An Appreciation of Tommy Gumina
by Joe Hartka, Co-Founder of TOMMYGUMINA.COM
My father was an accordion player, so quite naturally we had accordion records in our family collection. Of course I was not allowed to touch them. But I listened intently when Dad played them on his Westinghouse blonde oak console Hi-Fi system which his father and mother gave him when he graduated high school in 1958. I was especially intrigued with Tommy Gumina, but I didn't know why. This was the early 1960's and I was only 4 or 5 years old.
When I was 8 years old, my father was in college during the day and worked a job at night. I had my own record player by then (1969) and I knew where he hid his record collection. I looked through the lp's and I came across this really cool looking cover that had an accordion and clarinet with a dark background and a blue-ish hue on the accordion and the lp's title had letters in different colors. It was called "Polytones" and it was by The Buddy DeFranco - Tommy Gumina Quartet on Mercury Records.
Even though this lp was already 6 years old, I had never heard anything like this. The accordion sounded way different from the way my Dad played it. It sounded way different from the way anyone played it. College students would pass by my window, would stop and peer inside and say, "Hey kid, that sounds really cool. What is that?" I would proudly hold up the "Polytones" cover and say, "That's Tommy Gumina, man".
So what is it about the way Tommy Gumina plays that could so touch a boy of 8 and still have the exact same effect decades later on this same boy who is now a man of 43? Yes, the lightning fast solos were great and exciting, not to mention the rich, very present sound of the accordion itself, designed by Gumina himself and played through an amplifier also designed by him, but the thing I loved (and still love) the most is the way he plays chords. Gumina is a classically trained musician with a superior knowledge of harmony, and he not only knows basic chords but also all the variations on those basic chords, which explains why polytonality came so easily to him. Very few people in jazz at the time could play polytonal jazz and beautiful rich chords with the same conviction and skill that Gumina could. Gumina's jazz playing actually put him in the same league as Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck. No less an authority than Art Pepper called Gumina "a major jazz talent". Buddy DeFranco himself, when the suggestion was made to use an accordionist instead of a pianist on a record date, knew Gumina was something special after hearing him play. The late Leonard Feather had nothing but praise for Gumina and his brand of jazz playing.
So with all this going for him, why are Tommy Gumina recordings so very hard to find? Why is Tommy Gumina hardly (or never) mentioned in jazz history accounts? Because of the musical snobbery of the so-called jazz elites or purists. You see, no matter how brilliantly played or how beautiful the music was (both true in Gumina's case), he played the ACCORDION, not then or now recognized as a "jazz" instrument such as the sax or trumpet or even the piano. Regardless of how many jazz artists loved Gumina, and there were many, or how many record buyers loved Gumina, and there were many (and still are, me being #1), Decca and Mercury quietly allowed the lp's to slip out of print and as far as I know have not been re-issued.
There was no stopping Tommy Gumina, though. Besides being a brilliant musician and player, he was also a brilliant electronics technician. He had been designing and building his own accordions and amps since the 1950's. So in 1968, he started The Polytone Musical Instrument Company, and has had great success helping all kinds of musicians get great sound from their instruments with his superb amplifiers and pick-ups. Gumina still occasionally plays live (such as the college date he played with Art Pepper in 1975) and records at his own studio at Polytone (see the discography for Polytone listings.) He has also invented a great, versatile accordion- like instrument called The Polychorus, which can sound like an accordion or an organ and various other instruments and has a very authentic upright bass sound when Gumina plays the left hand side of the instrument. Gumina turned 80 years old in May and shows no signs of slowing down.
I have long been hoping and praying that Polygram and MCA would re-issue Gumina's recordings onto CD's, including alternate takes and unreleased songs just to make it sweeter. Maybe if enough of us e-mail these companies they will put them out. Tommy Gumina's wonderful music does not deserve to deteriorate in the cans of the record companies. As many times as I have heard Gumina's records, I still never get tired of them, and every time I play "Polytones", I am 8 years old again, and I still get the same goose bumps the same way I did then. Long Live Tommy Gumina.
JOE HARTKA 10 March 2005
