Accordions are not just a punch line anymore

"He came home from school, shoving this paper in my face, saying that a music teacher was offering lessons," Deanna Moceo said. "He had already checked off 'accordion,' and I said, 'No. What's an accordion?' "

But Moceo persisted, his kindergarten tenacity besting his mother's uncertainty. Now, a decade later, he is a rising star in a fringe group of young Americans who are trying to revive a part of musical history.

To some, picking up the pleated instrument -- perhaps best known as the backbone of polka bands -- may seem an eccentric waste of time. But to Moceo, who joined more than 100 of his compatriots at a national competition here last week, the accordion isn't a punch line or some strange contraption that Grandpa used to play. It's cool.

"The accordion was my first love for music," the Staten Island teenager said. "I wish more people would play. I wish I could go back to New York and jam with my friends."

Life as a young accordionist in the 21st century can get a little lonely at times. As Cory Pesaturo, 22, put it: "I had a musician's mullet and I played the accordion. And, no, girls where I'm from do not like the accordion."

But at the American Accordionists' Assn. festival, which ended Sunday, young people like Moceo and Pesaturo found themselves in rare company.

The conference rooms and hallways of the competition site -- a Holiday Inn -- vibrated with the hum of bellows moving air in classical undulations, staccato bursts of jazz and, of course, the familiar trot of polka. As the competitors milled from room to room, parents shouldered the instruments for children too small to bear their suitcase-sized load. All the while, the old guard of accordion players running the festival looked on with hopeful eyes.

"In order for an instrument to survive, there must be ongoing teaching and performance," said Faithe Deffner, who is a former president of the association and has been in the accordion business for more than 50 years.

Once among the most popular instruments in the United States, the accordion began its fall from grace sometime in the 1960s (depending on whom you talk to) and has never recovered.