June is National Accordion Awareness Month

When I was growing up, I thought Myron Floren was basically from Mars. What he was playing—and what he was playing it on—just seemed nuts to me. Now I see that he was astonishingly talented and very musical, in a crazy show-biz way. The status of the accordion has changed since then. It used to be the subject of derision. Today, it seems like any alt-rock band worth its salt has an accordion in their midst, or at least sitting in once in a while. It is a great sound, and it can do so many things (though it generally will sound like an accordion doing all of those things). Being a pretty fair pianist, it was not a big stretch for me to master the right hand of the accordion, and I did this years ago. The left hand is another matter entirely. Luckily, all of the music that I play on accordion only needs the right hand anyway. We live in a great time, my friends, when accordions have taken their rightful place on the American stage…just to the left and sort of in back of  the guitarist.