A radio documentary by project directors Julie Caine and Marié Abe exploring the stories and rich traditions of the accordion in California's diverse cultural landscape. This will be completed by 2010.
Julie Caine
Marié Abe
The accordion is the perfect vehicle to take us on an immigrant's voyage through California -- one of the most multicultural places in the world. Portable and hearty, the accordion is the instrument of the one-man band all over the world, and successive waves of newcomers have carried their squeezeboxes to with them to California, using its music to create community in a new land.
California has always been the primary destination for immigrants entering the United States, and has a higher percentage of immigrants from all around the world than any other state in the nation. California is also well known as the repository for waves of internal migration from all corners of the U.S., from the Dust Bowl migration in the 1920's to the most recent post-Katrina migration from New Orleans. What is less known, however, is that such longstanding histories of immigration and internal migration have made California a fertile ground for extremely diverse and vibrant accordion musical cultures.
The accordion is ubiquitous in the California soundscape: from "folk" genres such as German polka, Italian vaudeville, Mexican Norteño, New Orleans Zydeco and Cajun, Argentine Tango, Irish folk, Balkan dance, as well as in contemporary imagined, romanticized and re-invented genres such as circus music, seafaring pirate songs, punk rock, avant-garde experimental music and wildly hybridized music created by young omnivorous musicians, looking to re-assemble and juxtapose a wide variety of socio-musical identities into something very much their own.
In the course of the documentary, we'll look at the accordion's adaptability as a musical instrument across cultures, how the accordion played a part in California's union movements, the craftsmanship it demands, even today, and its appeal to people as diverse as lederhosen-wearing Polka lovers, Mexican Conjunto players and pierced and tattooed Burning Man aficionados. We'll look at not only how these diverse groups of people relate to each other through the accordion, but also how they diverge.
Taking the accordion as it lives as a cultural icon in people's imaginations (with both positive and negative associations) and as a physical object embodying a particular aesthetic in craftsmanship and in musicianship, Squeezebox Stories creates an interwoven series of first-person musical oral histories, grounded in the context of archival, historical background information, storytelling and performance.
As such, Squeezebox Stories will shed light on the shifting terrain of interactions between various groups of Californians as they negotiate their cultural identities -- ethnicity, race, age, class and gender -- in their everyday lives. Through a rich fabric of oral histories woven together with the accordion as a common thread, we will critically examine how these diverse groups of people have related/relate to each other through the accordion, how the accordion has enabled them to negotiate and constitute their identities in the process of moving through and settling in California, and how the accordion opens up new possibilities as it moves across social, musical and political boundaries today.
