The New Yorker recently featured a short video profile of Alex Carozza. Which reminded me of the time, long ago, when he sold me my first accordion…

It was 1997, and I found myself in New York City with the urge to buy an accordion and learn to play it. Back then, the section of 48th street just off of Times Square was without question the place to go. Most people just called it “Music Row”–not to be confused with Nashville’s Music Row, of course.

Think of it as sort of a Diagon Alley for musicians. Every instrument, accessory, and gadget you’d ever need could be purchased somewhere on that block. Manny’s was there. Rudy’s was there. Sam Ash lorded over about half the block with multiple storefronts.

Sandwiched between these “big guys” was an easy-to-miss door, leading to a narrow set of stairs that lead up to Alex’s shop on the second floor. It was there that I met the man himself and told him what I was looking for (something used, cheap, and shippable back home to Nashville).

He disappeared among the tall, metal shelves and soon emerged with what he assured me, in his characteristic Italian accent, was the perfect first accordion for me.

I guess he was right, because that old accordion set me on a musical path that, 16 years later, I’m still traveling.

These days, most of the music stores on 48th have either gone out of business or moved on to parts of the city with cheaper rent. But Alex and his accordions are still there, making sure there’s still some music playing on what’s left of New York’s “Music Row”.

Each year the National Association of Music Merchants meets here in Nashville for their “Summer NAMM” trade show. Geared toward retailers, the show boasts booth after booth of nearly every conceivable type of musical product manufacturer trying to pitch their wares to the Sam Ashes and Guitar Centers of the country. Recording equipment. Sheet music. Guitars. Keyboards. Violins. Horns. Drums. Weird instruments that defy categorization. You name it.

The NAMM show, like the US musical instrument market it represents, is very guitar-centric.

Unless you’re looking for an accordion, that is.

It’s possible that I missed a booth or two, but as far as I could tell when I visited, the place was 100% accordion-free. A squeezebox wasteland.

Even Roland, who gets a lot of credit for spearheading the digital accordion movement with their “V-Accordion” line, was basically phoning it in with a mere handful of non-accordion products. (The fact that they weren’t even mentioned in much of the printed material makes me suspect that their attendance was a last-minute afterthought.)

I guess that’s not too surprising. There was a time when accordions outsold electric guitars in the USA, but that was way back in the pre-Beatles days of yore. (Interestingly, Musikmesse, the European equivalent of NAMM, is still chock-full of accordion exhibitors.) Also, the Nashville show is really just a quarter of the size of the “real” NAMM taking place each year in Anaheim, so I guess you have to focus on what sells.

If there’s a silver lining it’s that just about every guitar-maker at NAMM was also selling ukuleles, along with entire booths leased by ukulele-only companies such as Kala and the Magic Fluke Company (who, by the way, are awesome folks). That’s something you probably wouldn’t have seen five years ago.

I’ve always felt that the ukulele and the accordion were sort of kindred spirits following similar trajectories–enormously popular in the first part of the 20th century, the butt of jokes by the second part, and only now becoming “cool” again thanks to a generation too young to have Tiny Tim and Lawrence Welk on their cultural radar.

So if the ukulele can successfully escape from the Island of Misfit Instruments, maybe there’s hope for the accordion yet.