Word: accordion
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Clothes for Callers. Her real start came when a pregnant customer asked Lane Bryant to make her something "comfortable and yet presentable." Mrs. Bryant made a tea gown in which the bodice was attached by an elastic band to an accordion-plaited skirt. This permitted comfort and style with expansion; with it Lane Bryant's business expanded...
...flashily upholstered saloon called Dixon's, a new outfit was packing in the big names of the nation's popular-music industry. It was called the Joe Mooney Quartet, and consisted of a clarinet, guitar, bass and (of all things) an accordion...
...Mooney campaign. He coaxed musicians, bandleaders and managers into making the trip to Paterson to hear "the most exciting musical unit in the U.S. today," devoted nine columns to Mooney in Down Beat, started his fellow editors worrying that their trade paper had gone goofy about an accordion quartet. Last week they had stopped worrying...
Jazz without Labels. For short, smiling Joe Mooney, 35, it was a sweet triumph. He had played piano in a dozen forgotten bands, arranged music for Fats Waller, Jane Froman, Jack Teagarden, Paul Whiteman. In 1935, he bet someone that an accordion could be made to swing, learned to play the thing and became accordionist in Whiteman's band. Then in 1943 an auto accident put him in a cast for 18 months, left him with a permanent limp. Last March he rounded up Clarinetist Andy Fitzgerald, Guitarist Jack Hotop and Bass Player Gate Frega, sold them...
...Mooney himself who makes the quartet spark. He does the arrangements they start from, writes many of the tunes, provides every cue during the improvisational passages, and sings the vocals in the soft style of Nat (King) Cole. Sometimes he switches from accordion to piano, astonishes fellow musicians by playing contrasting figures with right and left hand simultaneously. The other three members of the quartet watch Mooney closely, and with evident admiration. (He cannot watch them: he is blind.) Their cue from Mooney is often merely a smile or change of facial expression...