{"id":30269,"date":"2012-04-24T12:45:20","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T16:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=30269"},"modified":"2012-04-24T14:40:52","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T18:40:52","slug":"big-squeeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/24\/big-squeeze\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Squeeze"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On a recent Tuesday afternoon I was sitting with Walter Kuehr in the back room of Main Squeeze Accordions<\/a> on Essex Street, asking questions about the accordion business. He said he mostly does repairs these days, and he conducts the Main Squeeze Orchestra<\/a>, a fourteen-piece all-female accordion band he founded in 2002. Photos of famous accordion players line the wall: Myron Floren of the Lawrence Welk Show<\/em>; John Linnell from They Might Be Giants; Texas conjunto star Flaco Jimenez; \u201cWeird Al\u201d Yankovic. They\u2019ve all played in Main Squeeze, often in exchange for instrument repairs. On a shelf piled high with books and accordion music there\u2019s an advance copy of Squeeze This: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America<\/a>,<\/em> a study of the piano accordion by ethnomusicologist Marion Jacobson. She was once a student of Kuehr\u2019s, and they keep in touch.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething drew me in,\u201d Jacobson said later, recalling her first visit to Main Squeeze, in 2001. \u201cI had been thinking for some time that the accordion would be my next instrument. How could I not have this thing that makes even the simplest melodies sound so danceable, so rich?\u201d Though Jacobson got her ruby-red Delicia Carmen elsewhere (she traded for it with her piano, which is now the house instrument at the Brooklyn music venue Barbes), she returned to Main Squeeze to learn how to play.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In most respects, Jacobson and Kuehr couldn\u2019t be more different from each other. Kuehr is a lean, white-haired, beret-wearing man in his mid-fifties, with blue eyes and a clipped German accent. He was born in Frankfurt, where he started playing accordion at age six. When he moved to New York in 1989 he worked as a dishwasher and food deliveryman before opening Main Squeeze in 1996.<\/p>\n

Jacobson was born on Long Island and grew up in the DC suburbs of Maryland. In the late 1980s she was a classical-music critic for The Washington Post, and later got a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University. While Kuehr comes across as an iconoclastic accordion impresario, Jacobson seems like a levelheaded academic. But this much they have in common: both are accordion people.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAnybody holding an accordion and walking into an accordion club or convention will be welcome,\u201d Jacobson told me, explaining accordionists\u2019 unusual sense of unity. \u201cThere\u2019s this idea that because you and I play the accordion we\u2019re all in this together.\u201d William Schimmel<\/a>, a prominent New York accordion virtuoso and tango revivalist, agreed. \u201cIf two bass players got on the same a subway car, chances are they wouldn’t speak to each other. But if two people with accordion cases get on the subway chances are they\u2019ll hook up. It\u2019s that kind of community.\u201d<\/p>\n

The accordion hasn\u2019t always inspired such camaraderie. For much of its history the instrument was the object of contention between its ethnic and pop-culture proponents on one side, and those who wanted it to be taken seriously as a classical instrument on the other. Despite the solidarity avowed by Jacobson and Schimmel, there isn\u2019t always much connecting the different streams of accordion music, or the currents within them. Today, the accordion might be taken up by Balkan, klezmer, or zydeco musicians, neo-vaudeville acts like Portland\u2019s Vagabond Opera or burlesque performer Suzanne \u201cKitten on the Keys\u201d Ramsey, ethnic-flavored indie bands like Beirut and Gogol Bordello, or classical and jazz musicians with a flair for the exotic. What is it, then, that accounts for accordionists\u2019 sense of solidarity? The answer, it seems, has to do with Lawrence Welk.<\/p>\n

Milquetoast musician, bandleader, and host of an eponymous show that lasted more than twenty years, Lawrence Welk is probably the most vilified figure in all accordiana. With his pomaded coif, powder-blue suits, and opioid waltzes, he is accused of typecasting the accordion as unbearably square. For proof of Welk\u2019s influence just take the accordion-playing Steve Urkel<\/a>, a practitioner of the Welk-approved lifestyle if there ever was one. When Urkel is wooed by fellow accordionist Myra Monkhouse in the fourth season of Family Matters, she plays an autographed \u201cMyron Floren Polkamaster,\u201d named after Welk\u2019s accordion-wielding sidekick. By the time ABC cancelled Walk\u2019s show in 1971, its main sponsor was the dietary supplement Geritol.<\/p>\n