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Teddy passed his bandoneon for me to try and as I played a first tentative note, I felt the way the instrument drew breath and sing. It was alive. Never before had I felt such a connection with all the musicians who played the instrument over the years. The bandoneon resonated with their energy and aspirated the same air molecules that I now shared.

I bought my first bandoneon from Teddy, and armed with an argentine metodo and some lessons plans, I started a journey of discovery with a new friend.

As a pianist, I am at home with a keyboard that is simply laid out. The lowest note is on the left and the highest on the right, and as your fingers move from left to right, each note encountered raises the pitch a semitone.

The 142 note bandoneon laughs in the face of such simplicity. It is as if a gremlin has shuffled all the piano keys, thrown them in the air and replaced them as they fell. There is no order, no logic, and no simplicity.

As it that wasn't enough of a frustration, almost every button on the instrument sounds different on opening and closing the bellows. There is an array of 35 odd buttons at both ends of the bellows that deliver a different sound depending on the direction of bellows. In a nutshell, the instrument is basically 4 keyboards continually travelling in opposing directions at either end of the bellows.

During the first weeks of learning to play, all I could hear in my head was a wonderful, heartfelt melody. I later found out it was the vals 'Desde al Alma' (from the soul). The tune, and later the significance of its name kept me going through the first agonising months of musical pelmanisn.

I taught myself how to play Desde by heart, in A minor, using both hands. Teddy, ever the perfectionist, later chided me for only playing a single note melody with my right hand. "Steve, play harmonies," he would say, "learn your arpeggios, feel your chord shapes, it makes a fuller sound when you play like that". So I set about making sense of the insane. First with the right hand and leaning on my old friend the piano for advice, I learnt where the lowest and then the highest note were and then memorised the position of every note in sequential order between the two. Up and down. Down and up.

Up and down went my confidence and frustrations. The gremlins returned and sometimes I swear they made overnight changes to the button positions. If you touch type using a computer keyboard, you'll know that being one key displaced left or right vsm ,slr s mpmdrmdr pg etoymh (sorry that should have read 'can make a nonsense of writing').

The same thing can happen with the bandoneon. It is very easy to make something beautiful sound nrsiyogi;. I'll be back in a minute, I just need to turn spell check off.

Pictured above: My first bandoneon, a 142 note made in Uruguay around 1940.

That's beeter. Over the years, I have found many similarities between learning tango and learning bandoneon and I feel I have been guided to find more joy in both as a result. It has certainly helped be become a more sensitive teacher. My friend Korey Ireland is a pianist learning bandoneon and something he said about learning bandoneon hit home. "it is good to be humbled by a learning process". I often draw on my experience of learning bandoneon when I see students struggling with a new concept or technique. It is good for a teacher to relate to a student being challenged educationally - it makes them teach more laterally and sensitively.

I now have three bandoneons. My first, Teddy's bando, was made in Uruguay in the 1940s is my travelling and lending bando. My second is a 152 note black Klaus Gutjahr, made in the 1990s in the kitchen of its maker in Berlin. This modern instrument is lithe and quick and firm in its action, but gives me no impression being imbued with the energies of past owners but then it is a relative youngster. My third is a treasured Doble A. Doble A or AA is a contraction of the makers name Alfred Arnold. Julio Pane, a renowned bandoneonista in Argentina, previously owned the bandoneon.

My 'Doble A' found me as I was trying out bandos to buy for a friend in a music shop in BsAs. The owner obviously took me for a tourist and started me off with a beaten up old squeezebox that wheezed pathetically. The next few were so bad I only needed to play a few notes before emphatically saying "¡No! No me gusto, algo mas?" Slowly, as he heard I could play something resembling tango, the bandos he offered me to try got better and better until, after trying all the bandos in his window display, the owner disappeared for a while and came back with a beautiful reddish brown AA with mother of pearl inlay. One chord later, I was ready to say ¡Si! but spent the next couple of hours playing and negotiating a price.

This story will be continued...
Come back soon.