Where Y’at Interview

I was interviewed by Where Y’at for their April 2021 issue. They were only able to use a few excerpts of my lengthy responses. Here’s the unedited interview.

1. So, tell me about yourself and a little bit of your background, experience, etc.
2. How long have you been playing the accordion?
3. What can you tell me about accordion music and the accordion itself, in terms of the history, importance to Louisiana, etc.?
4. How difficult is it to learn to play the accordion?
5. What is the future of accordion music?
6. What can you tell me about the Accordion Festival? Did you start it? When is it, usually? What will happen this year? How long has it been going on, etc.?
7. What about COVID —obviously, it is seriously affecting the music industry. Have you been affected much?
8. How much does the average accordion cost? What is the lowest price and what would a high-end accordion run you?
9. How common is the accordion in Louisiana? Do you find that there are a lot of people who own them?
10. Any fun facts or anecdotes about the accordion?
11. Anything else you think everyone should know?

1. So, tell me about yourself and a little bit of your background, experience, etc. (to top ↑)

   I’m from rural New Hampshire originally. My father is a Latin percussionist and guitarist, but I actually had little interest in music until my mid-teens. I was always more interested in theater and literature. When I was maybe 14, I simultaneously fell in love with Tom Waits and Beethoven, and spent a few years teaching myself folk and classical guitar. I don’t know why I picked guitar, except that was the default choice at that time and was the most affordable and nearest thing at hand. I lived in Burlington, Vermont from my late teens to mid-thirties, working a lot of blue-collar jobs and driving a cab for years. I was always pursuing music or some other art form during that time, but without any formal education whatsoever. I use the word “pursuing” advisedly. I continue to pursue music, and may never catch the sonofabitch, but I keep trying.

   I became an accordion technician out of necessity when I moved to New Orleans 9 years ago and there was no one doing it here. I was the kind of kid who takes apart an alarm clock and I had done minor repairs on my accordion for years, but I had a guy in Vermont that I always went to for any serious work. My first and, really, only job in New Orleans was doing backbreaking labor like carrying people’s clawfoot tubs and sofa beds down from the third floor, and my body finally gave out. I gave myself a hernia and couldn’t do it anymore. While I was surviving on worker’s comp, I went and visited my friend in Vermont who had done my repairs for years, and he very generously taught me everything, or at least enough to get started. I’ve since learned from others as well, spent time working for a master accordion technician in Cologne, Germany, and developed my own techniques.
   

2. How long have you been playing the accordion? (to top ↑)

   Around 16, the idea to learn accordion came from great Tom Waits albums like Frank’s Wild Years and Rain Dogs. Also, one of my first jobs was working in an antique shop, and I remember being fascinated by the occasional accordions that came through. This was before the internet, so I placed a classified ad in the paper saying I needed an accordion. I got about a dozen replies, and my mother drove my around to look at various accordions that people had in the backs of their closets. I realize now that I was extremely lucky to have gotten a working one, since I knew nothing and almost all old, unplayed accordions are in horrible shape.

   So then my first accordion just sat there for the next few years while I continued my guitar finger-picking, coffeehouse open mic, sensitive singer-songwriter existence. I had no idea where to begin with it, didn’t know anyone who played, and lacked the discipline at that time to learn. I moved to Burlington when I was 18 and quickly got involved in local theater. I was an actor in an experimental troupe called The Fool’s Jacket which performed plays written by the group’s leader. They were usually in rhyming verse and our scripts were handwritten and barely legible, the entire play often written in a single, Kerouac-ian, probably chemically-assisted session. After portraying in these mad plays such characters as Abraham Lincoln, Victor Frankenstein, and the planet Mars, I was asked to play accordion for one. The play was about Gypsies, and by then I had taught myself some simple klezmer tunes. We put together the world’s worst pseudo-klezmer/Gypsy-type band and enjoyed it so much that after the play ended we decided to continue being a band. Despite not being good, we actually started getting gigs because that music, however ineptly rendered, was such a novelty in Vermont in the late 90’s. We eventually got better and became a beloved and well-known band, but only in Vermont. So the answer is about 22 years.
   

3. What can you tell me about accordion music and the accordion itself, in terms of the history, importance to Louisiana, etc.? (I know this is kind of a broad question, but please elaborate on this one as much as you can.) (to top ↑)

   Got about 37 hours? It’s a big subject. Very briefly, accordions are not a single instrument, but a vast and varied sub-category of bellows-driven free reed aerophones, itself a larger family of instruments which includes concertinas like the hexagonal ones typically seen in the British Isles and – ahistorically – movies about pirates, and the square, German ones like the bandoneon and chemnitzer, now mainly played in, respectively, tango in Buenos Aires and polka in the American mid-west. Harmoniums (those old organs that you pump with your feet, as well as the small, hand-pumped type used in Indian music) are also in this category. Other free reed instruments without bellows include the harmonica and melodica (that mouth-blown, piano-looking thing that Jon Batiste plays). All free reed instruments are ultimately derived from a 3,000 year old, bronze age Asian technology.

   Just within the category of instruments commonly called accordions you have a wide assortment of instruments, each of which can be virtually unplayable for a virtuoso of one of the other types. The one I play, and which tends to be the most common type in the US and western Europe, is the one with a piano-type keyboard, called a piano accordion. These came rather late to the party and didn’t become popular until the early 20th century. You have chromatic button accordions, which come in two different systems, one of which is popular in France, the other, called a bayan, predominant in Russia. You have “free bass” accordions with individual notes in the left hand (instead of the usual arrangement of bass notes and chords) for playing advanced classical music. Then there are the many types of diatonic button accordions, which play two different notes for each button, depending on the direction of the bellows. These are commonly referred to as accordions here, although they are called by other names elsewhere, such as melodeon in Britain and organetto in Italy. These include the single row, 10 button box used in Cajun and Quebecois musics, the 2 row played in Irish music, the 3 row played in Mexican conjunto, the steirische harmonika played in Alpine music, and many others. Also, accordions that look similar can sound like completely different instruments, with different numbers and configurations of reeds and different types of tuning.

   The accordion was the musical manifestation of the industrial revolution. Though it now evokes nostalgia for an imagined, supposedly more innocent past, it once was a cutting edge technology that to some cultural elites seemed a crass and ominous mechanization of music. The origins of the instrument are complicated and controversial, but suffice it to say that the first thing called an accordion was patented in 1829 in Vienna by a Transylvanian of Armenian descent. The first accordions to crawl from that primordial ooze were simple creatures, able to play only a few chords to accompany a singer. Early instruments would have been luxury items, with every part made by hand. In the latter part of the 19th century, German manufacturers figured out how to mass produce accordions, and they became affordable for the working class. Though Germans did more than anyone else to popularize the accordion, Italians perfected it, and the world’s finest accordions are still made in Castelfidardo, Italy, long the mecca of the industry. Accordions grew gradually more mechanically complex and versatile over the 19th century, branching off into innumerable species. A modern, professional accordion has over 4,000 parts – more than a piano, more than perhaps any acoustic instrument except maybe a large church organ. It spread to nearly every corner of the world, usually brought by German or Italian immigrants. Everywhere it went it was assimilated into, and often came to overtake, the local music. The Parisian waltz music (called bal-musette) that everyone immediately associates with the accordion was originally a bagpipe music. “Musette” was the name of the bagpipe. Often, the accordion blasted the fiddle out of its starring role. Formerly, fiddle was one of the louder instruments around in pre-amplification times, but the accordion was louder still and could be heard at the back of a room with 100 dancers. In Cajun music, for example, this resulted in the loss of some of the older, more complex repertoire, because the accordion that happened to be introduced to Louisiana was of the very simplest kind, able to play the notes of only one key. This dynamic (no pun intended) of brute force triumphing over musical subtlety eventually returned to haunt the accordion in the 1960’s. The accordion is very difficult to amplify to rock and roll levels, and this is probably one of the reasons for the accordion collapse of the late 20th century.

   As far as the accordion in Louisiana is concerned, the less I say the better, because there are many people around here you could ask who know much more than I. I can tell you that it was most likely brought here by German Jewish merchants who opened general stores in the late 19th century. The first Louisianans to play them were probably black Creole musicians. In fact, the oldest known image of an accordionist anywhere is a daguerreotype taken in a New Orleans studio in the 1850’s of a well-dressed young black man holding an early French type of accordion called a flutina. It resides in the collection of the New Orleans Jazz Museum. There’s a rich history of African-American accordion music in Louisiana, most of which went unrecorded. Ethnomusicologists who came to the South to document folk music had an aversion to the accordion, which they deemed insufficiently authentic. Alan Lomax called it “this pestiferous instrument” that had ruined music. Thank goodness we have recordings of Amédé Ardoin. There’s a handful of wonderful recordings of Leadbelly playing his “windjammer”. We are very lucky in Louisiana to have two of the world’s great accordion traditions, Cajun and zydeco. We could talk at length about these two very different styles which tend to get lumped together, but there are more informed people who should answer those questions. Also, we have in Louisiana some master builders of diatonic accordions. That’s a whole other discussion. It’s nice to be in, say, the middle of Australia and see some Aussie playing Cajun music on a Martin accordion.
   

4. How difficult is it to learn to play the accordion? (to top ↑)

   It depends on your levels of ambition and discipline. If you go the slow, stupid, auto-didactic route like I did, it could take 20 years to a lifetime to get good. If you find a decent teacher and practice every day, you could be making music in a few months. YouTube has made learning music much easier. When I was first learning, it was from cassette tapes, and I’d rewind and play the same 5 seconds of a 1920’s klezmer recording 100 times to try and figure out what the hell the clarinet player was doing. Now almost everything is on YouTube and they have a feature that allows you to slow it down to ½ or ¼ speed. There’s no longer any barrier to knowledge for most people, there is only the question of putting in the time and having a decent instrument. The accordion has a lower bar to sounding halfway decent than many instruments – brass, woodwinds, bowed strings – where you spend the first few months just trying to produce a tone that doesn’t sound like a sick animal. If your accordion sounds like a sick animal, only a technician can help with that. The accordion demands a certain formality of practice. You can’t just grab it like a guitar and play a few chords while you are laying on the couch watching TV. I used to play long tones on the cornet while watching movies. To practice accordion, you sit up straight in a chair without armrests and literally strap yourself in. There’s some commitment involved. It’s heavy, uncomfortable, asymmetrical, temperamental, does not like humidity or extremes of temperature, and is arduous and expensive to repair and tune. It has advantages over other instruments, however, which more than make up for all that. It’s like a relationship with a complicated and difficult, but never boring person. Apart from the fact that it can sound very beautiful when played well, it works equally well as an ensemble or solo instrument. You can play melody, harmony, chords, and bass lines and also sing all at the same time as with a piano, but unlike a piano you can always play your own instrument, rather than whatever out-of-tune barroom thing with unfamiliar action is at hand, or a soulless electronic keyboard. It’s a wind instrument, so it’s a good stand-in for horns, woodwinds, or strings. It’s an excellent instrument for learning music theory, better than piano, I think, because you have the chromatic keyboard on the right, and on the left side you have the circle of fifths. Without getting technical, knowing the circle of fifths is fundamental to understanding music, and it’s conveniently built right into the instrument, on piano and chromatic accordions anyway. Also, the accordion has the advantage of drawing from bottomless wells of nostalgia – perhaps more than any other instrument – in many people who can remember their grandparent playing it, or some perfectly patina-ed memory from their first trip abroad. It’s a circus. It’s a Fellini film. It’s an old photograph of Red Army soldiers posed in front of a tank.
   

5. What is the future of accordion music? (to top ↑)

   The good news is that the accordion is the most popular it’s been in probably 60 years, and not even in an ironic way anymore. When I started playing in the 90’s, it was hipster and contrarian to play accordion, like writing on an antique typewriter (which I also did) or refusing to have email. It had become this comic cliché of everything uncool, which had come full circle back to being cool, but in a slightly snotty hipster way, like wearing a Christmas sweater from the thrift store. You could get away with playing poorly, because people didn’t know what good accordion playing sounded like. That’s all pretty much gone now, thank goodness. The memory of Lawrence Welk and the whole 20th century American “accordion industrial complex” (as Marion Jacobson termed it) just doesn’t exist for young people now. Their first experience hearing it was probably with an indy rock band or on the Amelie soundtrack. It’s finally just another instrument, which attracts or repels on its own merits. There are many good younger accordionists now who are musicians first and accordionists second, as it should be. I should point out that most of these observations refer to the role of the accordion in mass culture. In many traditional communities all over the world, from Louisiana to Quebec to Mexico and South America and Eastern Europe, the accordion never went away.

   The bad news is that the reservoir of good, affordable, student instruments is drying up. Americans were buying over 100,000 accordions a year up until around 1960, and these millions of old, disused accordions laying around fueled the accordion revival of the 1990’s. By now, however, very few of them are in fully playable condition. If I search “accordion” on Ebay right now, nearly 4,000 results come up. About half of these are new instruments, and most of those are poor quality ones made in China. These might sound okay for a little while, but they are basically disposable instruments that will quickly go out of tune and fall apart, and won’t be worth repairing. Of the used instruments, most of these are pre-1960’s Italian or German models, better quality than the new Chinese ones, but almost all are in terrible shape and will need a great deal of skilled restoration to be playable. Usually, the more beautiful the accordion, the more of a wreck it will be inside, because the prettiest ones were made during the vaudeville era, pre-WW2. People are hoping to get hundreds or thousands of dollars for these on Ebay, but they are utterly worthless as instruments. There are few people with both the skill and time to restore them. It makes little economic sense to do so. Cheap, mass-produced guitars have convinced people that they should be able to get something playable for $300. People contact me all the time looking for the mythical $300 accordion and I have to explain that I typically spend 40-80 hours on each instrument I restore, which I then might sell for $700 or $800, and I probably paid $150 or more for it to begin with. At the very least, every old accordion needs a complete tuning before it can be sold in good conscience. A typical, professional-size accordion has 448 reeds, and tuning them involves very precisely filing these reeds with small hand files, so the tuning alone can often take well over 10 hours. It’s crazy from a business perspective to do this work, but it gives me some satisfaction to rehabilitate an instrument that would otherwise never be played again, like raising an orphaned baby rhinoceros and releasing it back into the wild.

   The accordion has always been an evolving technology, and there have been various, mostly unsuccessful attempts to update it for the electronic music age. In the early 1960’s, there were accordion/synthesizer hybrids with names like Cordovox and Accorgan. These mostly failed to catch on, and when someone buys one of these now the first thing they do is rip out all the vacuum tubes and other space-age electronics, which have long ceased to work, as they are actually good acoustic accordions underneath it all. The current iteration of this attempt to remake the accordion are the reed-less, fully digital accordions made by Roland. Unlike the 60’s hybrids, these are purely electronic instruments. To me they sound nothing like an accordion. The sound has an uncanny valley quality to it and, despite improvements in mimicking the response of reeds to changes in bellows air pressure, they feel all wrong. I hope these things are not the future of the accordion, as I am not a computer technician and would be out of a job. That said, many people like them. Something tells me that the lingering perfume of nostalgia which surrounds the instrument will continue to create a demand for traditional accordions.
   

6. What can you tell me about the Accordion Festival? Did you start it? When is it, usually? What will happen this year? How long has it been going on, etc.? (to top ↑)

   The New Orleans Accordion Festival was started by four local accordionists – Stephanie Reed, Greg Speck, Michael Ward-Bergeman, and myself – in 2018. It grew out of a yearly jam session for accordion players called Skinny Squeezy Tuesday, one week before Mardi Gras. A few of us had the idea separately, and we invited all the accordion players in town that we knew to help plan it. The four of us who kept showing up became the steering committee. The idea was to represent the whole range of musical styles that accordionists play here, as well as bring in at least one headline act from elsewhere. It was the first weekend in November and lasted for 3 days. We had 16 musical acts at 4 venues, all local except one, playing Cajun, zydeco, klezmer, traditional jazz, modern jazz, merengue, French, Balkan, and original music. We had a lecture on the history of free reed instruments, an accordion repair demonstration, a documentary film screening, a late night cabaret, a jam session, and an accordion petting zoo. All the money went to pay the musicians, except the four of us on the committee. It was great. It was also a ton of work for four people who already had busy lives and are not professional impresarios, and we eventually decided to skip 2019 make it an every-other-year event. Then, as we all know, the pandemic hit in 2020. We discussed doing some sort of online version, but ultimately decided that it wouldn’t really work. We are very much hoping to bring the festival back this fall, but so much remains unknown.
   

7. What about COVID —obviously, it is seriously affecting the music industry. Have you been affected much? How does the cancellation of festivals affect the accordion business, and, specifically, how is the Accordion Festival being affected? (to top ↑)

   I don’t want to complain, because a lot of other people have it much worse. I’ve played a total of 4 (outdoor, of course) gigs in the past year. It’s the first time in over 20 years that I’m not really a musician in any functional way, which is strange. Luckily, I was already working by myself at home fixing accordions, although that business is a trickle of what it normally would be. I’m good at living on not much money. It’s hard not to be filled with rage at the schmucks everywhere who refuse to wear masks and the satanic Republicans who are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. All we have to do is look at how a country like Australia has handled it and do the same, but we seem to be incapable of learning from anyone else.

   Actually, this should have been a great year for the accordion since it’s just about the only wind instrument you can play while wearing a mask, but the world doesn’t seem to have caught onto that.
   

8. How much does the average accordion cost? What is the lowest price and what would a high-end accordion run you? (to top ↑)

   A small, poorly made Chinese accordion with limited range can be had for $300 – $400, though these are not much more than toys. The finest accordions in the world are still made in Castelfidardo, Italy, and these will start in the thousands. A full size, professional accordion with hand-made reeds will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $8,000 – $15,000 new, although it’s possible to spend even more. Not so bad, considering that a top level violin or cello would be much more expensive. In the middle, you have some German instruments like Hohner and Weltmeister that are alright, although the cheaper Hohners are now made in China and are pretty poor. If you are looking to buy used, you should be willing to spend $700 – $1000 for a decent refurbished starter instrument, or $1500 – $4000 for something professional.
   

9. How common is the accordion in Louisiana? Do you find that there are a lot of people who own them? (to top ↑)

   There are many accordionists in Louisiana due to the Cajun and zydeco traditions, although I prefer to talk about my corner of the state, New Orleans. We have a small but wonderfully varied accordion community here. My clients are mostly in-town, and include players of traditional jazz, blues, klezmer, Balkan, Brazilian forró, Dominican merengue, French musette, “Gypsy” jazz, Arabic music (on an accordion specially tuned with quarter tones to achieve Arabic scales), even some Cajun and zydeco, although they tend to have their people around Lafayette and Houston.
   

10. Any fun facts or anecdotes about the accordion? (to top ↑)

    The accordion is its own fun fact. They are odd instruments often played by odd people, so it’s hard to know where to begin. One thing I love about being an accordion technician is the vast range of humans who play this instrument. One day I’ll have an elderly nun in a habit in my workshop (back when people were allowed to come inside), the next day, a Brazilian kid who works on an oil rig, then a virtuoso who plays with some of the world’s most elite classical musicians, then someone who plays 8 hours a day on Bourbon Street whose bellows have dissolved from the gallons of sweat they have absorbed, or a shaggy busker with an accordion held together with duct tape and straps made from a clothesline.

    The old instruments have stories to tell of the people who played them and the music they played. It’s like being a detective sometimes. I can often tell when I open up an old accordion that someone played for years in smoky bars, and only in C major, because the valves of only the notes in that key will be black with soot. I have a client who is always breaking his B flat reeds, because he plays on the street with a brass band, and a lot of brass music is in B flat. Also, small children are instinctively fascinated by the accordion, with its multitude of buttons and switches and shiny, moving bits. When I play on the street, they toddle towards it, bewitched, needing to touch it. I understand this compulsion, because I share it. Be nice to accordionists, or we will lead your children away like the pied piper!
    

11. Anything else you think everyone should know? (to top ↑)

    If anyone is interested in this stuff and wants to delve further, I recommend Bruce Triggs’ book Accordion Revolution. To learn about or support the New Orleans Accordion Festival, go to www.nola-accordion-festival.com. For help with all things accordion related, go to www.bigsqueezyaccordions.com. To listen to some of my music, www.davidcsymons.com.