We were chatting in the music studio of Mary Mancini and husband Mario Tacca’s Cortlandt Manor home, but we might as well have been at a café on Paris’ Left Bank.
Tacca and Don Gerundo were playing an impromptu accordion duet of “Quando, Quando, Quando,” which they would follow up with “Under the Sky of Paris.” In between, they accompanied Mancini as she paid tribute to chanteuse Edith Piaf by singing two numbers she made famous – “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” and “La Vie En Rose.” Such is the power of music to transport you to any time anywhere.
We expect there will be more transporting when the three take part in “An Accordion Extravaganza!”, presented by The American Accordionists’ Association at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 26, at Crystal Hall in Yorktown Heights. Gerundo and Tacca are among the 70 members of the 88-year-old organization, with Gerundo, a New Rochelle resident, serving as president and Tacca, a past vice president, receiving the AAA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. The association consists of professional and avocational musicians, primarily on the East Coast.
The first half of the concert will spotlight the Connecticut Accordion Orchestra, in which Gerundo plays, conducted by Peter Peluso. (Marilyn O’Neill serves as director.) The second half will feature Tacca; fellow accordionists Beverly Roberts Curnow, Kevin Friedrich, who will also serve as master of ceremonies, and Alex Chudolij; bassist David Grego; and trumpeter Peter Blume. Mancini will close out the show with a patriotic medley.
The afternoon will be an opportunity to get to know a perhaps surprisingly versatile instrument that has played a distinctive role in American culture and history, Gerundo said.
Believed to have been invented in early 19th-century Germany, the accordion is part of the free reed aerophone family of instruments – famous relatives include the harmonica and the concertina – in which sound vibrates as air flows past a reed in the frame. The accordion is driven by a bellows that the musician compresses and expands, playing the melody on a right-hand keyboard or buttons and the accompaniment on the left-hand buttons.
This duality gives the accordion a complexity like no other instrument except for the organ. (It’s telling that Tacca, who also plays the piano, is not only an accordionist but principal organist at Church of the Assumption in Peekskill where Mancini serves as principal cantor and music coordinator. Once when he was having trouble with the organ, he said, he was able to continue the liturgical music using his accordion.)
“You hear the instrument, and it’s so full,” Gerundo added. “The melody sings. It sounds like a full orchestra.”
That would explain the accordion’s adaptability to virtually any kind of music. It’s hard to beat an orchestra sound that you can pack into 12 to 20 pounds, which is what an accordion can weigh. (Costs range from $300 for a beginner’s model to more than $10,000 for certain professional instruments.) But hand in hand with that versatility is the immigrant story. The accordion spread throughout Europe, then went wherever Europeans went, including the Americas.
Those of a certain vintage will remember Lawrence Welk (1903-92), who grew up on a farm in the German-speaking community of Strasburg, North Dakota, and parlayed a $400 investment in an accordion (more than $6,500 today) into a career as an accordionist, bandleader and host of “The Lawrence Welk Show,” which aired from 1951 to’82. Among his featured performers was accordionist Myron Floren (1909-2005), Welk’s right-hand man, whose photograph hangs in Mancini and Tacca’s paneled studio. Tacca once substituted for Floren in a concert at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey.
Back in the 1940s and ’50s, Tacca said, the accordion was associated with waltzes and polkas. Today it moves to a variety of beats, from classical to jazz, Latin American music and Zydeco, the high-energy hybrid of Cajun and Creole Louisiana. Famous accordionists include Ukrainian classical specialist Alexandr Htustevich, French jazzman Richard Galliano, Mexican Norteño Grammy Award winner Ramon Ayala, Finnish folkie Sam Perttula, Celtic creative Tadhg Ó Meachair, French-German composer Lydia Auvray and, of course, “Weird Al” Yankovic.
Like those listed above, Gerundo, Mancini and Tacca earn their livings as musicians – no small feat since only 10% or less of musicians do.
Gerundo began playing at age 5 when he saw a little girl in his kindergarten class at Hamilton School in Mount Vernon and was smitten – with her accordion. He plays accordion and piano in the metro area, ranging from the standards in the Great American Songbook to jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Increasingly, he’s used Finale (music notation software) for compositions, arrangements, transpositions, workshops, demonstrations and classes.
A coloratura soprano – possessing the highest and most agile female vocal range – Mancini was born and raised in Peekskill where she began singing at Assumption Church at age 10. Her coaches included Carolina Segrera Holden, Luciano Pavarotti’s teacher in the United States. Mancini’s versatility is such that she sings in eight languages applied to repertoire that embraces everything from opera to sacred music to pop.
Tacca was born in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy and raised there and in Paris, continuing his music education when he came to the United States at age 12. Among the competitions he won was the International Accordion Competition at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. He and Mancini met at a concert at Assumption Church and have been making music together for a half-century across the globe, from local restaurants and East Coast resorts to symphony halls in China, sharing the bill with such performers as Paul Anka, Bobby Rydell and Jerry Vale.
In addition, Mancini and Tacca have formed the Hudson Valley Accordion Ensemble of eight accordions, guitar and drums and recorded 10 CDs. They also operate the Tacca Music Teaching and Recording Studio.
For the couple and for Gerundo, music isn’t just a career; it’s a passion. Mancini told us two stories about that passion. Once in Assumption, she let slip a piece of sheet music that wafted down to the congregation. A woman who had just lost her husband, found it and, reading the words, later told Mancini that it was a message from above – and she didn’t mean the choir loft.
Every six weeks, Mancini went on, she and Tacca perform at Rini’s Restaurant & Wine Bar in Elmsford where visitor Haley Horner – a 16-year-old art competition winner from South Carolina – was so moved that she sent the couple a card with her pencil drawing of them.
“The love of what we do sustains us,” Mancini said. “When we make music, it’s a joy, and it makes other people happy.”
“An Accordion Extravaganza!” takes place 2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 26, at Crystal Hall, 34 Hillandale Road, Yorktown Heights. For tickets ($45) and more, contact this email. You can also visit ameraccord.com or call Don Gerundo at 914-261-9320. For more on Mary Mancini and Mario Tacca, click here.
| Dreamstime.com
