In Joan Cochran Sommers’ day, accordion salesmen took to the streets of Kansas City to ply their wares door-to-door, enticing families across the metro with the promise of a future multitalented youth.
“They would knock and say, ‘Would you like for your children to have a musical education?’” Cochran Sommers recalls. “And of course Mother said, ‘yes.’”
It was the beginning of decades of playing, conducting and teaching the accordion — and by extension the beginning of Kansas City’s accordion heyday.
“My brother and I — he was a year younger — we both had accordion lessons right away, and we started on the little 12 bass and classes, and then we got to the bigger instruments,” she says. “It was just something that always appealed to me. I really liked the instrument.”
Cochran Sommers would go on to establish in 1961 an accordion program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, then called the University of Kansas City.
To do so, she first had to get buy-in from Archie Jones, Conservatory dean at the time, and Victor Labunski, Conservatory director from 1941 to 1971.
“We went to the Conservatory,” Cochran Sommers says, “and they heard me play some things, they heard me play some Bach inventions where they could absolutely look at a piano score and see that I played the exact same pitches that the pianist played.”
Interest in her private lessons didn’t hurt either. Cochran Sommers says, even before the Conservatory took her on, she was teaching about 100 students a week.
“I had a lot of students at the time,” she says. “I felt like we needed something here in Kansas City.”
With Cochran Sommers ensconced in the Conservatory, interest in the aerophone instrument blew up.
“If anybody wanted anybody to entertain them for any kind of a meeting, we were there. We took a lot of small groups out to the schools and played for young children,” she says. “Young people were interested, they liked to see the movement of the instrument — the bellows go, you know.”
“When we were active, it was an accordion town,” Cochran Sommers says.
A group of 15 musicians she led also did several USO tours in Europe, Russia and Scandinavia — singing and dancing included — all in the name of publicizing Kansas City and the Conservatory.
‘Better each year’
At 90 years old, Cochran Sommers is still performing, conducting, and teaching the next generation of accordion players in Kansas City. She says it’s one way she stays hopeful and strong.
“You're around people that are normally — not always, but normally — younger than you,” she says, noting stereotypes about the accordion are still common.
“They think sometimes that when we say ‘accordion orchestra,’ it's like a hundred accordions just playing a melody, and ‘oom-pah-pa!’ But that's not right at all,” Cochran Sommers says.
Instead, she says, people should think of talented musicians, some of whom have wonderful musical backgrounds from schools of great renown.
“For people who are not musicians, I wanted them to hear what the accordion could do,” Cochran Sommers says. “Some great teachers, great composers, are writing for us, and I think our time will be better and better each year.”
