What the band are up to

If all of our band played at the same time there would be 10 people playing a selection from an accordion, 8 melodeons, a concertina, a big drum, a little drum, 3 bodhrans, 2 mandolins, 3 fiddles, 2 cellos, a saxophone, a baritone horn, 2 tenor recorders, 2 descant recorders, a treble recorder, a clarinet, a flute and numerous small percussion instruments.  As it is you're most likely to see a band of 3 or 4 with rather fewer instruments than that.  The music that they play is for most of them, in keeping with the folk tradition, learnt by ear from someone who learnt it by ear from ... That means that the tune that we play might sound vaguely like the tune that you know by the same name (especially if you learnt it from a book of tunes) but ours is correct because we've let it evolve in the traditional manner.