Today's popular music is a group of various styles - jazz, swing, country, blues, bluegrass, rock, cajun, zydeco, and others.  The accordionist of today must gather together the knowledge of the melodic and harmonic flow of music to play in various popular styles and improvise/arrange skillfully.  One cannot simply sit down to improvise successfully over a twelve-bar blues without having first studied how; similarly one cannot simply play a Beethoven sonata without first having studied how to play Beethoven.  What is needed then, to accomplish professional-level playing in various popular styles?  The answer is thorough knowledge of harmony, chord structure, rhythm, and melody (including melodic improvisation).  Don't be scared by that statement; qualified instruction can provide useful tools toward this end in six to twelve months.  Along with this, every accordionist needs to remember the basic rule of switch selection: use good taste appropriate to the style in which you are playing.  Play polkas in master, play jazz on the bassoon reeds alone, use violin for French Musette, etc..

To play popular music skillfully one needs to use all the aforementioned skills together to develop a good playing technique.  Once that has been accomplished, tricky passages will be easier and open chords can be smoothly executed even in awkward positions.  A popular accordionist can certainly play Dizzy  Fingers and the Poet and Peasant Overture; this develops good technical skills from a classical standpoint which are applicable to any style.  I know of several accordion soloists who perform primarily from music arranged by others.  These same soloists would dearly love to be able to read lead sheets and improvise appropriately. (Lead sheets are melodies written on a single staff line with chords written above the staff.) A fully accomplished accordionist, possessing all the previously mentioned skills, can take a seemingly simple tune like Alley Cat and play it with symphonic sophistication.  Having this ability is like the difference between an elementary school education and a college education.  It raises the accordionist to an entirely new level.  Why did Mozart, who could compose new melodies at will, write several variations on his older melodies?  Why does a competent accordionist write, arrange, and improvise?  A drawing from a five year old child, while possessing artistic qualities, lacks the development and refinement of a trained visual artist.

The first place to begin is listening: all of the great musicians of the world listened to music with an attentive ear.  Listen closely for the movement of harmony and the way instruments are used in an arrangement.  Listen also to the variety of tempos and rhythms, keeping in mind that tempo refers only to speed, and rhythm refers to the organization of the notes.  The accordion is a very sophisticated instrument, encompassing the equivalent of a melodic instrument (right-hand keyboard) with its own backup combo (left-hand keyboard).  A good popular musician is like a chef who knows hundreds of recipes.  He knows how to mix ingredients, when to boil, when to fry, and when to broil.  The complete musician will use all the ingredients properly and will not add too much salt to the mixture.

Everything present in music today has evolved from something previous - new styles arise from old styles.  Though the various styles have their own idiosyncrasies which must be learned individually (jazz, rock, cajun, polka), they all depend on the same core elements - functional harmony, rhythm, and melody.  Every style is accessible if one only has a grasp of those central elements.  Remember: merely buying paints and brushes doesn't make one the next Rembrandt; similarly, merely buying an accordion doesn't make one the next Charles Magnante, Peter Soave, or Art Van Damme.