Time to roll out accordions

Accordions are big.

Accordions are loud.

A "Far Side" cartoon depicts people going to heaven receiving a harp — and people going to hell receiving an accordion.

"I play it mainly to annoy people," said Bountiful resident Jim Jensen.

A favorite target for lampooning, yes. But the accordion is also capable of truly beautiful music, present in abundance Tuesday night at the inaugural meeting of the Salt Lake Accordion Club.

Who knew there were so many accordion enthusiasts around? Organizer Jay Todd said he was expecting 30 and would have been ecstatic with 50. Ninety showed up.

"Isn't this great?" he enthused. "Ninety people!"

Granted, many of the attendees are closet players, in the sense that their accordions have been gathering dust in their closets for quite a while. But Todd sent out letters and plied the local media for publicity, and those who thought to quietly bury their accordion habit suddenly found themselves in a community of like-minded musicians.

And oh, what musicians they are.

Rick Morrison played a moving, minor-key piece of his own composition called "The Ballad of Rockwell." Ralph Hubrich, who used to walk several miles to his weekly lesson with his accordion strapped to his back, played a virtuoso version of the delicate, fast-moving "Hungarian Czardas." He also demonstrated a difficult "bellow shake," wherein a single note is repeated rapidly by pushing and pulling in quick succession.

"What they don't take into account is the huge span of years where not only did I not practice, I didn't even know where my accordion was," Hubrich said.

Young and old and middle-aged, the accordion players came. Some were nattily dressed, some were shabby. One man wore a bus driver's uniform, others sported earrings and bleached hair. Some are truly accomplished musicians, others can play only in the key of C.

They came, large and small. Morrison, a bear of a man, is seemingly twice as tall as Jay Todd's wife, Janet, who reaches 5 feet on a tall day and 112 pounds on a heavy one. Yet Todd plays an accordion weighing almost a third of her body weight (a full-size accordion weighs about 30 pounds) with zest and abandon.