How the accordion is slowly killing the electric guitar (or not)

One of the few things my dad remembers about my Great Uncle Mike is that he could juggle three eggs, then stop mid-juggle without breaking any of them.

I never knew my Great Uncle Mike, but in a weird way I feel connected to him. After Mike passed away, my dad inherited his accordion, passing it on to me two years ago. I've been clumsily churning out sea shanties on it ever since, still figuring out what all those tiny rows of buttons do. The accordion bears his name on it; "MIKE" is scrawled in ballpoint pen on the inside of one of the bellows.

According to Eli Kauffman, member of the Seattle-based experimental accordion quartet Hell's Bellows, my inheritance makes me proof of one of his theories on the quiet resurgence of the accordion.

"There is this new generation of young people picking up the accordion after finding it and dusting it off from their grandparents' closets," says Kauffman, who also runs an accordion repair shop, Bell and Reed, in Pioneer Square. "When young people come in the shop looking to get old accordions playable again, the story is almost always the same."

Kauffman himself inherited his accordion from his grandfather, an avid accordionist who reluctantly decided to pass on his instrument after it got too big for him.

"When I first got the accordion, I had very low expectations for it," Kauffman says. "I thought it was going to be really hokey. But I was pleased to discover it had a much broader range of capabilities than I gave it credit for."

That broader range of capabilities is being recognized by the larger culture as well.

"We're seeing the accordion show up in contemporary music again, as well as on TV in commercials and in music for films," says Joe Petosa, owner of Seattle-based Petosa Accordions.

With beloved films like "Amélie" (featuring an accordion-heavy score by Yann Tiersen) and bands like Gogol Bordello and Arcade Fire rocking the squeezebox with a punk rock swagger, the accordion certainly seems like it's getting the kids' attention.

For Minjae Kim, a 20 year old University of Washington student, it was Zach Condon of the band Beirut that initially grabbed his interest.

"I was listening to him a lot, and I really liked the way the accordion sounded. So I just decided to buy one on eBay and teach myself," Kim says.

Kim can whip out most of the songs from "Amélie" with ease, as well as a selection of Eastern European tunes from the "Everything is Illuminated" soundtrack. Kim returns to a classic though when it's time to stir up a party.

"People always have a lot of fun when I play Hava Nagila," says Kim, who can churn the Hebrew folk song out as if he himself were Jewish.

It was Beirut too, who initially sparked an interest in the accordion for Philip Kobernik, accordionist for Seattle indie band Hey Marseilles, who recently returned from playing six shows at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference and Festival in Austin, Texas.

"Playing the accordion is like dating a tortured girl," Kobernik says. "It's really hard to figure her out, but in the end, it's totally rewarding."

So who is this Beirut?

Stop strumming, start squeezing

Zach Condon dropped out of high school in Santa Fe, N.M, at the age of 16, and then promptly flew off to Paris a year later where he fell in love with Balkan music. Due to a wrist injury that prevented him from wrapping his hand around the neck of a guitar, he instead picked up the trumpet, the ukulele and the accordion. In 2006 he released his critically acclaimed and heavily Balkan-influenced album "Gulag Orkestar" under the name Beirut.

"My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player," said Condon in an interview with Pitchfork.com in 2006. "One of my earliest memories is him kind of forcing a guitar on all my brothers and me. You know, ‘You have to practice three hours a day!' I hated guitar at the time."

Condon's disdain for the electric guitar might have been more than just a result of his overbearing father. According to Joe Petosa, it might just be the natural order of things.

"What people forget is that in the '50s, the accordion was pretty much it," Petosa said. "But then in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the electric guitar took over, and the accordion fell by the wayside."

Thanks to the cycles that regulate fashion, trends and everything else in modern culture, the accordion might be coming back into our consciousness in a big way. People may be getting jaded with the electric guitar in the same way they grew weary of the accordion.

The Petosa family, however, never tired of the accordion. In 1922, Joe's great grandfather Carl Petosa immigrated from Italy and set up Petosa Accordions in Seattle. Petosa is now the sole surviving accordion manufacturer in the United States. Petosa takes orders for its accordions from countries all over the world, stretching from Australia to Europe to Asia.

Yes. The premier accordion manufacturer in the world is based in Seattle.

And this might be why Seattle has unwittingly become fertile ground for the return of the accordion.

The revolution starts here

The second Monday of every month, people from all over King County descend on the Senior Center of West Seattle to discuss and play accordions. Most of these people, as the location would suggest, are older people—people who belong to an age when the accordion was the most popular instrument in the country.

Bonnie Birch is one of these people. She is also the president of the Northwest Accordion Society, the group that puts on these monthly meetings. It is almost impossible to find a picture of her online where she is not sporting a huge grin as she plays her customized accordion, with her name, "BONNIE" printed proudly on its side.