Squeezebox Stories: tales of the accordion, the instrument that you hug

September 12, 2015 12:17 PM

California has long been home to immigrants from around the world (and from within the U.S.). What is less known, however, is that such longstanding histories of immigration and internal domestic migration have made California a fertile ground for extremely diverse and vibrant accordion musical cultures. With that, here is background on four immigrant populations —Italians, Creoles, Lebanese/Middle Eastern, and Mixtec/Mexican — to give more background the Squeezebox Stories, about an hour of history and tales of the accordion, filtered through customs and cultures found in California.

For a broader view, there's Accordions Worldwide (Accordions.com), with an extensive introduction to the instruments, more on accordion types, international history, terminology, humor and so much more.

If you're looking for some view of current "award-winning" accordion music, the Castelfidardo Premio e Concorso Internazionale di Fisarmonica (Castelfidardo Award and International Accordion Competition) is an annual event, which gets some coverage from Accordions Worldwide. The next event starts next week, so you can look back at last year and years prior for photos and clips from performances.

posted by filthy light thief (25 comments total)

Editorial comment: it's odd that Accordions Worldewide's (brief and incomplete) international histories includes three South American countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia), but nothing on Mexico, so in that aspect these two sites mesh well.

For more on the Mexican history of the accordion, there's also PBS' Accordion Dreams, which I just now found. And now I'll stop.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:21 PM on September 12, 2015

Dick Contino, still going strong at 85.

A sexy young Contino tears it up on 1950's TV
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:37 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I own not one but two accordions. My family isn't Polish but my grandparents and their families grew up in Catholic Chicago, so at every big family party my great uncle would get out his accordions and play polkas while everybody polkaed, a skill he learned in the 20s and 30s playing for other teenagers at parish dance halls. My grandfather was king of the polka dancers because he was quite the ladies' man and the only way a poor Catholic boy in Chicago who wasn't Polish or Irish could compete for girls was to dance like a demon. For a long time I thought everybody's family parties and/or funerals eventually devolved into semi-drunken polkaing in the living room to live accordion music but apparently not.

Anyway, I ended up with the accordions, which I know how to play, but I can't play, if you know what I mean. It's a pretty noisy instrument to be bad at, which has stymied my prior attempts to learn. (The two I have are also great big ones, so they're awfully heavy and unwieldy for a smaller woman, and bad bellows management leads to painful boob-pinching.) Maybe when I finish decluttering my house I'll take the smaller one to a music shop for refurbishment and try again!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:39 PM on September 12, 2015 [8 favorites]

For hours (and hours) of accordion music from around the world, a remarkable range of sounds, check out the 3-CD set called Planet Squeezebox.
posted by LeLiLo at 12:54 PM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

My daughter says that since her mom got an accordion, I don't sleep at night.
posted by clvrmnky at 1:16 PM on September 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Anyway, I ended up with the accordions, which I know how to play, but I can't play, if you know what I mean. It's a pretty noisy instrument to be bad at, which has stymied my prior attempts to learn.

I know too well. I was at a friend's house and I tried to play a large accordion, but it was awful. Still, I wish to learn (and I figure it's easier than spending years to learn to play a bagpipe), and I hope you can get better, too. Keep those family polka parties alive!

For hours (and hours) of accordion music from around the world, a remarkable range of sounds, check out the 3-CD set called Planet Squeezebox.

Wonderful, thanks! Speaking of remarkable range of sounds, I was an accordion skeptic until I attended a senior performance by a music student, where the student both presented a brief overview on the evolution of the instrument and the showed those in attendance the range of sounds that could be made on the various forms of accordions, including Diatonic Accordion and Concertina (not a recording of her performance, but both instruments playing a Swiss Waltz).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:59 PM on September 12, 2015

It's a pretty noisy instrument to be bad at

This is a marvelous and accurate turn of phrase
posted by clockzero at 2:00 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I just finished reading The Girl with Seven Names, a memoir about growing up in and escaping from North Korea. Before she accidentally escaped in 1997 her plan was to become a professional accordion player (and do some trading on the side to make sure there was always food on the table like her mother.) I don't know about now but in the 90's in North Korea professional accordion player was a good gig.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 2:00 PM on September 12, 2015

>What's the difference between an accordion and a trampoline?

I find it interesting that almost all of the jokes listed at Accordion Worldwide are the same jokes that are told about banjos. That is the exception of the squeezing an old alley cat one.

Oh, and this might be important-- I don't see "What are the least uttered words in the English language?"
A: That's the accordion player's porsche.
posted by cleroy at 2:16 PM on September 12, 2015

Secret Life of Gravy: I don't know about now but in the 90's in North Korea professional accordion player was a good gig.

Well, in 2012 this four-accordion rendition of a-ha's Take On Me by North Korean musicians was a hit on YouTube, and they also performed at the Norwegian Barents Secretariat, with much less internet attention.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:26 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

And holy guacamole, this is an impressive performance from Korean Central Television (조선중앙방송), posted to YouTube in 2009.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:28 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

I got to hear this guy (Iosif Purits) (warning: youtube link to a rather dissonant musical piece) a couple of years ago play things on his accordion that I'd never realized were possible.

Much less dissonant piece (duet with a clarinet).
posted by small_ruminant at 3:31 PM on September 12, 2015

Holy guacamole indeed, flt, that was an awesome performance just because SO... MANY... BUTTONS...

Still, I cannot understand how you could do an accordion post without mentioning Weird Al, either his first performances where his accordion was his only instrumentation and it made his rock music parodies 33% funnier or the polka medleys on all his albums...

But enough about His Weirdness, I remember my College Radio days when all the other student DJs looked at me sideways because I'd play "Squeeze Box" from The Who By Numbers album instead of the designated hit, "Slip Kid". Still, it helped me earn my own Sunday Night 'Dr. Demento-style' show... (along with finding this in their library of old '50s/'60s singles and making it my theme song)

But I digress...
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:35 PM on September 12, 2015

Anyone have links to some of the California Arab accordionists? The only one I'm finding is the woman from the group Helm.
posted by small_ruminant at 3:49 PM on September 12, 2015

California has long been home to immigrants from around the world (and from within the U.S.). What is less known, however, is that such longstanding histories of immigration and internal domestic migration have made California a fertile ground for extremely diverse and vibrant accordion musical cultures.

Where is Donald Trump when we need him?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 3:54 PM on September 12, 2015

I do love accordions and other squeezy instruments, but the CFMP* is Not Keen, especially after the disastrous Bagpipe Incident**.

It appears that good squeezeboxes are expensive, while cheap ones are not impressive. I have been told this at great length by dear friends... he plays melodeon, she plays concertina, and they are lovely people but you do not want to broach the subject of squeezy instruments unless you have an escape strategy planned.

But the weirdest thing recently was finding a Chinese colleague in Shanghai, who is nuts about Argentinian tango music, wondering where he can get a bandoneon. WhoTF has ever *heard* of the bandoneon? I look forward to weird bandoneon/erhu duets in due course.

* CFMP = Controller of Frivolous Musical Purchases, aka Mrs 43rd
** Don't ask. One cat still hasn't fully recovered
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 4:06 PM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm in LA and am in the process of auditioning/hiring an Argentine session accordionist for a tango, for a video game soundtrack, as we speak!

There are, like, dozens of world class ones to choose from and I've only looked / asked around a little. I'm totally overwhelmed. This is the greatest time in history to be making music. There are so many shockingly talented people out here to meet, make friends with, make magic with.
posted by jake at 4:23 PM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also Mr. 43rd, I learned about the Bandoneon because it's one of the 128 General MIDI preset instruments, which for the unfamiliar is a synthesizer backwards-compatibility standard by which you can play 20 different keyboards, but all of them will have a "Bandoneon / Tango Accordion" patch as voice #23 (and e.g. a String Section at #48).

Because of General MIDI (and this unbelievable book) I knew more than my parents about the different musical instruments of the world by the time I was 14. "What the hell is a SANTUR??? MOM I NEED TO GO TO THE LIBRARY. YES, RIGHT NOW. IT'S FOR UH.................. A THING"

How much time could I have saved if we had Wikipedia back then! But finding info in a pile of old, heavy books is still unbeatable in terms of "holy shit I willed this knowledge into my brain" and there's an awful lot of good dead-tree writing on musical instruments that hasn't made it online.
posted by jake at 4:40 PM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Well, if we're talking MIDI and the like, an acquaintance of mine used to have something like this, but a much earlier version.

MIDI. USB. 18 drum sets. 128 orchestral sounds. Effects. Looping. Loud. Heavy.

Personally, i reckon one of these could start the apocalypse.

But I digress.

*He* played a mandolin through a pedal board into a fairly large amp, and had a set of bass pedals. *She* played one of those into an equally large amp. Their "Won't Get Fooled Again" on mandolin and accordion could have given the Who a run for their money any night...
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 4:52 PM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

Augh holy shit that's so awesome
I wish I had a Mr. or Mrs. Jake to tell me not to impulse-buy one of these right now, because goddamn I want one.
posted by jake at 6:01 PM on September 12, 2015

One of the dichotomies of my life is that my first instrument was accordion and my second was harp.

In other news, my secretary went to the Cotati Accordion Festival a few weeks ago at the urging of a friend. Although she was skeptical in advance, she reported the following Monday that it was fan-fucking-tastic. She's got me convinced to go next year.
posted by janey47 at 6:47 PM on September 12, 2015

To start with I have more accordions than ANY of you, ask me anything you want about accordions.

I will just leave these examples of accordion randomness here;

Tiny accordions for the win
Techno accordion
Tuvan throat singing with accordion
Arabic accordion I have done some quarter note tuning for a Arabic music school in San Louis Obispo in the past,there seem to be several systems.
posted by boilermonster at 10:51 PM on September 12, 2015 [4 favorites]

The history in the SF bay area goes back into the 1880's with Dutch, German and Norwegian makers such as Miller and Greub and VerWer in Oakland, the field was later dominated by Italians.
posted by boilermonster at 11:02 PM on September 12, 2015

San Luis Obispo, CA has/had an Arabic music school? How did I miss that?
posted by filthy light thief at 1:22 PM on September 14, 2015

Polkacide has featured an accordion since their founding in the '80s. And don't forget Those Darn Accordions! San Francisco loves the squeezebox.
posted by goofyfoot at 11:43 PM on September 14, 2015