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<< Front page Arts November 7, 2003
 
Accordion love
Plugging for the evocative and the esoteric

The accordion may be the most maligned of all instruments. All you need to do is mention the word, and polka tunes rife with the stench of nerd come floating to mind. Yet if your tastes lean towards Tom Waits, Counting Crows or Pink Floyd, you have liked a song that was given its lushness by the gentle moan of the accordion. It’s about time you gave the accordion another chance; an endeavor made easy thanks to the appearance of Mark Growden on our campus.

Winner of many West Coast songwriting awards, not to mention much acclaim by the club scene of the area, Growden’s music is a fun challenge in terms of description; “Cabaret Tom Waits,” “a man standing at the crossroads of folk and avant garde,” “a decadent, graveyard Sgt Pepper’s” are just some minimalist descriptions. Imagine this: It is dark and you are at a carnival. Its color scheme is black and burgundy. It is a place where a beautiful fair-haired girl is attached through Siamese birth to a leering ghoul. Scary clowns in evening dresses twirl to the music of the demonic calliope, causing the baby dolls hung from the ceiling to swing gently. Then a band begins to play.

Using banjo, glockenspiel, tabla, ancient pump organ and innumerable other instruments, the band — one man — slowly lures all the strange creatures towards him, along with laughing children, and ecstatic crying crows, mute hobos and blissful lovers. All these people and things join the music in a dance that celebrates the beautiful and the grotesque; as the man switches to accordion they spin and leap up onto the strains of sound, clinging to the chords as they lift everyone up into ecstasy.

Growden and his many instruments, the accordion leading them all, will play the Cat in the Cream on Tuesday. Let them massage out a bit of your study stress by reminding you that there are many other worlds out there, and that running below all of them is the deep dark river of the subconscious.

Cat in the Cream. Free. Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 8 p.m.