Jack Garton’s accordion doesn’t play that incessant bouncing polka, or that nauseating carnival-ride refrain. Jack Garton’s accordion plays raspy chords and smoky riffs: ones you usually don’t hear from the squeezebox.
It slinks along behind un-ignorable drums and driving bass lines. It fades in and out of the forefront, occasionally rearing its head to squeeze out a batch of juicy notes.
Jack Garton is out to save the accordion.
In Garton’s opinion, the accordion has been relegated to the ironic and nostalgic for far too long. Nobody really plays the accordion with a straight face anymore, he says, and he wants to play songs that make it feel like a real instrument again.
His website describes The Demon Squadron, his vessel for that dream, as “a band of howling blues-dub sorcerers.” It features Amrit Basi on drums, Michael Alleyne on bass and Garton on accordion, trumpet and vocals.
And to hear Garton tell it, it’s those drums and that bass that are helping him restore the dignity of his beloved squeezebox.
“The kind of stuff we’re doing right now is trio music, so I’ve got bass and drums and accordion, but the emphasis a lot of the times is on the bass and the drums.”
Basi is, in Garton’s words, “the kind of drummer that you cannot ignore.” Whatever he’s doing is always clear to everyone in the room, and Garton loves that. That’s what he wants in his music, for the rhythm to be the first thing.
With the drums and bass driving the music, the accordion can slide in behind while the vocals take the lead.
Every once in a while it might poke its head out to add some melody, “but I try not to play the melodies that are kind of nauseating on the accordion. I try to play the kind of melodies that when it does come out it’s not the type of things you have heard a million times.”
The drums, the bass, the sneaky accordion—it’s all part of Garton’s plan to bridge the generation gap: if the accordion is perceived as an old person’s instrument, he wants to wrap it in grooves and get people dancing to it.
It’s a beautiful dream, but one that comes partly from his desire to repair the disconnect between himself and his own family.
“When I started to play music, it was a tough thing. My family wasn’t really into that, so I felt kind of isolated,” he explains
He says that the progression of technology hasn’t helped either, and that he knows less about his family’s history than any generation before him.
The Demon Squadron was his grandfather’s Second World War flight squadron, and he and his cousins and siblings all grew up hearing stories about the missions their grandfather would fly over the North Sea. Naming his band after it is a way for him to reach back into history and connect the dots between generations.
“It’s not really the same thing, but the kind of craziness of going on tour with a small group of people, and you’re sort of bonded together in this crazy mission: I identify with that.
“I wanted to do something that would recognize that—and because of that a lot of my aunts and uncles and cousins have kind of become more interested in what I’m doing,” he says.
Jack Garton and the Demon Squadron are on tour, and will bring brand new music to the Jasper Legion March 31.
Trevor Nichols
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