Accordions Rising Transcript

Accordions Rising Transcript

- [Narrator] I have always felt a certain affinity for the misunderstood. Conventional wisdom tells us that the accordion has had its day but what if everything we thought we knew about this most maligned of all musical instruments were wrong and what if the real story were one of incredible variety a fascinating cast of characters, their deep passions, dreams and dedication. What if the real story were a revelation?

- [Dr. William] We've come to a point now where people are interested in the way it looks. Most of the people who take up the accordion today whether it's younger people or people who come back to it they usually see it somewhere and it'll be really cool looking and they'll fall in love with it in a visceral sort of way and they'll wanna own it. Like this instrument here. It's wonderful because it has an industrial deco grill. So it's gorgeous to behold. You'll go into some people's homes and you'll, they'll see one displayed. You, well okay so we caught ya.

- They have a history. They have like a whole story, right?

- Yeah. Hidden swollen memories, diaspora.

- Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Accordion Stories. You know, when I think back about growing up in the Mon Valley, my memories are filled with the accordion. My father, when it was time to go to sleep would grab his accordion and he had his marshaling light cigar and sit in the dark and all you could see was that glowing red tip of that cigar and as he played some slow tune we'd both the drift off watching him play with that cigar in his mouth in the dark and of course after a couple of those measures we were both out cold. Well I was serenaded to sleep. I was very fortunate for that.

- I first saw the accordion and heard it in the 1950s. They were really ubiquitous. You could barely turn on the TV without seeing an accordion. In those days we had amateur hours which had not only singers but instrumentalists and jugglers and dancers and Dick Contino was an accordion player who was winning week after week after week when I was a kid and I was fascinated by the sound of it, I was fascinated by the look of it and by the fact that he was a star and so the accordion was my introduction to somebody being a musical star which became ironic in terms of what I later learned about people's impression of the instrument.

I started taking lessons from a guy who came door to door and he introduced me to pop tunes and things like that but the real dive into what the accordion was about came when I was introduced to this wonderful accordion teacher, Walter Grabowski who was one of the best accordion teachers in the country and he introduced me to the concept of the accordion as a classical instrument but also he was Polish-American and he himself played Polish weddings and dances and so he introduced me to polkas and waltzes and in the neighborhood I grew up in and the people who played accordion were working people, guys who worked during the week in the mines or the steel mills or in the glass factory and then they played on weekends as a side job.

So I thought that I would have to do something else but the only thing I was good at with my hands was playing my instrument. It was only when I was 18 and I wanted to go to music school I decided that in some way my life wanted to be in music. I started looking in catalogs and they were all the instruments that you can major on were listed alphabetically and the first one was bassoon but I was lucky and I was stubborn and I wasn't gonna quit, it just meant too much to me. You and I were both at the San Antonio International Accordion Festival and the musician there that had a huge impact on me was Kepa Junkera, from the vast region of Spain and he has this wonderful technique he does. Playing very fast reiterated and he's like, and he introduces ends of phrases with a great deal of flair. I came back from the festival and I wrote this piece dedicated to him which I called Ratatatatui and the ratatata is a machine gun sound that I associated with that repeated note and the beginning of it is like this.

- My parents started me off on classical piano at age five. So I was already playing little, you know, little recitals. I don't remember getting all that much of a bang out of it. People would pat me on the head and say, "That's nice Billy, what a nice boy you are." It really crossed my mind because is that all there is to this? A pat on the head and people telling me I'm a nice little boy because what would happen is my uncles would all arrive all hell would break loose. Case of beer would be rolled in, sausages and stuff and I realized the power of the instrument, what the instrument could make people do. I wanted to make people do that too where it wasn't happening for me when I was playing the piano. People were dancing around, they were really truly enjoying themselves and, as it went along they could go the other way too. You know, then all of a sudden the accordion player starts playing a sad song that reminds them of, you know a departed relative and somebody, everybody starts crying but still, still I realized the power of the instrument, the emotional ride it could take people on and so I wanted them, I wanted to play that instrument.

- And it was not considered dorky or because I wasn't on the football team or something. It was considered to be you know, something really wonderful that you had a talent and people looked up to and the fact that it was accordion was neither here nor there because many of their parents were Czech or Slovak or Polish or Slovenian or Italian. So they had that as part of their tradition too. It was considered part of their culture. You know up until the '60s and then when those kids started to mature then that generation discovered their own instrument which was the guitar and that was the beginning of the end of the accordion as the king of popular culture.

- It went out of style. It didn't mean people stopped using it because you know you turned on the radio, you still heard it, you went to the movies, you heard it in the backgrounds, you heard it you know, "Pink Panther". It was all the way through Broadway Danny Rose or "Moonstruck" all these movies where you hear that wonderful Italian music, that sound but you didn't know who they were.

- And I've lived with him through this period where we had disgruntled older people, older than us, we're now the elders, we want the accordion to be taken seriously. Bill's younger students they don't think about that. Those 20 and 30 year olds, they don't have that context They're more interested in ethnomusicology, world music, mixing mashing music.

- [Woman] I was 16 years old and I was walking through a bookstore in Ohio and I heard an album of klezmer music led by a Itzhak Perlman and I'd never heard this music before and I got really into it. I asked my parents for an accordion and they gave me one.

- I'm actually a piano player. A friend's landlord was throwing an accordion away. It was falling apart and I put it back together with a gaff tape and rubber cement. I play around in a band and we decided we needed an accordion on some songs so I've been playing accordion. I picked up a better one. I'm still learning.

- People consider highbrow or lowbrow. The accordion has a lot to say about that.

- There is this element, no matter what you do somebody somewhere is gonna think it's ridiculous.

- People have said to me, "What does your husband do?" And I say, "Well, he plays the accordion" and they laughed.

- Well you know there's the old cartoon about, "Welcome to heaven here's your harp" and "Welcome to hell here's your accordion", right?

- In this country for some reason, it seems to have an association with street musicians or the circus.

- [Guy] If I'm at the carousel in the airport waiting for my luggage and this big thing comes out and somebody says, "What is it?" I mean, then I have to go through the whole thing. "Oh, is an accordion." And then the conversation comes to a stop because people think they know about you then, that you dress up in lederhosen and you play what they consider stupid music and you're not very interesting and the irony about all of that is that even the guys who wear lederhosen among them there are some phenomenal players. Not only in terms of their techniques but even their originality. So you have to watch your stereotypes no matter who you are. I mean I'm saying even for myself because I had those same stereotypes.

- [Pauline] If you play the accordion, I'm lucky to have been playing it for 69 years now. You're introduced to new people and they say, "Oh what do you play?" And I say, "Well I play the accordion." And then... You know, the image of Lawrence Welk usually appears in polka. You're an outsider. You know, this is usually in establishment situations which of course I've been involved in.

- As a kid I was pretty obsessed with Lawrence Welk and growing up in a classical music household that I think that was a big rebellion on my part that the bubbles and the hairdos just fascinated me.

- [Narrator] Lawrence Welk and his Champagne music. At one point after starting to play accordion, daily, I was wandering the streets and I thought what am I doing with my life? Is this the right path, you know? And I ended up stumbling into an abandoned building in the East Village and I found on the floor an autograph copy of a Lawrence Welk's book called "My America, Your America." And I took that as a real sign that Lawrence was just looking down and giving me the okay. ♪ Me ♪ ♪ And the bad boys ♪ ♪ Stay up all night ♪ That's my idealized version of America. It's somewhere where music ends up mixing and turning into other things. I don't think Lawrence would have liked that.

- I remember once being brought in to do a commercial for a candy bar that had like a Cajun theme. It was, had some New Orleans connection to it. So they're trying to push that. So they had the composer for the session do like a zydeco tune and they brought me into play accordion and then the whole time in the mix they kept saying, "oh accordion's too loud, accordion's too loud." And I'm sitting there thinking, man these guys are trying to be hip. and they don't even realize that in zydeco music the accordion's the lead not only that but pop bands are trying to cover zydeco tunes because they want the sound of the accordion. So even this person who was supposed to be hip to popular culture was like a generation behind in his thinking that's what's so frustrating.

- [Bruce] In Louisiana, this is a very unique place. People here talk loud and they play loud. So when it came to the accordion, they certainly put their own stamp on style. A lot heavier, a lot brighter sound, a much stronger sound. They came in very early, shortly after they were invented basically. Early spirituals, early work songs, blues. Earliest photo I think is Circa 1855 photo of a Creole accordion player. The spirit of Marie Laveau prevails over lots of things. So, I'm sitting in there, fiddling around with my accordion and the song came to me. She's probably the most well-known priestess associated with voodoo and helping orphans and stuff that stories and books and movies are made out of. She started using an accordion player in her voodoo rituals for the music. So got a deal with Marie Laveau to be in New Orleans

- I enjoy photographing accordion players. The accordionist is a leader of the group and he's an advocate for the culture, he's an advocate in the community, he's a star. You know people look up to him and this happens time and time again. This is a photograph I took in 1987 of Clifton Chenier, founder originator of zydeco music and he's playing a song called "I'm Coming Home". It's one of his famous hits. It was his last concert in Louisiana, he died later that year. ♪ Yes I'm coming back home ♪ ♪ 'Cause that's where I belong ♪ Clifton Chenier played music the accordion was just the instrument. He played it as if it was an extension of himself. In his case, he was emotionally one with his accordion because it was all tied up into this transitive moment where it's the last time he's playing for his people. Angels and Accordions is a site-specific performance at Greenwood Cemetery that involves dancers and accordion players. A site-specific work is a piece that's made to highlight some aspect of the place that it's in. Accordions were invented around 1829, 1830 so they're in a way contemporary with the cemetery which was built in 1838. Gyke Lasevick wrote music for the beginning and ending and we accompany him on those sections. I work with seven or eight or nine or 10 accordion players who are scattered through the grounds of the cemetery. As we were thinking about the New Orleans funeral tradition of mixing joy with sadness, what we were really trying to capture was a certain resonance with the history of the cemetery and a sense of the past coming in on the present.

- [Guy] It just was a wonderful celebration of a space of a weekend long event and of a community of artists.

- I'm an accordion player and a composer. My current accordion group is called The Famous Accordion Orchestra. It usually works as a quartet but sometimes I put together larger groups, amateurs and professionals, many different levels mixed. I've always been interested in, doing music that's based on sustained textures, drones, repeated patterns, things which stretch out over a long period of time and don't really require dramatic development so that you can kind of pop in here a bit of it it's part of the space and pop out and not feel like you've missed anything.

- All the things they say about the instrument is 100% true. It's to build an ironic duality. The accordion is hip, the accordion is square, the accordion is elegant, The accordion is vulgar, the accordion is classy and it ain't got no class. It's never one without the other, that's the essence of the accordion, If you get too down with it then it reveals an elegance.

- I was very dissatisfied with the symphony orchestra which I love but I found it inflexible. I thought that that was holding me back and I wanted to divide it up so the major number in a group of 15 would be from one instrumental family. Seven accordions, three strings. In this case, violin, cello and bass with influences of rock, jazz, world music to call it strictly classical only says, you know, we're not rock musicians and primarily not jazz musicians.

- Thank you,

- Once you show them that you can do things that they never imagined which in one incident is just being able to play concert music, then you're able to take them somewhere else with it that it can only do this kind of concert music, it can play Baroque music, it can also play contemporary music, dissenting contemporary music, minimalistic contemporary music, it can play folk inspired contemporary music. So this can be as versatile as any other concert instrument.

- Now I think one of my roles in the accordion world and the music world in general is to create more chaos, to create more disarray, to see musical elements collide more. Working with Mickey over the years, I was then able to take the whole notion of realizing a project on the accordion in three dimensional space. In a way I could never do before. A tremendous counterpoint of texture. What the piece does it explores the orchestral dimension of the instrument. The other aspect of what I was interested in exploring was the cinematic dimension, being able to put a film into your mind. The title of the work is "A Born Reality". I became very much a fan of all those Bourne movies with Matt Damon. I just saw this paranoid guy watching his back all the time, on the run all the time, people after him. I just became enamored by the feeling these characters had of having to watch their back and to me that was just such a metaphor for our fears. Just that feeling of flight and traveling through all these wonderful places and I get my upper body workout in just by playing on this particular large instrument.

- There is this feeling in the classical world that if you're a classical musician you should be able to play anything but you know there are Bulgarian accordionist who are some of them who don't read music, who can play the accordion absolutely as well and many times better than any of the classical virtuosos I've heard and also I mean, there are Tex Mex accordion players who are playing these little button accordions which have maybe you know a three octave range and a very limited left-hand range. They play a diatonic instruments. They get one note on the outs bellows, one note in the in bellows and they have to change bellows to get a new note. I hear some Russian virtuosos, some Serbian virtuosos, some Chinese virtuosos that are playing music that I honestly could tell you that I could spend the rest of my life trying to learn some of those pieces. So each tradition has its own kind of virtuosity to it. Every musician has a unique story. They come from a particular place, a particular background, a particular training and only you have that and only you can tell your story.

- This accordion I really love for the Balkan music. I like the sound of it, the tones it has for the, the warmth of it. It has a really nice warm sound to me. See that clarinet sound, it's really nice, has a sweet sound. You know, it can also be sad. I come from a Balkan family. Family of musicians. They come from Serbia, Banat, Roma. I started learning with my father. In the Balkans a lot of people don't read music, since he never took no music lessons he learned on his own in the village. So he said, "I don't want you to be like that, "I want you to go to music school, "learn how to read music." This is not a big deal, it's just like the drum roll. There's so many things you can do on accordion. Then we have the bello shake, have you seen that? A wedding or birthday party here, the music is the main thing and then it'll last to four hours, it lasted three days. If the music's no good then after the party everyone talks about the party, the party was terrible. So this is my son Peter and he's playing the chromatic accordion. This is the cool instrument right now. Well let's try a duel. Try something together. This is a piece from Serbia. So that's kind of a Serbian-

- [Woman] Wow.

- [Frank] My name is Frank Petrilli and I'm a jazz accordionist. Well I've always been a fan of the American song book and the American standards which a lot of jazz is based. About six and a half years ago I became passionate about playing the acoustic accordion. I played as a kid but I really didn't have this passionate relationship as I do as an adult now. The one word that best describes my experience with this whole thing is blessed which I don't use very often. When I started playing within six months I was starting with Frank Morocco who is the best jazz player of his genre in the world. I just loved the way he played and I just idolize him and here I was playing with him and the last couple of years we would just jam and by osmosis my improvisation skills just got better. He gave to me everything he could when he was alive musically and then even after he passed away I was able to play one of his concerts in Kiev and do some things that would not have been possible if I wasn't that fortunate to have that experience. Frank used to say the bellows are the soul of the accordion and if you don't have good control of your bellows you weren't gonna get the accordion to speak. It's a very physical instrument that you actually hold up against your body and hug for lack of a better word moving the air in and out like you're breathing just about and again I'm modeled after Frank Morocco because I love the way he plays and you always know where he's at in relation to the melody and now my feeling towards the accordion is one of passion and enjoyment.

- I started playing accordion when I was 18 which was 24 years ago and I was playing jazz piano at the time and a friend of mine bought me an old accordion at a rummage sale. It was almost a joke. He said, "Here, check this out." It was fun, I liked the comical side, the connection with folk music and the fact that within the world of jazz, it was a new sound. I live in Brooklyn, New York and I play a lot of different kinds of music and I also write my own music. Based in jazz, it's modern jazz but it's very influenced by different kinds of accordion folk music. We have a division between serious art and "low art". In our country anyway the accordion is usually put into the low art category which is something that I like about it. One time I was playing for somebody and she said, "Oh, you play the accordion "that reminds me of illegal street vendors." And she just pulled that out of the blue. So people in our country have this association with the accordion as you know, oh, are you gonna have a monkey with a cup? But it's the fact that it's in that special niche that makes it exciting I think to people like myself who've been rediscovering it over the last 20 years. We play in small clubs, played with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and New York City ballet. A couple of the places I play at are Barbes and Le Poisson Rouge Those are clubs that attract a younger crowd. The accordion is showing up more and more in these kinds of places.

- There's something about playing accordion or a trombone or these instruments that in mainstream society at least are malign or banjo. All the instruments that have jokes about them there is something confrontational about.

♪ Bless please the people in our galleries ♪

♪ Lonely as a distant train ♪

♪ Bless now ♪

♪ The cancer of the bone ♪

♪ The last light making beautiful ♪

♪ The poisons in the sky ♪

♪ And the condemned man in his tuxedo dream ♪

♪ His dream of limousines and innocence ♪

♪ Take off your clothes and come to him in dreams ♪

♪ Stand on the fire escape naked and bliss ♪

♪ With jazz like a rivulet of codeine ♪

♪ The laughter spilling from our broken necklaces ♪

♪ Oh ♪

♪ Christ, by the dumpster ♪

♪ Peeling and a-tossin' your lottery tickets ♪

I was in a very conservative music school and my teacher as brilliant as he was, piano teacher was very traditional and one of my reasons for getting the accordion was to irritate him a little bit. I remember his reaction when I said I bought an accordion. He looked at me and went, "Why?" And that's when I went, "I think I made the right choice."

♪ In Christ I'll tumble ♪

Thank you. Accordion is actually the most conventional instrument we use. We have theremin. We do a lot for choreographers, for theater and for film. Going off my impression the accordion was like most people that it was this instrument that very square Midwesterners played because they weren't cool and listening to rock and roll and it really wasn't until listening to Tom White's records or listening to The Pogs that I began to see it in a different light and realize that it had this great sort of mix of nostalgia but also some subversion, a little bit of sort of cabaret debauchery quality to it and that's when it really sort of hit me that as a piano player, maybe this is something I can move over to.

- So about 16, 17 years ago I ran into a state sale and I saw that they were selling an accordion and I decided I better go to the bank, take out some money and strap that thing on the back of my motorcycle and take it home. I had seen this movie called "In The Time of The Gypsies" by Emir Kusturica who was the one of the most famous Serbian composers. He made this film called "In The Time Of The Gypsies" that had featured a boy about 12 or 13 who played a red accordion and I was really, really drawn to the music, to the film, to the region and the magic realism that he was portraying about the lives of the Romani people. I decided that I wanted to play that music of that region, I just felt like I was on a new path. It does evoke something and every time someone hears an accordion I believe they're happy. Raya Brass Band is a Balkan, village style brass band that plays primarily music from Serbia, Romani music, music from Eastern Europe. There's a promoter in New York city promoting these Valentine day bathhouse gigs with the various bands around the city. Everybody goes to the bathhouse, they get into their bikinis and the swimsuits and there's a dance party at the same time. The scene is largely people who aren't from Eastern Europe. They're just interested in the music, they love the dancing, they're attracted to something new.

- [Alex] This store I have 37 years.

- [Woman] And have you seen changes in the use or in purchase?

- [Alex] You know, it's changed a little bit. The woman now learn more accordion than before. More a womens than the men in accordions. 80% the people who buy accordion's a woman. Yes, yes, it's true.

- [Woman] That is interesting.

- Very interesting. The woman love the accordion because they say, the sound is nice, you know, with the bellow you can express a little more and this is different than the organ that you You know you can't express with an organ. For a simple See.

- [Nicole] I'm a french singer accordionist. From early on I was practicing becoming a performer. Accompany myself on the accordion give me further strength to do it full time because you're more independent. I kind of discovered the accordion strangely enough coming to New York. I am a bit of a frustrated pianist. I started performing in cafes in New York and kind of naturally I met some accordionist and I felt well this is actually a great instrument. It's like a piano but it's a portable piano and I like this combination of piano with the gypsy possibility. You can play anything on the accordion and it didn't have to be only the musette style.

- This accordion is a real musette accordion, see. Musette means it's three reeds, see musette. See the sound?

- I first picked it up as a joke but I like to say that the joke backfired on me and I fell in love with a little accordion and couldn't put it down. People talk about this resurgence in an interest in accordion now but this was in 1985. I was playing on the street and playing in a bunch of different bands and "Rolling Stone" magazine you know, they have the hot issue every year. So in 1988 the hot issue, I had my picture in there as an accordion player. It's sort of like a back burner kind of hot.

♪ And some day the prince will not come ♪

And for awhile I played a country Western band, a kind of tropical Samba band, klezmer and absorbed a lot of different styles and then began writing songs. I will say I borrow from a lot of styles. The music industry relies on demographics and one of my shows in the audience there were two people with blue hair and one was a punk like little kid with bright blue hair and one was a woman of you know, a certain age with her version of blue hair and both of them really responded well. So I, it's pretty across the board and I feel like, yeah I can't really describe the audience per se but it's certainly people that appreciate sort of misfits.

♪ And I'm a lucky girl ♪

♪ Because I've got it all ♪

♪ Me and the bad boys ♪

♪ We never win 'cause we don't play ♪

♪ So take a picture ♪

♪ It will last a whole lot longer ♪

♪ And you can look at it someday ♪

♪ When you feel stronger ♪

- The people that I'm closest to now I know through playing music. I have a band it's a 14 piece all female accordion orchestra called Main Squeeze Orchestra and the people in the orchestra are some of my closest friends. The Main Squeeze Orchestra was formed by Walter Kuehr. He owns an accordion shop on the lower East side in Manhattan.

- Yeah the shop is known by everyone who plays accordion in New York and outside. The shop is 16 years old and it got to over the years a good reputation. I think I practically know everyone here in New York who plays and it's fun, they know me. The motto is main squeeze for all your accordion needs and if we don't have it, you don't need it. John Lenon's son Sean came in, Cyndi Lauper, I met Al Yankovic, "Weird Al" Yankovic. I met some famous guys like these and then some come in just to buy some straps. Yeah one of my two bands is called The Last Of The International Playboys. The size of the band and the instrumentation had to do it with my taste for big band and Latin music. Like a big rich sound. The first record we did we called it Big As Jazz Latin lounge And Secret Agent Swing.

- He had this dream that he was the conductor of an all-female accordion orchestra and he just started recruiting from students who had come to him for lessons.

- It took almost a year and then I had it but I was working on it day and night. I was completely obsessed with that. I had the shop so I was practically like the spider in the web to recruit all those players.

- Suddenly people aren't looking at you like the dorky accordion player, everyone's kind of like, "Oh, the cool accordion player."

- [Peter] Rikers Island is a prison in Queens, New York. Going with a brass band there, Slavic Soul Party I'm thinking to myself, I'm gonna go perform with my accordion at a prison. You know I was feeling not too comfortable going with an accordion they're gonna make fun and say, "Hey, play a polka." Not that polkas are bad. So we started playing then the leader of the band said, "Peter, why don't you play your soul?" They doing all this kind of flashy stuff. What am I playing? I don't think that's gonna work. So all of a sudden I just stopped and played this soul called "All My Life" from K-Ci & JoJo. I just started a few bars of that and everyone started going berserk, they were like, yeah.

- [Woman] Wow.

- Yeah because they knew this and they all started singing along to it. By the end of the day everyone was like, "I do a lot of rapping when I get out of here "I wanna use the accordion on some of my recordings." This can be a new thing.

- There more ethnic bands from cage music to klezmer and cumbia and merengue and they all having accordions.

- You know we're all in this together.

- It's worldwide and has all these different forms from the bandoneon to the concertina.

- Thank you. Thank you very mucho.

- [Dr. William] There are actually people out there who are trying to say, "Well, "we have to make the accordion respectable and classical." When right now the accordion is in the most ripe position to drink in everything that can be expressed with the accordion all over the world. It's in one of the most prime places it could ever be in the history of its continuous evolution or what I call evolution by permanent transition.

- One of the groups that I perform in is called Gypsy Groove and the style of music that they do from Django Reinhardt started around in the '30s. Django was a gypsy, he heard Duke Ellington and he said, "I wanna play jazz." He was a guitarist, came up with this kind of hybrid of gypsy jazz. Another group I play in, Pop Astronomy, explores common elements between klezmer and Roma music also known as gypsy music including middle Eastern scales and ribbons.

- [Dr. William] The world isn't around anymore the world's bellow pleated, the world is expanding, the world is contracting constantly. So many cultures all meshing and colliding together. I mean, the accordion is the icon of all that.

- And it's gonna have a continuing future because it can be anything really any kind of music.

- [Pauline] There was a period that I worked a lot with drones meaning long sounds. So I would practice with my instrument to be able to change bellows as inaudibly as possible. You know that's pretty hard, it's just like trying to sing a long tone and then take a breath and sing another one, right? So I was practicing this for a long time and I still do that and I, you know I can sustain a tone for a very long time because I know how to move slowly and to take the bellows with me and bring it back. So that's what I'm doing right now is playing my imaginary accordion, right? Out of that practice a lot of different of my sonic meditations came. My own music is for the purpose of expanding my mind, I mean to change my mind and to change my own patterns and having the intention that the sounds that I make to make music would have a beneficial effect and then I got the sense that if you listened long enough you begin to discover a whole world that was contained in one sound.

- [Guy] She was the first to be a really highly regarded original thinker whose main instrument was the accordion and whose primary work as a composer was with the accordion. She is a brilliant improviser as well in her own meditative language. I tended to lean more towards the Slovenian American tradition because that's where my family was from. From the very beginning I had these two sort of complimentary and contradicting loves which was for the folk side of my instrument, the popular side and the classical side which was less known. Eventually I was introduced to contemporary accordion music, classical music for accordion written by living composers and that's where I became a composer because I fell in love with that music which was written for my instrument and did not have to be adapted in any way. I found my voice as a musician with that. I don't consider myself a missionary I play the accordion because I love it and because it's my voice and it's my way of relating to the world around me. So I don't do it to change minds I do it to share what I've found to be the beauty of the instrument and the music that it can make. When I started really getting interested in contemporary classical music one of the first composers that I really gravitated to was György Ligeti, Hungarian, Romanian composer who wrote music that was very intricate but also really his own sound world. A lot of his music was used in the movie "2001". So it's very atmospheric, sometimes almost meditative. I just love his music and after he died I wrote this piece in tribute. Sometimes I'll think about a particular technique on accordion that I wanna explore. The Lincoln T piece, it's just splitting your hand into two parts and what can you do if one part of your hand is playing one thing and the other part of your hand is playing something else So in a sense the piece is in étude. I do think about the particular aspects of the accordion when I'm writing tunes. The grass that is blue ain't nothing but a polka. It's really a polka but it's kind of a bluegrass polka because it uses a blue scale. I premiered that piece at a big festival called New Music America and there are always new music type people in the audience and they were clapping in two, you know because it started off like an official Boca and then I went into this place where the hands are in different majors and the, the clapping just started just went, it started, it started falling all apart you know, nothing like seeing a bunch of avant-garde types trying to find out where the beat was and it was a really the first piece I had written that I absolutely had a blast while I was writing it as a sort of "serious composer" but then as I started collaborating with dancers and theater companies I had to have other concerns because they had very specific needs. Needed a three minute piece but how can I write a three minute piece I'm a minimalist. After three minutes I'm just getting, you know the tuning of the chord that I'm interested in but then when I started doing it I said, "Oh, well I could use some of these dance forms "that I grew up with as a kid." Like polkas, waltzs, tangos and after that joy and fun was another thing to explore as well as somber serious meditative. What I found out was that I could write in those social dance traditions but still have a contemporary voice as a composer and it was kind of a breakthrough for me because I had always kept those things very separate.

- [Nicole] No I like to use the accordion as almost like a charged organ because my music is something that is mystical. So what happened here was the, my illuminated accordion. So many years ago I was performing at somebody's house and he said, "Nicole, your whole look is great, "it's very stylized but really one thing you have to work on "is the accordion because it looks too heavy. "Your character is so light, "there is such a lightness about it "and your accordion looks so heavy." With the big straps, my accordion was black. A friend of mine's a sculpture who was working a lot with plexiglass and at some point I thought, "That's what I need, "I need a transparent accordion." A week later I was at a party and I run into Walter Kuehr who has this very nice accordion shop and so I told him, "Walter have you ever thought of "making a transparent accordion? "I'm dreaming of having one." And he said, "Yes, actually we were working on it "with Paul Lincoln", who I knew already, he was an artist and he said, "I've solved the problem. "I'm gonna make the accordion for you "and in exchange I would like you to be part "of my new project and play in my movie." And I thought, "Wow." So he did this film called "Undine's Curse". It was part of an installation called hyperbaric, hypobaric about breathing and kind of coming to life in a way from the sponge to the birds. It was very esoteric playing the lincordion. My friend, his father is an electrician so he learned all the tricks as a kid and he loves to play around with LEDs and stuff like this and so he helped me, he did the lighting of the lincordion. I guess it looks very impressing the big bag and the front basket and the accordion on the back and everything but it's just a question of balance. I like to have something very self-contained. Being able to go around on my bike if the gigs, you know, don't pay thousands of dollars is something that helps me to make it viable.

- I like to think of the accordion as kind of the character actor of musical instruments because there's a sincerity and a sort of absurdity that mix in a tragic and comedic at the same time.

- I was intrigued by her overall combination of song writing, playing, persona performance. Next time I was in New York we went out on the Staten Island ferry. Like the idea of the city in the background and just her there in that context. The last record I made is called Melusine Years. Melusine is the name of a character from the middle ages in French lore. This woman would turn into a mermaid once a week, somehow that changing into a different creature a couple of times a week it just sort of struck me as an interesting way that people do exist.

- [Philip] Thematically it's wonderful because the accordion is an instrument of immigrants and we were floating in New York Harbor the historic gateway for immigrants and she's just in her own world.

♪ I will shine in that beautiful city ♪

♪ Just like the best of the polished ♪

♪ But my darling in case you're forgetting ♪

♪ You are natural born anything but ♪

♪ Who will line up to congratulate you ♪

♪ For successfully stealing the scene ♪

♪ And they'll all either love you or hate you ♪

♪ For you'll always be text in between ♪

♪ Tourmaline ♪

♪ Tourmaline ♪

♪ Of all the green haired girls at sea ♪

♪ Today you'll blow them all away ♪

♪ Just like the rest of us backwater babies ♪

♪ You grab any old lime that you throw ♪

♪ Just promise me when you get back to shore ♪

♪ That you won't go and sow where you've been ♪

- [Rachelle] One thing about wearing an accordion and singing is it does compress your lungs and there's like a sound that you kind of have to make that fits into the sound of the accordion.

- [Pauline] You're looking at a roll-on v-accordion, v being virtual. The instrument has the appearance of being an accordion and indeed it acts like one. So in this instrument there are models of a large variety of accordions. Parisian, oh yes, here it is the old Paris. The bells, even though you hear air right now 'cause I'm using the air button there's no air in there going through any reeds, there's not a single reed, it's a computer. I mean there's a computer in the, in this instrument. The other night I played a concert and afterwards there were two computer scientists, they were music buffs. I don't know free jazz guy came up and he said, "Oh that's brilliant", and he said, "what system is that using?" And I said, "I don't know and I don't care."

- [Woman] You just wanna do the music, yeah.

- [Pauline] I just wanna play the music yeah.

- [Woman] What a range. I mean a range of possibilities.

- Oh yeah.

- [Woman] Types of music and types of sounds.

- Yeah.

- [Woman] I'm sure you must feel like the possibilities are endless.

- Well, there's a lot more that can be done.