Jazz Manouche

I don’t know how a button accordion works. I understand squeeze boxes with a piano-style keyboard. They say the sweetest sound in the world is when you throw an accordion into a dumpster, and it lands on a dulcimer you threw in there earlier. But this adding machine stapled on a bellows? No clue.

So this Gallic gentlemen, Marc Berthoumieux, has me double flummoxed. He’s playing Chinese checkers and music comes out. I don’t know how he squeezes such wonderful and inventive music out of it. Makes me want to move to Paris and learn to smoke greasy cigarettes and drink wine from a beaker and look existential while the waiter ignores me. If Rocky the Gibson wrangler announces that if you have a request, write it on a 20 Euro note and send it up, I’ll bite. Of course I’ll ask for Sunny. It was the official song of the twenty-teens, remember?