Accordion Has Squeezed Its Way Into Hip New Music

Pop gaveth, pop took it away. Pop gaveth back?

“Well, now you find what isn’t hip is hip,” says Faithe Duffner, president of the Long Island-based American Accordionists Association. “For kids, what their parents don’t like is OK with them. So why not?”

And these parents once dropped their accordions as fast as they could as they raced to pick up their Strats and Les Pauls on their way to the future.

A new generation is discovering the instrument and taking it out for a spin, either including it in their own new music - like the Pogues and Crash Test Dummies - or listening to once-obscure accordion styles like the zydeco music of Clifton Chenier, the “nuevo tango” of Astor Piazzolla or the fast and furious Tex-Mex music of Esteban (Steve) Jordan.

Meanwhile, two recent compilations -“Planet Squeezebox Accordion Music From Around The World” and “Legends of the Accordion” - offer such a rich, wide view that they invite a re-evaluation of the instrument.

After all, from the 1920s to the 1950s, the accordion was often the instrument of choice for pop music in North America, and with good reason. Imagine a sort of acoustic synthesizer capable of playing melodies, accompaniment and rhythm all at once, a juggernaut of buttons and keys and cool, weird sounds packaged in a bright red plastic box, portable and LOUD.

Then came rock ‘n’ roll.

Suddenly the instrument was not merely out of fashion but took on the air of the odd man out of pop music, Brylcreemed and buttoned up in a polyester short-sleeved shirt - and with an accent to boot.

The image stuck and the accordion never quite recovered. Until now. Maybe.

“There is a lot of new interest in the instrument,” she says cautiously. “Record companies would not be putting out these collections if there was no interest. The fact is the accordion never left: You heard it on commercials, all the time, but you didn’t see it, and out of sight out of mind. Now you are seeing it again.”

Michal Shapiro, who compiled and produced the excellent three-CD collection “Planet Squeezebox: Accordion Music From Around the World,” says “the stigma is mostly in America, unfortunately. The rest of the world has a very different attitude about it, and doing the research for ‘Planet Squeezebox’ confirmed it.”

What happened to the accordion in the United States was part of the cycle in which every generation rebels to what has happened before, she says.

Jazz keyboardist Gil Goldstein, 45, a much-in-demand New York-based player, composer and arranger who has worked with artists such as Gil Evans, Pat Metheny and Sting, has become a champion of the accordion. He wasn’t always.

“I guess it was around seventh grade when I started playing in bands and my father kept saying, ‘Why don’t you play the accordion in the band?’ and I kept saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no, Dad. You don’t understand.’ It was so unhip that it was unthinkable,” he said. “Of course, had I done it I would have invented zydeco music in Maryland around 1958, but what can I say?”

The popular perception of any instrument, suggests Goldstein, depends on who plays it.

Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Hornsby, Los Lobos, The Band, Tom Waits and David Byrne, to name a few, have used it. And Paul Simon featured it on his ground-breaking “Graceland,” a pop album based on South African music that fueled a fledging world-music phenomenon.

Suddenly, a generational interest in ethnic identity found expression in a newfound fascination with roots music, both indigenous and from around the globe. Suddenly the lowly accordion was rediscovered in very hip music.

“There was a time when Americans wanted to be Americans and began to look down on anything that was culturally less than perfectly Mayflower,” says Duffner. “But we have another generation, and they don’t feel the need to frown upon their ethnic past to be solidly American. When I was a child, I had a relative who played accordion, and I thought it was the most fascinating thing in the world,” she reminisces. “When you are a child, you have no preconceptions. Maybe now the accordion can be discovered without the baggage and be seen for what it is, a great instrument, warm and phenomenally versatile.”