FOUR-TIME GRAMMY NOMINEE____LynnMarie & The Boxhounds, featuring Charlie Kelley____Make The Accordion Sexy, Fun ____And Hip For A Whole New Generation!
The accordion is not a punchline.
It often seems that way, particularly in the post-rock-and-roll era. Those old enough to remember the rise of Elvis will also remember the anti-Elvis, accordionist Myron (The Happy Norwegian) Floren, who could be seen weekly on The Lawrence Welk Show pumping out yet another chorus of Lady of Spain. Younger folk are more likely to associate the instrument with Weird Al Yankovic, a musical parodist whose first success was a squeezebox send-up of Another One Bites the Dust called Another One Rides the Bus.
Between bad jokes (What's the difference between an onion and an accordion? People cry when they chop up onions), double entendres (as the Who sang, "Mama's got a squeezebox, Daddy never sleeps at night"), and anti-polka snobbery, it's no wonder people snicker when they see an accordion. Even Rodney Dangerfield got more respect.
It's not as if the instrument is universally scorned. Accordion plays a lead role in Norteno and Tex-Mex music, where soloists such as Flaco Jimenez and the late Esteban (Steve) Jordan were stars, and also in Louisiana zydeco music, which was essentially invented by accordionist Clifton Chenier.
In Argentina, the voice of the tango is the bandoneon, a German cousin to the accordion; in France, Edith Piaf's performance of L'Accordeoniste speaks volumes about the instrument's appeal. The accordion or its brethren, the melodeon and concertina, can be found in Irish ceili bands, Colombia cumbia, South African boeremusiek, in gypsy music, in Brazilian forro, in jazz and pop groups, and of course in polka bands. You can even hear it at the opera, should you ever attend a production of Berg's Wozzeck.
So how did it get such a bad reputation?
"It's got a bad rap because it wasn't part of the establishment canon," says Pauline Oliveros, 78, a composer and accordionist who teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. A major figure in electronic and improvisational music for the last half-century, Oliveros will be performing at Ontario's Guelph Jazz Festival on Sept. 8.
"The accordion was invented in 1840, and this is after the classical period, the baroque period, and so on," she says. "It was designed to be played as a portable instrument, so that took it out to the working people's neighbourhoods. So it has a class prejudice against it."
In that sense, the accordion is in much the same boat as the harmonica. "The harmonica is really a remarkable instrument," she says. "It's directly in contact with the mouth of the player, and the player can make all sorts of expressive gestures with the mouth instantaneously. It's quite extraordinary."
In the 1920s and thirties, the harmonica was taken quite seriously in classical circles. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Malcolm Arnold wrote orchestral pieces for it, and George Gershwin insisted that Larry Adler's harmonica version of Rhapsody in Blue was better than the original. But by the 1960s, it was largely dismissed as a folk instrument, best suited for blues and rock music.
Although the accordion followed a similar arc of popularity, Oliveros - who has been playing the instrument since she was 9 - didn't abandon it, even as her own interests turned to electronic music. For one thing, she was lucky enough to have studied under Willard Palmer, a Bach scholar and virtuoso who was equally at home on piano, organ and accordion. Palmer, who helped develop the "free bass" accordion, was one of the first to emphasize the instrument's potential for music outside the folk ghetto.
One of the accordion's strengths was that it is a more expressive keyboard than the piano or organ. Thanks to the bellows, it's easy for an accordionist to make rapid, dramatic or subtle changes in volume, giving the instrument the dynamic range of a wind instrument.
"One of the most neglected things in music education is dynamics and tonal quality," says Oliveros. "There's a concentration on pitch and rhythm, but without the expressive aspects."
That expressive element also plays a large part in the music of another musician coming to the Guelph festival, bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi. Like Astor Piazolla, the bandoneon genius who towers over Argentine music like a tango Beethoven, Saluzzi relies as much on composed passages as on improvisation. But Saluzzi's tone, phrasing and sense of instrumental colour make his music feel deeply personal, as if the bandoneon reflected some inner voice. It's as if he breathes with his bellows.
For Oliveros, the expressive power of the accordion led, quite unexpectedly, into electronic music.
At first, she was simply interested in the instrument's sonic potential, it's ability to do something beyond playing the notes on the page. "Willard Palmer taught me to listen for difference tones on the accordion," she says, referring to a sound on the far edges of accordion technique. Difference tones are a sort of sonic illusion that occurs when two notes vibrate together in such a way as to make the listener hear a third, related note.
"I knew that if you played an interval [on accordion]and pulled hard enough, in the high register you'd hear a difference tone," she explains. By chance, she discovered that, by tweaking the dials on early synthesizers in the 1960s, she could get the same effect from high-frequency oscillators.
"That's how I invented my system," she says, referring to the Expanded Instrument System which allows her to expand, alter and augment the sounds of her accordion until it takes on an almost orchestral depth and range. "Those ideas I have developed continuously since then into very complex systems."
These days, Oliveros has gone beyond altering the sound of an acoustic accordion. Instead, she uses a Roland V-Accordion, which has the same keyboard, bellows, and buttons as her old instrument, but draws on a huge arsenal of digital sounds.
"It looks and feels like an accordion, but it's a wolf in sheep's clothing," she says, laughing.
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Six takes on the one-man band
The accordion comes in all kinds of iterations, including these half-dozen most-common ones.
As ubiquitous as the accordion may seem, it actually exists in many different varieties. Here are the six principal types:
PIANO ACCORDION This is the accordion you've seen Weird Al Yankovic, Arcade Fire's Régine Chassagne, and countless polka stars play. It has a piano-style keyboard on the right side, and small, kernel-sized buttons on the left. The most common type uses what are known as stradella bass chord buttons, to flesh out the right-hand melody with harmony and bass. The "free bass" accordion replaces those chord buttons with ones that play individual notes.
CONTINENTAL CHROMATIC ACCORDION If you've ever seen accordion buskers in France or Italy, this is likely what they played. It's big, like the piano accordion, but instead of a piano-style keyboard, there are six rows of large, quarter-sized black and white buttons. The French jazz accordionist Richard Galliano plays this type.
MELODEON These are small accordions with two or four rows of buttons in place of a keyboard, and are often used in folk music. Flaco Jimenez plays one, as do countless Irish, Cajun and Scandinavian folk musicians. Melodeons come in two types. Diatonic melodeons have fewer buttons, and are limited to specific keys, like a standard harmonica. Chromatic melodeons play all 12 tones of the octave, just like a piano.
CONCERTINA A small accordion with hexagonal ends, instead of a perpendicular keyboard like a piano accordion or melodeon, its buttons are flush with the end pieces. Although it typically has a smaller range than other accordions, it's popular in English, Irish and Boer folk music.
BANDOLEON This is a German variant on the concertina, with square or rectangular ends instead of hexagonal. It is primarily known these days for its role in Argentine tango music.
ROLAND V-ACCORDION This is a modern, digital instrument that uses an accordion interface. Instead of reeds, the bellows activate accelerometers, which shade the way the digitally modelled sounds are heard.
J.D.C.