Photo by Jennifer Brown.

I did a fair bit of work massaging some presentations and software demos into shape last weekend, but there was also some downtime. The Ginger Ninja and I enjoyed dinner with the Accordion City foodie group/dinner club known as the Society of the Secret Pickle. The photo above shows me playing Happy Birthday to Pat, one of the guests at the event.

Photo by Pat.

I’ll write more about the Society of the Secret Pickle and the lovely food we had later, but in the meantime, you might want to check out:

Photo by Pat.

• Pat’s summary of the evening, as written in her foodie blog, Epiglutton
• The Society of the Secret Pickle Flickr photoset

The Accordion Jam

With all the travelling I’d been doing in the fall, my birthday party back on November 7th was a last-minute affair, but it was a great one. I managed to snag a spot for fifteen people at Caplansky’s Delicatessen. Caplansky’s has been open merely half a year, but in that short span of time, it’s won the loyalty of local deli fans, foodies and celebrities as well as my in-laws, who’ve forgotten more about deli than I will ever learn. The Ginger Ninja and I took them there over the holidays and not only did they enjoy their meal, they also enjoyed meeting the proprietor, Zane Caplansky.

I was enjoying a birthday beer while waiting for the appetizers to arrive when Wendy pointed out that a young guy with an accordion had entered the restaurant. Two accordionists meeting at random in a restaurant is a rare and precious phenomenon, so I introduced myself and told him that I too had an accordion – the little red number that I’d purchased on the very afternoon I signed my offer letter from Microsoft.

His name was Ronen Segall, and in addition to playing at parties and other functions, he plays at Caplansky’s. “I think I’ve read your blog before,” he said as we conversed. “Would you like to do a couple of numbers with me?”

I find invitations like that just about impossible to refuse, and the result – a performance of Que Sera, Sera, Should I Stay or Should I Go and Don’t You Want Me — is shown in the video below. My thanks to Pavel Zaitsev for doing the camerawork!

Caplansky’s

Here’s a shot of Caplansky’s taken from near the front of the restaurant on my phone back in September. Get a good look, because the place’s word-of-mouth has grown over the past few months and I doubt we’ll see it this empty for a good long time.

“We may be witnessing the birth of an institution,” gushes Toronto Life (the magazine for the local Lexus set) about Caplansky’s, and I concur. These days, the place is buzzing even during most other restaurant’s off-peak hours and the queue waiting for a table often goes out the door.

This is the second incarnation of the restaurant, the first one being a little shop operating symbiotically within the Monarch Tavern. With a brand new smoker and a new front-of-house and back-of-house staff, Zane’s raised the quality of his stuff from good to great, added items to the menu and taking on increasingly large crowds.

Here’s a shot of the tasty pickle plate that Wendy and I shared as an appetizer back in September. I’ve made it black and white because my mobile phone camera has a tendency to colour pictures of food in that unappetizing, 1950s drive-in movie theatre snack bar menu way:

For my main, I had the Caplansky’s Combo, a nice plate with a selection of their deli meats served along with a few slices of rye, tomato slices and onion. Back then, it comprised smoked meat, thick slices of grilled versht (beef salami), smoked turkey and chopped liver. I had to hit the gym a little harder the next day, but it was worth it.

Here’s a photo of the Combo, once again converted to black and white thanks to my mobile phone’s inability to take a decent food photo:

The question always comes up when I talk about the place: “How does it compare to Schwartz’s?” For those of you not familiar with the establishment, Schwartz’s is Montreal’s legendary charcuterie hebraique, who’ve been doing smoked meat since the Great Depression and their excellent product is considered to be the gold standard. I try to get in a meal there every time I’m in Montreal, and plan to do so again when I’m there later this month for the CUSEC conference.

I like both; Caplansky’s smoked meat has a smokier flavour to it, which I think is a good thing. I’d rather see Zane put his own touch on it rather than slavishly attempt to ape Schwartz’s. It’s the sort of deviation that gets the Montreal smoked meat purists up in arms, but they’re chauvinistic food grognards (who can shove Lucien Bouchard’s missing leg up their collective arses, if you want my honest opinion).

When I took the in-laws there over the holidays, I started with the split pea soup – simple and hearty – and followed that with the salami and eggs, which turned out to be one of the best renditions of this deli classic that I’ve ever had. Wendy had one of my silver dollar pancake-sized latkes that came with the dish and swooned. They’re quite good.

A lot of delis fall down when it comes to dessert, but not Caplansky’s. I believe they get their desserts from somewhere else, but that other place is great! The chocolate cake that I got for my birthday party was so good that I got another slice, and I plan to return for another serving of their dark chocolate bread pudding, which I had during my visit last week.

To sum it up: the food’s great. You should go.

Being someone who’s very passionate about his work and his field, I find it gratifying when I encounter someone who feels the same way about his. That’s what I like about Zane – he cares intensely about the food he serves and the restaurant in which he serves it. He obsesses about getting things just right – just read some entries in his blog to see just how much – and he also works the crowd at the restaurant, chatting up the tables and even doing a little order-taking and serving. This is no mere job for him – it’s a calling, and it shows.

If this article has enticed you to give Caplansky’s a try, I’d say go for it – but they’re taking this Monday through Friday off. Caplansky’s will be back open for business on Saturday, January 9th.

Caplansky’s Delicatessen is located at 356 College Street (at the corner of College and Brunswick, a few blocks west of Spadina). They’re open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, and from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. the rest of the week.

Map showing location of Caplansky’s Delicatessen (356 College Street, Toronto ON)

Links

• Caplansky’s site
• Caplansky’s blog
• Toronto Life writeup
• Gourmet Magazine writeup

For no reason other than kicks, here’s a video shot earlier this summer – me playing the “Keyboard Cat song” on accordion on a patio at the end of a beery evening in Ottawa:

(If you haven’t heard of Keyboard Cat, here’s an explanation.)

No visit to Halifax is complete without a stop to the Lower Deck pub for a pint (or five), and no rock band is complete without an accordion. A fortunate combination of the two came about when I went to Halifax to help run TechDays there in early November, and it resulted in the performance recorded in the video above, in which I joined the band for a rousing and drunken version of Steppenwolf’s classic, Born to Be Wild. Let this be a reminder to you: the accordion is not just a machine that creates music; it also creates serendipity.

Oddly enough, the band had never played the number before, but that never deterred them from doing so in front of an audience, and they played it as if it were a well-established part of their repertoire. This is not the first time that this has happened either – the Zaitchik Brothers, the band at our wedding reception, had also never played Born to Be Wild before, but we brought the house down. I’ll have to post a video of that one sometime.

I think that there’s something so basic, so primal, so inherently rock-and-roll-y in Born to Be Wild that it’s encoded into the genetic memory of rock musicians and hence they can play it on command without having rehearsed it.

While walking back to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel from Centre Mont-Royal through Montreal’s network of underground shopping malls and Metro tunnels, we passed by this pair of buskers, who were burning up their frets with some very fast-paced jazz:

Christian suggested that I join them, and moments later, the bassist, guitarist and I agreed to do some high-speed 12-bar blues in E flat minor (they actually play in E, but they were tuned down a half-step).

I’m actually pretty terrible at improvising in that key, but I did my level best to keep up.

As I played, my co-worker Vivian snapped these photos with my camera.

These guys were quite good and played at a blistering pace.

I really should work on the keys in which I’m terrible at jamming: C sharp/D flat, D sharp/E flat, G sharp/A flat and A sharp/B flat. I have no idea why I’m better at other keys but not these ones. I suppose it just boils down to practice, practice, practice.

After a couple of minutes’ worth of jamming, we wrapped it up and shook hands. Christian threw a ten-dollar bill into their guitar case as a way of saying “thanks” for letting me join them in an impromptu performance and we continued on our way south through the tunnel.

In case I don’t say it enough: I love the accordion and what happens when I bring it along.

GO!’s host Brent Bambury gets the audience warmed up before the show.

A little while back, Jeff Goodes, producer for CBC Radio One’s Saturday morning flagship show GO!, emailed me asking if I’d like to do a radio appearance on a show featuring some kind of music-related contest. I said “of course!” and ended up at CBC studios to record today’s episode earlier this morning.

 GO!’s producer Jeff Goodes explains things to the audience before the show.

The theme of today’s show was “Spin the Wheel of GO!”, in which Wheel of Fortune- and I Ching-style randomness would supposedly determine what would appear and what would happen on the show. I had a lot of fun doing the show, and you can hear the fun by heading down to GO!’s audio archives, scrolling down to the show marked 11/21/2009 – Spin the Wheel of GO! and clicking the “Play” button.

When I arrived just after 8:30 a.m., I was escorted to the green room, where the indie-folk strains of Kate Rogers and her band could be heard as they performed a number for a sound check. It sounded great and I made a mental note to buy their CD after the show.

Kate Rogers and her band.

Kate Rogers (photo courtesy of the CBC).

I got to meet my fellow guests Teodora, who would be “competing” against me in musical trivia games, and Shin, a guitarist who’d just come to Accordion City from Japan. He would provide music for one of the music trivia games.

Shin playing guitar.

Shin (photo courtesy of the CBC).

At 9:30, after Brent and Jeff quickly gave the audience the “this is how things work on this show” explanation and handed out some prizes to the audience for answering trivia questions, and the recording session began.

Brent warms up the audience.

The first music trivia game that Brent had Teodora and me play was “The Japanese Guitarist”, in which Shin played slowed-down versions of popular tunes on guitar and sang the lyrics in Japanese. I scored half-points for identifying Flo Rida’s Right Round as Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round, the song from which Flo Rida took the sample.

Teodora (photo courtesy of the CBC).

I completely failed to identify the second song he played for me as Avril Lavigne’s Sk8r Boi, which I should’ve done, since I played the song on accordion on MuchMusic’s Much on Demand show a few years back.

Teodora and Brent.

Around that time, Katherine Burrell took a seat beside me at the table. She and Brent did a bit on Michael Jackson’s “Secret CIA file”, after which they cut to some music. During that lull, she took a closer look at my accordion, which I was wearing, and ran her hand down its side.

“Did you just stroke his accordion?” Brent asked, incredulously.

“I get that all the time,” I said, with what was probably a smirk. Ah, the things that never make it to broadcast…

Brent Bambury.

The next trivia game was “This Is It”, featuring questions about Michael Jackson. I cleaned up – and surprised myself – with the depth of my Michael Jackson knowledge.

Yours Truly (photo courtesy of the CBC).

The final trivia game was the “Foxy Roxy” game, in which Teodora and I answered questions about British art-rock band Roxy Music. I didn’t do too badly with this one, correctly identifying the Roxy Music single that Bill Murray performed at a karaoke bar in Lost in Translation as More Than This.

Yours Truly on accordion (photo courtesy of the CBC).

I did much worse with my attempt at performing Roxy Music’s Avalon on accordion. I have no idea why – for the most part, it’s a three-chord song that I should’ve been able to squeeze out in even the most drunken of states. I’m just terrible at playing songs in the key of F. Clearly I need more practice.

(I thought I did a half-decent job of emulating Bryan Ferry’s “I just had a good hard shag” vocals.)

I just hope that Bryan Ferry can forgive me for murdering his song.

After that, we had another performance by the Kate Rogers Band:

After which the show wrapped up and Brent tooks questions from the audience:

One of the questions from the audience was “Could we hear Joey do a full song?”, so I gave them the sure-fire number Baby One More Time, which got a lot of applause.

And before I left, Jeff snapped this photo of Teodora, me and Shin:      

I’d like to thank Jeff Goodes and Brent Bambury for having me on the show, and all the CBC staff for making me feel welcome. Jeff, if you ever need me for more shows, you’ve got my number!

If you listen on CBC Radio One on Saturdays you’re in for a surprise: Yours Truly will be appearing on the Brent Bambury’s show Go! tomorrow. There’ll be musical merriment of all sorts. Go! broadcasts live at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, 11:00 in Newfoundland.

Rodney Buike took this photo of me on Tuesday evening. I look as if I should be backing up Tom Waits or playing in a cojunto band:

…and if you were wondering: oh yes, I do own the deluxe edition of The Beatles: Rock Band:

For the TechDays conference’s stops in Vancouver and Toronto, Microsoft hired Vancouver-based photog extraordinaire Kris Krug to take photos of the Developer and Platform Evangelism team, which includes Yours Truly. The photos were taken during the conference, which meant that most of us were wearing the official TechDays shirts, which were colour-coded to match the conference track in which we were leading or participating. The track that I lead is Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, and its colour is orange. Luckily the folks who made the shirts had a pretty snappy shade of orange (the label refers to the colour as “Spark”) that I can rock.

Most of our photo shoot was on the promenade outside the Vancouver Convention Centre, looking out over the water. He just had me play tunes on the accordion while he shot photos, so they’re all pretty candid shots. Here’s one of the photos that Kris took of me.

There are more of me and the rest of the DPE team in Kris’ Flickr photoset.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Everyone who knows me and watches Mad Men emailed, texted, Tweeted me to tell me about the scene from Sunday’s episode in which Joan (the curvy redheaded head of Sterling Cooper’s steno pool) played C’est Magnifique on her accordion. Yes, I saw it and enjoyed it quite a bit:

Thanks to Curtis Wilcox for pointing me to the video!

At the Mesh Conference held earlier this year, I was asked at the last minute to play an opening number for the big panel discussion on using social media for marketing. I decided to get cheeky and played AC/DC’s Big Balls, since having them is a quality that you need to really use social media and social networking to advantage. As I played, Kaz Ehara shot these photos:

Photos by Kaz Ehara.
Click the photos to see them on their Flickr pages.

For those of you unfamiliar with the song, here it is, synced to clips from Spongebob Squarepants:

Heather Leson, with whom I used to work at Tucows, snapped this photo of me breaking out the squeezebox at Tuesday’s HoHOTo charity event.

HoHOTo is the second edition of the HoHoTO (pronounced “Ho Ho Tee Oh”) party, which was a charity event that took place close to Christmas (hence the “Ho Ho”) and was very quickly organized after a few people had a little discussion on Twitter. No giant planning committees, no long meetings in windowless boardrooms over bad coffee and stale donuts, no big media marketing campaigns – just a group of dedicated volunteers and community leaders, a modicum of social media savvy, some fast-moving sponsors (including my employer, Microsoft Canada) and a club willing to let use their space on short notice.

Although it’s nowhere near Christmas, the event’s name has a lot of goodwill and the website already exists, so why not simply change the capitalization and pronunciation? And thus HoHOTo (pronounced “Ho HOT Oh”) came into being.

One again, it was organized largely by that chunk of the local creative class comprising both techies and marketing types. The event was a double success in raising over CAD$10,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank and being a great evening out as well.

I saw camera flashes galore at HoHOTo, and a number of those flashes ended up as pictures on Flickr.

I don’t normally vandalize signs, but I’d make an exception for this special case:

Stefan Arentz, a co-member of HacklabTO, sent me the photo. He says that it was put up by a Dutch cafe owner to ban accordion-playing gypsies.

I no longer live in Accordion City’s Queen/Spadina neighbourhood and therefore don’t play there very often anymore. Luckily that doesn’t mean that they’re lacking for the accordion: there was a guy playing a fine little red number there earlier this afternoon:

Squeeze on, good sir!

One of the nice things about my job is that they actually ask me to incorporate the accordion into it. Yesterday, we shot this video featuring me on accordion promoting the upcoming Make Web Not War event happening next week right here in Accordion City. Think of it as another of my contributions to Accordion Awareness Month:

MAKE WEB NOT WAR – VIDEO FOUR – TORONTO from The Biz Media on Vimeo.

There’s only one mistake in the video – “accordion” is misspelled. If you’d like the follow me on Twitter, the correct ID is AccordionGuy, not AccordianGuy.

For more details about Make Web Not War, see:

• The Make Web Not War site
• Canadian Developer Connection
• Global Nerdy (my personal tech blog)
• David Crow’s blog

Back in 1989, Tom Torriglia – formerly of the band Those Darn Accordions and now a member of Bella Ciao – established the month of June as Accordion Awareness Month, making this June the 20th anniversary. The purpose of Accordion Awareness Month is to let the world know that the accordion’s making a comeback and invite people to understand the true musical (and in my case, life-changing) potential of my favourite instrument. In honour of this very special month, I’ll be posting stories about accordion as well as other accordion-related news, as well as doing some performances all over town (the Roller Derby was just the beginning).

I’m not the only one doing something special for Accordion Awareness Month. The fine folks at the all-things-accordion blog Let’s Polka are challenging accordion players and enthusiasts to take the Accordion Awareness Month pledge. They’re asking you to do something to promote The Instrument of the Gods:

This year, we want you — our humble, accordion-loving readers — to help promote the virtues of our favorite instrument. Sit on your porch and play some tunes for your neighbors, attend a show on our accordion event calendar, fill up your coworker’s iPod with Flaco Jimenez songs when he isn’t looking, tell all your friends about Let’s Polka… the possibilities are limitless. Me, I’m going to sit on my balcony every night, directly above a pizzeria, and serenade patrons.

To encourage you, we’re giving away over $100 worth of accordion-related goodies to readers who pledge to promote the accordion this month. To make your pledge, write a comment on this post and tell us how you plan to celebrate Accordion Awareness Month — doesn’t matter if it’s something small (making a YouTube video) or big (writing an accordion concerto). One lucky, randomly-chosen pledger will receive a prize package packed with accordion CDs, books, and more. (Prize details coming soon!)

Happy Accordion Awareness Month! Let the squeezing begin!

Tomorrow at the George Bell Arena in Accordion City’s west end, I’ll be playing (and singing) Canada’s National Anthem at the start of the Toronto Roller Derby match between the Gore-Gore Rollergirls and Chicks Ahoy! I’m working on a rendition that respects the proud heritages of both Canada and roller derby.

If you’d like to hear my rockin’ accordion rendition of O Canada and enjoy some roller derby (the motto is “Real Women. Real Hits. Real Heart.”), it’s all happening at the George Bell Arena (215 Ryding Avenue, in the “Junction” neighbourhood). Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door and kids under 7 get in free. The doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the game starts at 7:30, which is when I figure I’ll be playing.

For those of you who can’t remember or don’t know the words to our anthem, here they are:

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love
In all thy sons command.

With glowing hearts
We see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land
Glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

I’ll post my chord arrangements later.

And, as further enticement, here are the Gore-Gore Rollergirls:

Adam Schwabe took this photo of me playing a request at the Drake Hotel’s rooftop bar early Friday evening:

This is the most awesome accordion cover EVAR! (Hint: "Quiero Que Me Quieras" is Spanish for "I Want You to Want Me".)

And hey, happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone!