Hello there, I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good. And here's a good deal, our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this super cool radio station, where I produce weekly, and whence what I produce is strongly distributed by PRI, Public Radio International.
Well, you can't always tell what the consequences of your actions are going to be, as Mrs. O'Leary's cow used to say. I was reading something recently that pointed out that Adolphe Sax, when he invented the saxophone in the 1840s, couldn't have had the faintest notion of how his instrument would end up being used in the new world. The music he knew, presumably, was European band music and symphonic music.
Little did he know that his instrument would become extremely popular, but not in that kind of music, particularly. Within less than a century, the instrument bearing his name would be known around the world, but it would be primarily associated with brothels, smoke-filled nightclubs, and dance halls where who knows what all went on. Now let's consider the ancient Chinese instrument the sheng, which is a free-reed mouth organ.
It has usually 17 vertical bamboo pipes held together in a sort of a cluster with a common air chamber. A shenger, or would it be a shengist, sort of looks like he's playing a bunch of celery. The instrument goes back at least to the time of Confucius.
It was introduced into Europe in 1777 and the way the reeds are mounted gave European instrument makers ideas, resulting ultimately in the invention of the harmonium as well as the... well, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Here's the sheng from a CD called Buddhist Music of Tianjin. The sheng is the organ-like instrument holding long notes in the background.
[music: Yan Guo Nanlou, "Geese Crossing Over the Southern Mansion" (Buddhist Music of Tianjin); Tianjin Buddhist Music Ensemble]
Now who in his wildest dreams would have thought that that instrument would lead to this instrument?
[music: Floren, "Dakota Polka" (Legends of Accordion); Myron Floren/Lawrence Welk & His Champagne Music]
It's a wonderful, a wonderful life if you can listen to bands such as that of my fellow North Dakotan Lawrence Welk. And as a matter of fact, we heard them playing the Dakota Polka. And Myron Floren, he was not only playing the Dakota Polka, he was also playing the accordion. Which, as luck would have it, is the subject of today's show. Now, as a reformed bassoonist, I have a certain amount of empathy with, not to mention sympathy for, accordionists.
I've had to endure my share of bassoon jokes, I mean, aside from the ones I made up myself, but they were as nothing compared to what accordionists have to put up with. We're talking about the Rodney Dangerfield of musical instruments here. You probably know the definition of a gentleman, right? A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion, but doesn't. I can hear all of you accordionists out there going, yeah, yeah, very funny, but don't bother to write, okay?
Just put your mechanical pencil back in your shirt pocket with that little plastic protective shield on it. Just kidding. Now, I know you don't have to be a nerd to play the accordion, but it helps.
I'm sorry, I just can't stop myself, oh brother, no you don't have to be a nerd, you have to be able not to mind if people think you're a nerd, but you don't have to be a nerd, at least you don't have to be a nerd in other ways too, okay, okay, okay, I'm not even going to answer that, I'll stop fooling around here because actually accordions are used in all different kinds of music, not just polka bands. They're also used in schottische bands.
[sound: irrelevancy alarm]
All right! Okay! All right! All right! Now, that's it, folks. No more kidding around here. When the Irrelevancy Alarm goes off, that's serious. I've got to toe the line. I mean, that thing has a little counter on it. I'm serious. You know, like a self-service copier in a copy center? And if I rack up more than a certain amount of alarms a month, I mean, that thing actually gets read regularly by the same guy who does the gas and electricity meters. Can you believe that? And he reports it directly to the president of the parent company. I'm not just talking about the station manager. And if there's more than a certain number of hits on that puppy, I'll be in very deep trouble.
They'll probably make me listen to a whole concert of accor- No! No! I'm not gonna say it! No! I did not say it! Check with a third-base umpire, I stopped myself in time. No, I really did. Okay, accordionists are not all nerdy. Or, as Johann Sebastian Bach put it, Die Akkordeonisten, sie sind gar nicht nerdisch.
He was defending some accordionists in Leipzig that he knew from the ridicule they received for waiting around to play an instrument that hadn't been invented yet. Okay, I'll tell you what let's do. Why don't we hit a few of the clubs in town that have accordionists? I'll show you what I mean about the variety of accordion music. And I'm not even including classical music here. We deal with that on other shows. But even just in three clubs, we'll start at a really ritzy supper club.
Don't worry, I can charge this to the station, just between you and me. Okay, we'll start at El Copacordiana, and then we'll slip around the corner to a nice little folk music place I know, and then we'll end up at a very funky bar called The Squeeze, where you can dance as close as you want. Come on, let's go. It'll only take about eight and a half minutes.
[music: Evans/Reeves/Damerell, "Lady of Spain" (Legends of Accordion); Dick Contino]
[music: Kalaniemi, "Lomasävel" (Keepers); Maria Kalaniemi & Aldargaz]
[music: Williams, "Slow Horses & Fast Women" (Cajun Music & Zydeco); Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas]
Okay, we've been hitting the accordion clubs here. At the first one, we heard Dick Contino playing the Moonlight Sonata of accordion music, Lady of Spain. And then at that little folk place, the Bellows, we heard Maria Kalaniemi and Aldargaz doing something called Lomasävel. They're new to me. I really like that a lot. And then finally, at The Squeeze, we got there just in time to hear Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas do Slow Horses and Fast Women. Great verse there: "Man who chases women and a dog who chases cars don't last long."
A bit of Cajun blues in the night. You know, that's ordinarily such a loose place, that bar. I couldn't believe they carded you. You notice they didn't card me. And no, I don't think it's the bifocals and the white beard. They know I'm Peter Schickele, host of Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
There was an early 20th century American artist named George Bellows and I've always thought that the proper response to his name would be he certainly does and I wish he'd pipe down. But the Bellows we're talking about today are the ones that provide the air supply for an accordion and its relatives such as the concertina and bandoneon.
Basically what your accordion is is a portable organ and I mean a really portable organ not like those portable organs we see in medieval or renaissance paintings which are portable compared to the organs in Radio City Music Hall. I mean a couple of guys or one angel could lift them and take them to another room and put them down on a table but with an accordion you can actually accompany yourself while you dance if you can't afford aerobics classes.
It has an amazingly large range, considering its size. A full-size accordion with a lot of stops, you know, different sounds to choose from, well, it's a bit like a Harley. It's one big hog of an instrument to carry. But even if you don't want to dance with it on, you can certainly stroll, or at least you'd better be able to if you want to make anything in tips. As I said, a large accordion has a considerable choice of tone colors, and one of the most familiar of them is produced by having, for each note, two reeds slightly out of tune with each other, producing a sort of a vibrato, a sort of a tang.
On the organ, such stops, like the Vox Humana or the Unda Maris, tend to be soft, but on the accordion, it's your straight-ahead basic stop. That's the sound that you associate with your honeymoon in, well, I don't even have to say the name of the place. As soon as you hear
[music]
your mind conjures up the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Jerry Lewis, the Louvre, all those experiences that feel as if they just happened yesterday, even though your kids are approaching retirement age. You want to go back to Europe, don't you? Well, in the 19th century, a lot of Europeans wanted to leave Europe.
[music]
And leave they did, often taking their accordions with them.
By the end of the century, there was hardly a continent in the world that had not been accordionized. It could truly be said, and often was, that the sun never set on the arm-bellowed empire. Well, I'm feeling a bit of wanderlust myself. Let's take an accordion cruise. Prepare to recline your deck chair, lie back, and lose yourself in three exotic styles. It's always wise to bring a sweater; evenings can be cool. Worried about how things will go in your absence? Relax!
Amazingly enough, considering that its ports of call are on three different continents, this cruise only takes a little over nine minutes.
[music: D'Arienzo/Gorrindo, "Paciencia" (Evita's Tango); Juan D'Arienzo y su Orquesta]
Welcome home, and I hope you enjoyed your cruise on the S.S. Leaky Bellows. It's just a joke, we were never in any danger. Our first stop was Paris, which is a pretty neat trick for an ocean liner, where we heard Edith Piaf singing L'Accordéoniste, which is French for he who makes music not all by himself, but with the aid of an accordion.
Piaf. Aren't her R's amazing? I could listen to her sing R all night. And the way she cracks on that very last phrase. She sounds like Tammy Wynette. Next, we docked in South Texas, where Valerio Longoria regaled us with Mujer Hermosa, Pretty Woman. Eat your heart out, Roy Orbison. That's from an Arhoolie CD called The Roots of Tejano and Conjunto Music.
And our last port of call was Argentina, where Juan D'Arienzo and his orchestra performed Paciencia. That's a tango from the 1940s. Me, I'm from the 1930s, and I'm your captain. My name is Peter Schickele of the SS Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio Entertainment [sic].
International. When I taught at the Juilliard School of Music many many many years ago, I came in at the end of an era. An era that most people might not have noticed. The people who taught theory and the history of music in those days were mostly composers. And composers always need extra money. So what some of them did was they went out to some music school on Long Island on weekends and taught accordion to kids. These guys weren't accordionists, but they were very musical, musical enough to keep a step ahead of their students.
That was before all the kids snuck out of their houses with their accordions and traded them in for electric guitars. The 1960s ushered in a period of exile from the mainstream American scene, and only fairly recently has the accordion begun to seep back into our collective conscious.
But seep it definitely has begun to and you now hear accordion in real what in New York is called downtown music. All the really hip stuff in the Apple is supposed to happen below 14th Street. Both my kids live down there and the clubs they go to and play in are down there. I mean they're pretty cosmopolitan. They don't get nosebleeds if they go above 14th Street like some people do. But their turf is definitely down there in the neighborhoods north and south of Houston.
The street, the pronunciation of whose name separates the tourists from the locals in New York. Today's program is called The Gospel Accordion to Pete. And we are now going to...
I guess I ought to get that. Hello?
Uh-huh. Yeah.
Okay, well look, I'm sure everything you say is true. You probably are the coolest, hippest accordionist ever to strap on the squeeze, as you put it. But I very rarely have guests on the show.
And when I do, I like to, you know, plan quite a bit in advance. No, no, I agree. But I think everybody knows I was kidding about the accordion's NQ, nerd quotient. I mean, you know, most of the stuff we've heard on today's show has been very tasty, far from nerdy, so I don't think... Yeah, okay. Look, Mister... what is it? Mr. DeLugg, how far do you live from the station? Oh, you are, are you? Well, I should hope so. That's one of the reasons there is a receptionist, to keep people from wandering...
Oh, all right. Okay, look, I'll tell you what. I hope I don't regret this. But I'm about to play our last suite. Why don't you come up to the studio and I'll let you play your hippest of the hip opus. But listen, and you've got to agree to this or the deal's off. This is not a talk show. So don't come up here expecting to deliver a sermon about how cool the accordion is. I'll introduce you, you'll play, and that's it, okay? Not a word. Alright, you're on. I'll see you in a couple of minutes.
And hey, hey, if the on-the-air sign is lit up, wait till...right, okay. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Hey, maybe he's great. I think, uh, perhaps I feel a little guilty about all the accordion jokes I did at the top of the show, so the idea of having a really classy solo at the end is probably appropriate.
So here's our last suite, which features music by people who have been officially certified as cool by the downtown types. They've got the Good Loft-keeping seal of approval. I call this suite downtown accordions. And I'm using the word downtown metaphorically, by the way. I don't mean that all these are New Yorkers. Yes, Virginia, it is possible to be a card-carrying, copacetic, cool cat, even if you're not in New York City.
Four numbers, I'll catch you in 11 minutes.
[music: Millard, "Already Gone" (The Entertainers); Polka Dogs]
[music: DiPippo, "Arthur Street" (Legends of Accordion); Angelo DiPippo]
[music: Costello, "The Long Honeymoon" (Imperial Bedroom); Elvis Costello & the Attractions]
[music: They Might Be Giants, "Space Suit" (Apollo 18); They Might Be Giants]
The first one was wielded by Tina Kick, a member of the Polka Dogs, who proved that you don't have to be quiet to be cool. Great cut. Talk about energy. It sounds like it's about to go up in flames at any minute. Canadian band, apparently. I've never seen them. I only know this album. You heard John Millard, the singer, mention Owen Sound. That's where my mother was born. Small world, huh?
Now, she wasn't Canadian, but I think her mother had relatives there or something. Anyway, number two was Arthur Street. That's the name of the tune, not the accordionist, whose name is Angelo DiPippo. Good solid jazz groove there. Then came Elvis Costello's The Long Honeymoon from the Imperial Bedroom album.
You know, he really writes art songs, that guy. I don't know if he would consider that a compliment, but I mean it as one. Songs like that feel to me like later stops on the same line that Schubert was on. Like Schubert, Costello can use a standard song form, but infuse it with such variety and through-composed details that it doesn't sound like a formula.
I've come to him late, I'll admit it. My kids were singing his praises years ago, but I heard a couple of things that didn't do it for me, so I let it slide. My mistake. How uncool can you get? Well, what do you expect? As I said before, I grew up in the same state as Lawrence Welk did. To me, cool means 20 below zero. So our suite ended with a little waltz called Space Suit. That was They Might Be Giants from their Apollo 18 album.
Okay! Mr. Milton DeLugg is with us here in the studio. I didn't realize when I invited him up, you know, over the telephone, that he had a whole band with him, but they've managed to set up in here. We had to move my collection of 45s out into the hall, but they're here, and Milton has promised to show us just how cool an accordion and an accordionist can be. Take it away, Mr. DeLugg.
[music: Pisano, "So What’s New" (Legends of Accordion); Milton DeLugg]
Milton DeLugg playing So What's New. Okay, Milton, thanks for squeezing in here, and the rest of you fellas too. Now, I'd appreciate it if you'd just hang for a few minutes before you pack up and leave. We'll be killing the mics here pretty soon. As a matter of fact, why don't I just put something on right now so that you cats can split. Here, this ought to do it. Love Me Tender isn't my favorite song, but it's right here at hand. Thanks again, dudes.
[music: Miskulin, "The Crazy Accordion" (Legends of Accordion); Joey Miskulin]
It wasn't Love Me Tender for long, was it? The Crazy Accordion with Joey Miskulin. I'm not sure if I'm saying that name right, but what else is new?
Okay folks, I mentioned earlier that we deal with classical music for accordion on other shows, but since this show is called The Gospel Accordion to Pete, we really ought to at least give a nod to the classical realm. We'll go out with another cut from this terrific Rhino CD called Legends of Accordion. I love the fact that there's no the in the title. Not Legends of the Accordion, just... Here, let me turn this knob here.
Legends of Accordion As if Accordion were a place like Ancient Greece or Sleepy Hollow. This album has been the backbone of this show today.
About a third of the music we've heard is off Legends of Accordion I even swiped the pun in the title of today's program from the liner notes. Mea culpa, Eddie Gorodetsky. Thank you. Okay, we're going out with an old Fritz Kreisler crowd pleaser originally for violin. Here's Liebesfreud played by Anthony Galla-Rini.
[music: Kreisler, "Liebesfreud" (Legends of Accordion); Anthony Galla-Rini]
And that's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for public broadcasting, and by this radio station and its members. Our program is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International. We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with album numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program number 157. And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi.
You're looking good. See you next week.
[No speech for 37 s.]
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Schickele Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Schickele Mix. Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.