A jazz accordion? No kidding

Place the word “jazz” next to the word “accordion” and you have what most jazz fans would agree is an oxymoron. The sound, the style -- even the look -- of the instrument are far more commonly associated with polka music, “Lady of Spain” and almost anything other than jazz.

Don’t tell that to Frank Marocco, however, who has been one of the accordion’s rare jazz pioneers. (The short list also includes Art Van Damme, Mat Mathews, Joe Mooney, Richard Galliano and, on occasion, George Shearing and Pete Jolly.) On Sunday at Spazio, Marocco, a veteran of hundreds of recording dates, made a convincing case for the instrument’s capacity to effectively deliver all the core elements of first-class jazz.

Working with alto saxophonist John Whinnery, bassist John Giannelli and drummer Kendall Kay, Marocco played with hard-swinging inventiveness, applying his bop-based style to a program reaching from Jobim and Legrand to Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz.” In many of the numbers, Marocco’s rich chording was combined with the Paul Desmond-influenced saxophone of Whinnery, producing lush, appealing harmonic textures. Countering the smoothly integrated togetherness of the two front-line instruments, Gianelli, who has performed with everyone from Sarah Vaughan to Chet Baker, employed his wide-ranging, five-string acoustic bass in a series of explosively articulate improvisations.

By the time the set was concluded, thoughts of polkas and squeezeboxes had long disappeared, as Marocco’s fascinating performance thoroughly affirmed the fact that it’s not the instrument that makes the music, it’s the imagination and creativity of the person who is playing it.