At various Vancouver venues on Friday and Saturday, September 12 and 13

It’s odd when a concert begins with the most virtuosic artist on the bill—Steven Normandin in this case—but oddness and quirkiness are twin threads that weave through the Accordion Noir festival. Friday night’s show at the Russian Hall in Strathcona presented an eclectic mix of genres and styles, setting them within a vaudevillian frame with burlesque and magic acts. MC Jack Garton helped set the tone with his hair slicked back, his attire consisting of a three-piece suit, pink socks, and black-and-white brogues.

Garton embraced the theme of the evening—accordion speakeasy—with glee and a hint of sleeze, and performing with almost every act. His hallmark, developed with his former band Maria in the Shower, is playing the trumpet with his right hand while the left hand plays bass lines and chords on his piano-accordion. It’s much more than a party trick. The sound is punchy and bright, with the instruments perfectly coordinated. He even he downed a pint of beer onstage in less than 10 seconds.

The rapidly vanishing pint was a toast to Vancouver accordion-noirist par excellence Geoff Berner, who was due to headline the evening but cancelled due to his father’s passing. Appropriately the occasion also had the feel of an unusually celebratory wake.

Normandin commanded a range of traditions. Treating the audience to a dazzling display of technique that never came at the expense of feeling, the Quebecer seemed to have seven fingers on his right hand as it darted lightly over the keys, barely touching them. Normandin opened with a tour de force, singing the wordy “Bruxelles” by Jacques Brel, which evokes the Belgian legend’s home city in the ‘20s. Then came “Chinese Waltz’ by Joseph Colombo, one of the first composers of the musette style so closely associated with Paris, followed by “Le Tango Stupéfiant” (translated by Normandin as “the Drug Tango”), a blackly comic number from 1935 about a love-lorn woman who turns to drugs but ends up smoking eucalyptus and sniffing crushed moth-balls.

The genial Normandin let his fingers do most of the talking, however. He played Jewish klezmer, English hornpipes, and Polish polkas on an orange-red piano accordion with black and white keys, called the “tiger”. The instrument spoke loud but it was the crowd that roared in response to his master class.

Fellow Quebecois musicians Ol’ Crocodile, offered a three-song teaser for Saturday evening’s Accordion Noir show, at the same venue, bringing together alt-folk, blues, and ska in a potent busker’s blend fired by accordionist Alexandre Liagre’s sandpaper-and-moonshine vocals.

Garton returned with his new four-piece band Demon Squadron, to play for burlesque artist Little Miss Risk. The local performer’s face was half-covered by a Mexican skull mask crowned with blood-red roses (the image made famous by the Grateful Dead), and she briefly wore the Mexican colours with a flouncy green dress and red bra, artfully removed to reveal floral pasties. Garton and the band stayed onstage and performed a full set, opening with a song about his troubled youth and bellowing the chorus “Too much Jesus and not enough whiskey”. The musical components and influences shifted from pop, folk, funk, and ska to Cuban and East European traditions, and Berner was lovingly evoked with a venomous version of Berner’s “Fuck tha Police”.

Then for something completely different, with the suave Travis Bernhardt doing sleight-of-hand magic tricks with remarkable deftness and an ironically engaging audience-putdown patter. US one-man band Lonesome Leash performed the feat of playing accordion and trumpet simultaneously like Garton, seated with one foot pumping a bass drum and the other a hi-hat cymbal. It was clever, but some songs overstayed their welcome.

The final act combined Demon Squadron and local Balkan brass ensemble Orkestar Slivovica, augmented at first by ace violinist Briga from Montreal who played a traditional Serbian tune which she gave a more contemporary twist. The band played a lengthy set of dance tunes interspersed with songs, powered by a seven-piece brass section. The roisterous sound brought those who stayed past last-call to their feet, and the evening ended with guest Seattle accordionist Marchette DuBois joining the ensemble to rouse the community spirit one more time before the accordion speakeasy closed.