The ThunderBlogs

Outside the Ukrainian Hall in Strathcona, a young woman stood on the sidewalk, quietly playing a vaguely Eastern European-sounding tune.  But this was no traditional squeezebox concert geared for a polka-loving crowd.  Inside the hall, devotees of the accordion gathered on wooden chairs.  Dreadlocked punks with painted faces sat next to young hipsters and middle-aged men with grey ponytails and black berets.

Saturday’s concert, the penultimate event in the week-long Accordion Noir festival, opened with the anarcho-punk sounds of Vancouver-island’s Ursula.  Under the deep red curtains of the Ukrainian hall, a banjo, an accordion and a single drum inspired the gathered crowd of accordion enthusiasts to stomp their feet and cheer wildly.

“The accordion doesn’t only have to be a punch line,” said festival organizer Rowan Lipkovits, “real music can be done on the squeezebox.”  Lipkovits described the prejudice against the accordion as stemming, in part, from what he calls “Lawrence Welk champagne music.”  But those that dismiss the instrument as only being engineered to play polka are missing a whole world of music that is often dark and edgy.  Lipkovits said that the accordion is experiencing a renaissance as young people pick up the instrument and challenge the guitar’s hegemony in popular music.

Bruce Triggs, who, along with Lipkovits, started the radio show that gives its name to the festival, sees the accordion as having “a bunch of qualities that make it different and cool.”  He cited the instrument’s loudness, portability and its ability to play both rhythm and melody at the same time as being key features.  He described playing his accordion at the Seattle WTO protests in 1999.

While the older generation might think of Welk and dismiss the accordion, Triggs said that today’s young people have no real reason to be prejudiced against the instrument he described as “viscerally cool.”  Triggs reeled off an exhaustive list of accordion-oriented bands, spanning from the Finnish heavy metal of Turisas to the folk-punk sounds of Saint Petersburg-based Iva Nova.  He said that the radio show receives about 20 new cds of accordion music each week.

With a weekly radio show and podcast boasting as many as 3000 downloads, a monthly squeezebox circle and an annual festival that strained capacity at local venues, the edgy renaissance of the accordion appears to be gaining a strong hold in Vancouver’s music scene.