Squeeze my box

As the South Bank Centre gets itself all keyed-up for a mass musical `squeeze-in', Michael Church celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the humble accordion

Eddie LeJeune clamps his tiny accordion between huge blacksmith's forearms, and sings French love songs in a strangled tenor voice. Backed by the Morse Playboys on fiddle and guitar, he's one of hundreds who carry the cajun tradition through the plains and swamps of Louisiana, spinning a miasma of convivial, fuggy warmth. But this man is cajun royalty: the son of Iry LeJeune, who grabbed the moribund instrument in the Fifties and pumped it with new life.

Iry, who was blind, was knocked down and killed by a car as he waited by the roadside: Eddie, four at the time, now barely remembers him. "But I loved him well, and seeing how his music touched people, I felt I would one day need to touch them too." He learnt by watching his grandmother "pushing and pulling", and by listening to the records Iry had left to posterity.

Over the decades he's honed an art whose strength lies in its innocence: strong, simple rhythms, and no change of key, because the cajun accordion can only play in one key. But this doesn't preclude chromatic adventure. "You lead the other musicians into a new key - a sharp or flat key - but you can't actually play in it yourself. And you mustn't leave them in there too long, because they'd get massacred without you - you must lead them back out to safety. They've done you a favour playing the notes you can't, so you show your gratitude by bringing them back to the standard key." A knight and his men, a shepherd with his flock - and all over the business of a semitone, on the humblest instrument of its kind.

The mass squeeze-in due to take place on the South Bank this week - where LeJeune will be one of the stars - is designed to reflect the extraordinary diversity of accordion styles around the world. It's been conceived by the theatre impresario Michael Morris (the co-director of Artangel, the commissioners of Rachel Whiteread's House and other such installation extravaganzas), who got bitten by the accordion bug when he chanced to visit the Umbrian hill-town of Castelfidardo, once the world capital of accordion production.

In the Fifties, the Soprani factory was exporting half a million instruments a year. By the time Morris got there it was derelict, with one lone survivor producing three a month in his garage, while his son played with his electronic sampler upstairs. "That dead era began to obsess me," says Morris. "I found an old photo of the Soprani workforce, and went round town asking if people had any others, and found some marvellous things. I began to realise what the travels of this instrument could tell you about population history. It was a worker's instrument, and portable, and it was what migrant labourers took with them when they left Italy for Buenos Aires, or Germany for Texas."

The scale of the response to the South Bank concerts, evocatively titled "Now You Squeeze It", has taken everyone by surprise. The accordion community is alive and astonishingly well, sustained by a network of clubs and newsletters: its specialist shops are thriving, as are its four specialist magazines. You want to buy a spangled vintage model? The back page of Accordion Today advertises a Scandalli 120 Bass Musette for pounds 650, and a Paolo Soprani 120 (straight-tuned, double cassotto - connoisseurs will understand) for a cool pounds 2,400. Inside, grinning oldsters tout their services: Freeland Barbour (jigs, Reels, Norwegian, Swedish); Jack Hughes (Bastion of Welsh Accordion Music); and the prancing, pyjama-clad Phyllis Gillingham (Personality Accordionists). And they're moving with the times: the thing now is to get your Soprani Midi'd up.

But the accordion lacks its Larry Adler: despite the late Astor Piazzolla's symphonic compositions for its Argentinian variant, the bandoneon, the instrument still languishes in a sub-professional oubliette. Sue Coppard, secretary of the Wiltshire-based Whitehorse Accordion Club, is a typically vocal champion. "It's extremely versatile," she insists. "Gershwin and Cole Porter go magnificently on it, and so does Verdi." Derived from the Chinese sheng, which was brought to Europe in 1777, and with its name patented in Vienna in 1829, the accordion is still on the long haul to respectability.

With only three nights at his disposal, Morris has had to limit his choices: he wasn't able, alas, to bring over the Japanese woman accordionist who plays Scarlatti sonatas. One of his neatest ideas bit the dust when the Horniman Museum, which has just acquired a collection of 600 accordions, refused permission for a mass squeeze-in of the whole collection at once (Morris had intended to commission a piece). "Those accordions will never be played again," he laments. "I find that terribly sad, and their makers would too." The Horniman, when I ring them, are unrepentant. "These instruments are now museum artefacts," says a curator icily.

But the South Bank programme won't lack variety, kicking off as it does with the Finnish Kimmo Pohjonen who - cavorting with his instrument as The Who cavorted with their guitars - delivers performance art rather than mere accordionism. "I wanted to do something new," he says, "and I was tired of seeing the guitarists I performed with get the benefit of electronic effects." He now has effects of his own, courtesy of a pedal and a loop-machine: watching him at work in a welter of what seems extraneous sounds, it's hard to believe that it's all live, and all him.

The Malagasy musician with whom Kimmo shares his evening learnt his art at weddings, baptisms, and circumcisions: its source is the communal trance. Regis Gizavo's music has a muscular warmth that is quintessentially African, but it draws for its textures on styles much further afield. Sharon Shannon, who opens the following night, could not be more different: her toe-tripping Irish stuff may be sexless, but it's guaranteed to draw the crowd. Oswaldinho, the Brazilian who follows her, brings back a whiff of reality: he and his forro trio - a corruption of the words "for all" - deal in gracefully tumbling melodies and serpentine repetitions which vividly suggest the lines of the dance they are designed to accompany.

If the oddest event of the series is a session of readings from E Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes - the picaresque travels of an accordion through 20th-century America - the most inspiring will undoubtedly be the concert by Argentinian bandoneonist Juan-Jose Mosalini with the violinist Antonio Agri. Mosalini's music, like Piazzolla's, represents the grafting of avant- garde Paris on to Buenos Airean tango, and Agri was for several years Piazzolla's own violinist: their joint pedigree reveals itself in the subdued passion and smouldering elegance of everything they play. The little bandoneon may be the hardest member of the accordion family to master, but it speaks with unique force. Listen to these virtuosi, and you listen not only to the best of the past, but also to a portent of the future

`Now You Squeeze It' is at the South Bank Centre from tomorrow to Sat (booking: 0171-960 4242), with an outing to Docklands on Friday for `Accordion Heaven', a night of Cajun music and food, from 7.30pm at Cabot Hall, Canary Wharf (0171-418 2783)