Sous Le Ciel De Paris (Under the Paris Skies) is another tune that will work well, I've found.Īs my friend's daughter accurately pointed out, we are playing music that people who have probably never been to a Paris cafe think would be played there. We did find a few things in the Waltz books (damn, I love playing from them!). I also agree that if we are discreet about it we can slip in something from Italy or perhaps French Canadian. I will take them to our next practice and see how they fly. The additional tunes look and sound great. The concertina player used to play piano accordion, so I'm going to dig out mine and see if he will give it a try after 20 years. The biggest chunk of that work will be to write out enough for me to substitute for guitar - I'm more of a note player than an ear player.

We do have a few Edith Piaf tunes, but I'm going to have to do some arranging to make 'em work.

My suggestion would be that once you have some actual French musette tunes you can mix it up with a few tangos and Italian waltzes and nobody will mind - a French Cafe music set would probably have a fair few of that type of tune anyway. There is quite a bit of free music online that will suits you. There probably was a guitar part as well for that arrangement, but I don't have it.

I made a video of me playing the first mandolin part a few years ago (Link ()) - it's much richer once you add the second mandolin part and rhythm, too.ģ) La Valse Bleu (Alfred Margis): Fairly well-known tune usually played on piano, which I have in the attached mandolin duet version. There's an arrangement for two mandolins with guitar chords in Sheri Mignano's book 'Mandolin Melodies', which should suit your line-up. I have an arrangement for two mandolins and guitar (see attached - tune and arrangement should be in the public domain by now), which I recorded last year:Ģ) Domino: a French song written in 1950 by Louis Ferrari, and a hit for Bing Crosby in English translation. I see Bruce Clausen has already responded - his recording of 'Rivalité' is really nice and I have the sheet music lying around somewhere (it's not as easy as Bruce makes it sound).ġ) La Petite Tonkinoise: A French polka written in 1905, but now mostly associated with Josephine Baker's big hit in the 1920s. Burmese: ကဖီး (my) ( ka.There are a few nice musette-style tunes out there that work fine on mandolin and that should suit your mandolin/violin/bass line-up.

French cafe music classic