LOS ANGELES ― Across the street from a wine lounge and a gourmet sausage spot in the Atwater Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, a small red-and-white neon sign reads: “DAVE’S ACCORDION SCHOOL.”

Inside, black and tan cases sprawl in a row along the floor, and two shelves hold a hodgepodge of squeezeboxes for sale. Business cards of norteno stars blanket a corkboard near the door, and nearby there’s a printout of the dictionary’s definition of the word “accordion,” with a suggested alternative: “A fantastic companion.”

Owner Dave Caballero, 68, sat on a piano bench examining the innards of a brown accordion. Down a narrow hallway, in a room decorated with an old blue couch and a figurine of Andy from “Toy Story,” his wife, Veronika, was finishing up her session with Emily Gaughenbaugh.

The spry 92-year-old said she took up the instrument a couple of months ago, in part because it beats doing crossword puzzles. She packed up her small red accordion and walked back into the shop’s storefront, where a signed picture of the Irish band the Pogues hangs on the wall next to one from Weird Al Yankovic that reads: “DAVE ― Thanks for everything. ... And don’t forget to eat your broccoli! Weird Al.”

As Gaughenbaugh waited for her 66-year-old daughter to finish her guitar lesson in another room, she watched a man with graying hair finish his lesson, her slim shoulders swaying to the melody from the French film “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” Soon a twenty-something with a pixie haircut and a young Russian boy showed up for their lessons.

“Accordion is coming back,” Gaughenbaugh said, smiling. “For a while it was kind of a joke.”

Back in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, Los Angeles had a well-established accordion ecosystem. Door-to-door salesmen recruited students for lessons, dozens of schools sustained them and an annual competition drew thousands of accordion students from all over the country who tried to outperform each other on “Bing Bang Polka” and “Yankee Doodle Rag.”

One of those salesmen knocked on the front door of a Lynwood, California, home almost 50 years ago and gave the couple there his pitch: I’d like to teach your son to play the guitar, or maybe the piano accordion. The couple picked the latter, and on the day before his seventh birthday, little Alfred Matthew Yankovic had his first lesson.

Before long, the boy better known now as Weird Al had figured out the bellow box’s push and pull ― and what people thought of it.

“The accordion got a reputation of being kind of unhip,” Yankovic said with a laugh that acknowledged he’s stating the obvious.

But now the equation has flipped.

Thanks in part to its adoption by influential musicians and bands, such as Tom Waits, Gogol Bordello and Mumford & Sons, its role in the whimsical film cult classic “Amelie” and a general trend of branding the once-weird as hip, the accordion has a new reputation: quirky, modish even.

French singer and accordionist Jessica Fichot ― Ms. May in a pinup-style calendar called “Accordion Babes” hanging at Dave’s shop ― said she noticed the instrument’s wave of trendiness eight years ago or so after she graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music and moved to LA.

Fichot kept hearing the push-and-pull of the bellows in the background of a lot of new music and decided to add an accordionist to her band. But she didn’t have any luck finding somebody, so she went to eBay, bought one for $30 and taught herself.

“I think I was part of this new thing,” she said. “Acoustic music ... was becoming a little bit hip, and I think the accordion was part of that.”

Yankovic said he first noticed the reputation shift about a decade ago and quipped that he probably had something to do with it.

“I like to think that I’ve helped to bring sexy back to the accordion,” he said, laughing.

But in certain pockets of LA’s accordion culture, sexiness was never a struggle.

Among Latino aficionados of the diatonic button accordion ― the type mastered by conjunto and norteno greats like Flaco Jimenez and Ramon Ayala and newcomers like La Santa Cecilia ― the instrument was not only never a joke but actually quite revered.

Button accordionist Otono Lujan ― whose father, Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, helped pioneer the Chicano art movement ― never thought of the instrument as weird or embarrassing.

“It doesn’t have the same kind of stigma of being nerdy,” said Lujan, who teaches button accordion lessons and plays one in the band Conjunto Los Pochos. (When people ask about piano accordion, he sends them to Dave’s for lessons.)

“It’s a very simple music,” he said. “But it’s got a soul to it that really pulled me in.”

Although he’s trained on the button style, Lujan loves all accordions.

“There’s all these different flavors,” he said. “But the unifying element is ... the ability to control this dynamic with the bellows that almost mirrors human speech.”

By Marisa Gerber

(Los Angeles Times)

(MCT Information Services)