ACCORDION SOUND BACK, SANS BUBBLES.

Byline: Paul Grondahl Albany Times Union

When 69-year-old Tommy Ippolito, who has been playing accordion since he was 5, strolls with a squeeze box at a private reception these days, a teen-ager occasionally inquires: What instrument is that?

``Now, that's kind of scary,'' said Ippolito, union president of the Albany Musician's Association, who reached the apex of his career in 1956 and 1957 as accordionist on Arthur Godfrey's CBS-TV show.

But to this generation's youth, who came of age with rap music and MTV videos, the accordion must seem like a kind of archeological artifact.

In the generation-to-generation pendulum of musical tastes, the accordion is enjoying yet another rebirth, swinging away from the ``champagne'' music of Lawrence Welk and moving beyond the boom of the accordion in Cajun-influenced pop music that peaked at the end of the 1980s.

This nouveau accordion style is finding a home in the hands of self-taught musicians like Joe Pasko, 36, of Mother Judge.

``People really seem to love the hillbilly instruments,'' said Pasko, who mixes his accordion playing with spoons, washboard, Jew's harp and homegrown percussion instruments.

For Pasko, married and a father of two whose daytime job is in banking, the discovery that accordion could be cool came after he started playing with the Mother Judge crew five years ago. Whenever he hit those first joyous, shimmering chords on his Roma or a petite, pale yellow Moressi 12-bass squeeze box, bar wallflowers rushed out onto the dance floor.

The accordion has ancient roots. Musicologists consider the accordion a distant relative of the Chinese cheng, a gourd fitted with 17 bamboo pipes of differing lengths first mentioned about 1100 B.C. Viennese Cyril Damian patented the accordion in Paris in 1829, and in 1863 the first accordion appeared in Italy, the world's leading maker of the air-pressure instruments.

Manufacturing of accordions shifted dramatically around 1950 when the new material, celluloid, was used along with mother-of-pearl to mass-produce inexpensive instruments. Peak production was 1953, when nearly 500,000 accordions were exported from Italy and Germany.

In America, at least, the Eisenhower era coincided with the entrance of Elvis and rock 'n' roll and the exit of the accordion as king of the popular music heap.

``Rock knocked the accordion right out of the box,'' Ippolito said.