where were you born?

I was born in Roscommon Town, County Roscommon on the West Coast, well, in the west of Ireland in the region known as Connacht, the province of Connacht, and grew up in a family steeped in music, really. My father is a fantastic musician, a piano accordionist and he played for years in show bands as well as traditional music, so he has a wide range of music and influences, which really rubbed off on the type of music I play now; its not just strictly traditional. So he give us lessons and also my mother played music. Her first cousin is a well-known music teacher, Paddy Ryan, round all of Ireland, so we also had him to give us lessons as well, so we had the best of both worlds. We were getting it at home and at school and everything. We were just surrounded by music and we were loving it and its been my life up to now.

Now how did you end up playing piano accordion instead of button box?

Because, my father plays one.

Was that from show bands?

Yes, and he played it in traditional music. He was in ceili bands, won an all-Ireland championship in 1964 in Clones [in County Tyrone] and he was part of the Killina Celi band which in their day were one of the better known celi bands, performed live on the Celi House which was the prestigious thing to do on a Saturday night on nationwide radio, so he had this old battered accordion in the shed and nothing would do but I had to get it up and running so he got it repaired so much that you could knock a few tunes out of it. But once he seen I was interested enough he bought me a proper piano accordion. And ...I used to play the whistle before that but ever since then I've been playing the box.

Since most people do play button box, what do you do that's different? You have a smoother sound.

Well, see, a piano accordion will be smoother anyway, because with the button box its in out on each note and on the same key, the in-out, the push and the draw so on the piano accordion the same note is on the draw and the push. So its going to be much smoother anyway. So its going to be very hard to make it sound like a button box, but that's what I set out to achieve, really, to have more of that style a cross between a button box and fiddle music, that's where I would like to see myself.

What kind of accordion do you have? How many bases do you have?

I have 72. It's a 72 bass and on the right hand...I can never remember how many notes, it goes from G, two and a half octaves the usual on that size accordion. Its actually a brand new accordion, a Salterelle, they sponsor me, they make the most famous button accordions in Ireland at the moment. I'm really pleased with that, it's a really nice instrument.

Where are they made?

They're made in France.

If you're playing a tune, I know many piano accordion players are playing chords on their right hand and you don't, you just play like a button box player

Yeh. I would play chords if I was backing singers in a different situation, but in this situation I have a guitar and a double bass already playing the chords so I have to play melody. But on the left hand I would play chords more often when I was playing without a bass player, you know what I mean, in the Sessions I would tend to use the left hand a lot more.

So you'd be accompanying yourself..

Yeh, exactly, yeh

Now who are the guys you are playing with?

The guys I'm playing with at the moment are Frankie Kelly on guitar from County Mayo, who has played with the Boys of the Lough, with Brendan Power the harmonica wizard to Sean Keane the vocalist from the famous Keane family, and then on the double bass we have Damien Evans from Australia and we found him on the street in Galway, busking, and he's been with us the last year, year and a half. [The guitar player is Frank Kilkelly.]

This is your usual band?

Yeh, and this is the first time we've all been together in America, for some reason we could never pull it together. I always had someone else come over with me, so I'm really delighted that this time Frank and Damien could come with me.

On your album you have a different group...

Yeh, thats been made three years ago or something...a lot of different people I was playing with in Galway. I've been living in Galway now since 1990, so there's a lot of good musicians around in Ireland, like Steve Cooney who produced a lot of albums and changed the sound of Irish music considerable in the last 10 to 20 years I suppose...he's a big input.

I bet. It doesnt sound like it did 20 or 30 years ago.

Yeh, and I mean its still there and we still like to play that way. But everything has to move a little.

What's different?

Well...I suppose the thing that's most worrying is the regional styles are probably phased out a lot. Now the Donegal style is still there in a big way, Altan, and if you go to Donegal that's the type of fiddle playing, really energetic fiddle playing and you couldnt mistake it anyway you know, course the East Galway style which would be a totally different style of music, really slow, still has a lot of lift in it. You wouldnt tend to hear as much of it these days, well, I havent anyway! And so maybe it has begun to phase out, but you know the roots of the music is still there, there's still great Irish music there all the time.

It seems to me there is a contemporary acoustic influence that wasnt there before.

Yeh, well, you bring in guitars and double basses you know things change, but the other thing is that back in the 60s there was double basses in bands at the time playing Irish music and also saxophones. Cause my mother played saxophone in a band called the cottage girls I think they were, and I come across an old photograph, I never knew it until I saw it in the photograph, and in the same photograph in the bands there were two piano accordions. So people go on about the fact that piano accordions is new in Irish music but they're actually completely wrong because its as old as any other form, its just never got the...it was never appreciated as much...because I suppose there were some pretty bad players. It's a lovely instrument, if you play it badly it can be loud and then its going to drown everything out and it has a bad name for doing that in sessions.

Currently are there any other players in Ireland?

There are indeed. On piano accordion there are several players, Mirella Murray a great friend of mine, she comes from Claddaghduff in Connemara, she's a fantastic accordion player and hopefully she 's going to have something recorded within the next year or so, and there's also Karen Tweed from England-are you aware of Karen Tweed, you are, and there is Jimmy Keane in Chicago, he's a great...Keane, O'Connell, and...you know Robbie O'Connell, I was actually hanging out with him 2 days ago before I got here, had a great time. He's really special there, he was there way back there before anybody else.

Are there songs composed...

With the piano accordion in mind? Well, I write a lot of music which I suppose would suit the piano box more than any other instrument, yeh. Absolutely. And its probably going to work well on the button box as well. The two instruments arent that different really. They only look different really.

Just the reeds...

Yeh, that's about it. They can sound the same, you know, but there's obviously more of a flow to the piano accordion, its hard to get the rhythm into it the button box has but apart from that it's the same thing as far as I'm concerned anyway.

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gennett at gorge dot net

The Columbia Gypsy