All Hail the Stomach Steinway:
Squeeze Please
Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 11/15/95
The three-CD set Planet Squeezebox (Ellipses Arts) is perhaps the perfect use of the CD box-set format. It offers a wealth of musical education, to the point that it’s a must for the collections of every school and public library. Its 51 tracks by 51 acts in 40 genres provide listening experiences ranging from exuberant participatory folk celebrations to world-weary melancholy to mind-altering alternate melodics. For an instrument of so many variations (including the concertina, bandoneon, and organetto) used in so many places in so many ways, it’s surprising to read in the box set’s exquisite 56-page booklet that the beloved “Stomach Steinway” dates only back to 1829 (less than 50 years before the first phonograph). From Austria it quickly spread throughout Europe, and from there to Europe’s colonies and ex-colonies in Africa, the Americas, and scattered parts of Asia. Twice as loud as any previous Euro folk instrument, it was also capable of playing melody, harmony and rhythm at once. By the 1850s its various forms were mainstays of folk and dance music worldwide, taking the place of everything from bagpipes to violins in dozens of new and pre-existing genres. Wallingford-based Petosa Music still makes some of the best-loved accordions anywhere; over-30 locals remember the sqeezebox stylings of kids’ TV personality Stan Boreson (while ’90s hipsters know Accordion Joe’s performances on The Spud Goodman Show).
Planet Squeezebox offers great examples of much of what you might expect it to offer: Polkas, tangos, Irish jigs, American jazz and blues standards, zydeco, Jewish klezmer wedding music, sambas, assorted Lat-Am dance musics. You might not expect what else you’ll get: French musettes, Egyptian belly-dancing accompaniment, Quebecois barn-dance balladeering, Italian tarantella, achingly poignant modern-classical compositions, even a Debussy prelude. It’s unfortunately diluted, by the kind of conservatively-curated and blandly-mixed mellow tedium that still gives the U.S. world-music industry a bad name. That’s particularly the case on disc 3, in which the set’s curators go to Africa equipped with your basic Paul Simon notions of nice unchallenging world-beat tuneage. But hey, that’s what programmable CD players are made for.
But at a time when the “Unplugged” fad and the various successors to ’70s “women’s music” have revived the association of acoustic music with singer-songwriter solemnity, it’s important to have the best parts of a set like this reminding us how this family of instruments has long been a force for honest artistic expression, celebration, and working-class togetherness. Those “punk polka” spoofs in the ’80s by Weird Al Yancovic and others weren’t too off the mark; the squeezebox really is the original hi-NRG DIY music machine.
