“The accordion is affordable, portable and loud,” says Schatz, who recently released a new album, Nocturnal Wild Life Journal. These qualities, along with the raw appeal of its distinctive sound, are what originally popularized the accordion in Europe in the 1800s. Germany, Italy and France all fell in love with the accordion, and New Orleans’ present music scene reflects these old-world sounds as well as those born from the accordion’s crossing over the Atlantic. When any of New Orleans’ many accordionists straps on this free reed instrument, he or she brings the vaudeville to the performance and the parade inside the bar.

Common belief has it that the accordion made its way to Louisiana in the hands of the German immigrants who flooded here in the mid-1800s. The accordion traveled well on ships and its operator could serve as a one-man band. John Roger, who builds button accordions in Meraux, Louisiana put it this way: “You can play it acoustically and still hear it. You can play it by itself and it’s the band. If you can sing, even better.”

Cajuns quickly adopted the accordion, and the accordion, in turn, changed their French country music, becoming perhaps more central to it than even the violin or guitar. Louis Michot, who plays fiddle for the Lost Bayou Ramblers of Broussard, Louisiana, says that when his brother Andre “throws the accordion in there, it brings a deeper and funkier rhythm.” Andre learned how to play the accordion from Ray Abshire, who learned from Nathan Abshire, who learned from hearing it in dance halls in and around Lafayette. “The way it honks is funky and junky,” says Michot.

The King of Zydeco, Clifton Chenier, played a piano accordion, which differs from the button accordion in that the button accordion makes one sound when you push its bellows and another when you pull. Piano accordions sound the same notes whether they’re pushed or pulled. The right hand has a keyboard at its disposal and plays the melody. The left hand, in Glen Hartman’s words, has “all the funny buttons.” It plays the accompaniment—bass notes and chords. “Taking advantage of both hands is a little bit like juggling,” says Schatz. There are chromatic accordions, which can sound every note, and diatonic accordions, which are locked into certain scales. All accordions use bellows to push air through reeds and create notes, but there’s no set way to make this happen.

“I think of the accordion as a very distinctive flavor, like garlic, that can go in a bunch of different directions,” says Schatz. In addition to Cajun and zydeco, accordions in New Orleans bellow to gypsy jazz, dance music from Martinique, and a host of other genres. Mary Go Round uses her accordion to transform her folklorist-style storytelling into a cabaret package. Walt McClements lends his accordion to the rambunctious, brassy circus sound of Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship? The Zydepunks are releasing a new album, Exile Waltz, later this month, and Christian Kuffner and Eve use accordions to create a hybrid of Cajun, Irish, Klezmer and punk sounds. Ron Hodges of the Iguanas plays his diatonic accordion in a Tex-Mex style.

For Schatz, playing the accordion has opened up a world of ethnic folk music, which, in turn, influences how he writes his own songs. “With the accordion, if I want to play something that sounds like it’s Middle Eastern, it’s easier to do so. Certain licks that you play on the accordion I think, ‘Oh, that sounds like the swamp to me,’ and others sound like the Romanian countryside.”

But the versatility of the accordion doesn’t stop at its culture references. “The nice thing about it is that you can play it like a single note instrument, like a clarinet, or you can play it more like a church organ and have chords,” says Schatz. “The rough rule of thumb,” he continues, “is the more people I play with, the less busy I make my own parts.”

In the Herringbone Orchestra, Courtney Lain follows the same rule, playing quietly in order to be in step with the other acoustic instruments. Unfortunately, this often means you don’t hear all the crazy sounds coming from Lain’s accorgan, which is an electric, Italian-made accordion with an organ synthesizer built into it. The accorgan works like a pump organ, producing two simultaneous sounds—those of an acoustic accordion and an electronic organ. Lain hugs her accorgan in close and rests her left cheek on the button cabinet in order to listen through the bellows. Her atmospheric and playfully creepy accorgan layers a drama line under the delicate tinkle of harp, bass clarinet, cello, drums, and euphonium. “I use the quieter settings because I don’t want to overpower everybody. That’s the beauty of having an orchestra, the sounds together. ”

Patrick Harison plays accordion in the Panorama Jazz Band, where he says he uses the accordion like a horn rather than a piano. “It’s an air-powered instrument using reeds, so it has more in common with the clarinet or the sax, rather than a strap-on piano.” But even though their sounds are generated differently, the relationship between the piano and the accordion is not incidental. Several local musicians, including Hartman, Lain and Bart Ramsey, began their accordion careers precisely because they were piano players. “I took up the accordion because I’m a piano player, but I couldn’t take a piano to a camp fire,” says Ramsey, whose band VaVaVoom brings to New Orleans the sounds of French jazz, which the accordion enthusiastically permeated over the last century.

It can march in a band. It can play backup or lead. And what’s more, it adds atmosphere. “The accordion brings a great deal of life and a lot of nostalgic connotations for people,” says Jonathan Freilich, the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars’ guitar player. In a city breathing the past into the present, the accordion has become one more indispensable tool. Klezmer, which Hartman describes as Jewish party music, hails from Eastern Europe. The Klezmer All-Stars weren’t the first to bring Klezmer to New Orleans, but they were the first to bring it back to the bars and the streets—the places where it originated. “It’s crazy dance music,” says Hartman, “and people like to get crazy.”

For all of the instrument’s evocative powers, Patrick Harison sums up the accordion’s charms simply. “Electricity can come and go,” he says, “but an accordion is a party in a box. Whenever you have an accordion, you can take your party with you.”

Seven year old Dinerral Shavers walks onto the stage of the Sound Café with a snare drum strapped to his chest. It’s past 6:30 on a Wednesday evening, the hour of the café’s weekly Youth Music Clinic. Neva Joseph, a music education major at Loyola University, instructs Shavers to “listen to the song and try to put a beat to it.” And he does. Moments later, Shavers plays the head, the rim, and the side of his drum along to Neva’s singing of the spiritual, “Mary had a Baby.”

This weekly musical mentoring session is one of several mentoring programs—both informal and formal, old and new—that are working to provide continuity between generations of musicians and to pass on New Orleans musical traditions. Working with children is only one half of the equation. On the adult end of the clinic, jazz clarinetist and Xavier University professor Dr. Michael White has been mentoring the Hot 8 Brass Band at the café. They discuss volume, dynamics, harmonies, what to wear, and lost features of New Orleans music, such as collective improvisation, which, according to White, is “when everybody is improvising at the same time, while also trying to sound like one voice, so to speak.”

This structure—masters teaching adult students who in turn teach younger students—is a common feature of Crescent City musical mentoring. University of New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong Quintet, which is sponsored by the Louis Armstrong Education Foundation, is now in its fifth year of sending graduate students from the University of New Orleans’ jazz studies program into public schools to provide supplemental music instruction, including history and theory. The Quintet also gives lecture performances, which they call “informances” to the general student population. The program was designed to promote the study of jazz, but as Jamelle Williams, the Quintet’s site coordinator, explains, “At the very core of our curriculum is the city of New Orleans itself. While the entire curriculum consists of more than New Orleans traditional jazz, it’s very important as the foundation of the music.”

The Quintet has traditionally worked with students already receiving the fundamentals of playing instruments. “Since the storm, the program has shifted,” says Williams. “We don’t’ have the same quality of music programs. We’ve had to do more history because we don’t have as many kids who are musically capable.”

But even before the storm, many music educators were concerned about the quality of music education in New Orleans. “People are saying we’re not preserving musical traditions, but we’ve been losing them for years. Katrina hit the final blow,” says Virginia Olander, the Music Education Coordinator at Loyola University. “The condition of the public schools and the condition of the programs was sad. And that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. There are some wonderful music educators out there working hard to keep music alive. Has it been across the board that all children are getting a music education? No.”

This is one reason why Olander is so excited about the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz moving to New Orleans. The Monk Institute engages in jazz education from elementary through college levels. Graduate students receive mentoring from jazz masters, and in turn, they work with students in the New Orleans public schools—public, charter, and recovery. “It’s an ongoing commitment,” says Tom Carter, the Institute’s president. We’ll select three to five schools the first year, and it will double the second year, multiplying each year.” On the other end of the musical education equation, a different jazz master will be in residence one week out of the month to work with students from Loyola, the five consortium schools (UNO, Xavier, Tulane, Dillard, Southern), and Delgado. Among the jazz masters are Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and New Orleans’ Terence Blanchard.

The Institute’s curriculum includes a history of New Orleans and its importance, but it will expose students to all styles of the music. “Jazz music is a living music and it’s important to grow,” says Carter. “New Orleans is where this music originates, and it’s important to be a part of the rich traditions as well as the future sounds, the expansion of the music”.

Relocating the institute to New Orleans is a way, says Carter, “for the jazz community to make a contribution to the birthplace of jazz. We feel an enormous appreciation to New Orleans not only for being the birthplace of jazz, but also for continuing to enhance it over the years. This is way to contribute back.” Carter says moving the institute is a way of joining hands with all that is there in New Orleans. “We want to be a part of the community. The city is meeting and facing so many challenges and hopefully this will be a part of helping to meet those challenges.”

Al “Carnival Time” Johnson bought his house on Tennessee Street in the Lower Ninth Ward in 1969. It wasn’t in the best shape, but he could afford it, and he figured, “When I meet Mrs. Right, we’d buy the house of our dreams.” Johnson spent the next 36 or so years working on the house—changing the look of the front, building an addition—until the force of water from the breach in the Industrial Canal, just three blocks away, knocked the house off its piers and moved it about 40 feet.

A year later, Johnson began writing “The Lower Ninth Ward Blues,” which is, in many respects, a tribute to his lost home:

I lived 2349 Tennessee Street

I remember the big oak tree

I lived 2349 Tennessee Street

I loved it and it loved me

I’m telling you now like I told you before

That home I love it’s not there anymore

I’m calling it, I’m naming it the Lower Ninth Ward Blues

Johnson attempted to salvage things from his former home several times, and on one occasion last August, volunteers from the Arabi Wrecking Krewe accompanied him. “We looked for six hours and we came up with about four sweatshirts, two T-shirts, some laminated newspaper articles, a few 45s, some posters that were miraculously compressed together and stayed dry, and that’s it,” says Sheik Richardson, one of the Arabi Wrecking Krewe’s founders. Afterwards, Johnson stood on the steps which once led to his front door and declared, “I guess it’s the last time I’ll see my house.”

Later that night, while trying to sleep, the image haunted Richardson. He called Jordan Hirsch, the director of Sweet Home New Orleans. “I said, ‘I’ve got this crazy idea. I want to take Al’s house apart and put it back together on top of the old foundation, piece by piece,’” Richardson says. He guessed the project would cost about $100,000, but “I was hell bent on putting it right there on Tennessee Street.”

Johnson spoke to Common Ground and City Hall and asked them not to demolish his house, but he never got anything in writing.  A few weeks later, without warning, the house was bulldozed. “There was no orange tag on his house saying, ‘This house is not fit for habitation,’” Richardson says. “We don’t know what happened. We do know that the houses next to his and across from his were not touched.”

We were all surprised,” says Johnson, “but after Katrina, you learn to accept and adjust to what’s going on.”

Johnson is 67 years old, and only recently has he begun earning royalties for the song which made him famous. “The only thing he had was that home in that Lower Ninth Ward,” says Jon Kardon of the Arabi Wrecking Krewe, “What was going to get him by was owning that home.”

Johnson is typical of musicians of his age, according to Kardon. “They’re legacy musicians who aren’t working so much,” he says. “They have the most difficult time rebounding from this.”

Johnson explored his options. “I took heed that FEMA was throwing people out, and I put in an application with Musicians’ Village. That’s when the Arabi Wrecking Krewe said they wanted to help me.”

For months, there has been a link on the Arabi Wrecking Krewe’s Web site where people could contribute to “The Al Johnson Fund.” Through donations made to the fund, the Krewe was able to present a $10,000 dollar check to Johnson on Mardi Gras day at the Mother-In-Law Lounge, representing their commitment to building him a house. “It was out of our love for Al and what he represents for this city,” says Kardon. “He is so emblematic of everything that is New Orleans.”

A three-bedroom house at Musicians’ Village costs $75,000. “What we’ll do is buy an annuity and set up a trust for Al so that it’s directly making the house payment,” says Kardon. “If we’re wildly successful, we can help with the insurance.” A fundraiser in Boston is scheduled for March 25, and another one will be held at Tipitina’s around Jazz Fest.

“He wanted to be part of a community with other musicians,” says Kardon. “This worked except that he fell out of the model. He wouldn’t have met the city income requirements set up by Habitat on his own. They may have figured out a way to get him in regardless, but we came to them and asked, how can we make this happen?”

Sheik Richardson put it like this: “We think symbolically, if we rebuild Al’s house, we might make up for his being ripped off for a lifetime with his song.”