Album Notes

We all love the movies! They provide us with escape, inspiration, and moments we enjoy reliving again and again. One of the most memorable aspects of the film experience is music. With this, their 6th CD, Cafe Accordion Orchestra (CAO) celebrates this fascination with songs from the movies.
Based in Minneapolis/St.Paul, CAO has been performing and recording since 1994. Their music is an infectious, dancer-friendly blend of the sounds of a Paris cafe, a prohibition era speakeasy, and a tropical cabana.
CAO's evokative music has been featured on MTV's The Real World in Paris, a TV commercial for Suave Products, and a number of independent films. They have performed at the International Akkordeon Festival in Vienna, Austria, the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the Minnesota State Fair, and for hundreds of dances, weddings, parties, and festivals across the upper midwest.

Review:
There's a certain joie de vivre that's crucial to the romantic gypsy music known as musette, an insouciant revelry with a titch of kitsch. Café Accordion Orchestra don't just understand this, they embody it. Cinema, the quintet's sixth CD, is a particularly impressive sleight of hand, a heavily themed affair that isn't bogged down by its premise. Taking songs from film soundtracks ranging from the Marx Brothers to Quentin Tarantino and revising them to evoke a Parisian sidewalk during that gilded era between the two world wars, they never flag in their enthusiasm, veer into pigeonholed parody, or otherwise insult the listener's intelligence. Founder Dan Newton's accordion remains the obvious signature, but the nimble string-pickers—Eric Mohring on mandolin and violin, Brian Barnes on guitars and banjo—are a worthy foil. —Britt Robson City Pages, Minneapols