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A nightly text with a vague descritption of perhaps something musical happening leads to a bar. A small bar. One of those places that is poorly lit and feels more the size of a livingroom than a bar.

Standing on a piece of what could be called the stage pressed up against a wooden support beam I try to take up as little room as possible as the band begins to open up all the instrument cases.

An accordion, a concertina, a silver tuba, two things that look like tubas but a bit smaller, a saxophone, something that seems like a saxophone but is long and skinny and black and sounds deeper, something that sounds like a saxophone but looks more like a clarinet, three clarinets, an old tarnished trumpet, a sideways trumpet, a piccolo, a banjo, a big drum on the floor, a snare drum on the floor, a bass made from a big plastic bucket on the floor and a pole with a string on it, and perhaps a few more instruments.

The band is densely packed together. They take up about a third of the entire bar.

The music begins. The crowd stomps feet. Little dances in the front area, it is too small for rows.

The girl with the accordion begins chanting the song with the crowd. I think it is all in Russian. Something that doesn’t sound French. The whole thing feels and sounds Balkan.

I can’t tell if the girl with the accordion is my age, or has a decade or more on me. She seems like she would be an over enthusiastic music teacher for a day job.

At one point a book with lyrics scrawed in it comes out in the crowd and people gather around it to sing along. This can’t be French. I swear it is something eastern European.

The music just keeps going, but yet after a song finishes one or two people disperse.

The banjo player asks where everyone has gone because they weren’t planning an intermission. I turn around and look behind my wooden beam and see the bar has emptied out. “To smoke, they’re French” I make out (and partly imagine) someone telling him in French. They tune their instruments but continue playing tunes. During solos the other band members sit so that the person soloing can be seen in the sea of people.

Band members return. People switch instruments.

This is why I have come to France.

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