The Leader of the Band

Once upon a time, a teenage boy in Lindström, Minnesota, started a rock ’n’ roll band with his friends. They wore tight white bell-bottoms and shiny nylon jackets, called themselves Neon, and played the Bee Gees, Elton John, and Billy Joel. One day, a band member’s parent suggested they expand their audience by learning some old-time songs. The lead singer’s mom had a little-used accordion tucked away in a closet, which she offered to one of the band members—on the condition that he return it when she asked for it back.

Dan Chouinard, now forty-three, hung onto the instrument for twenty years, growing more enamored with it every day.

Chouinard—who is best known today as a pianist—is the second of six children in a musical family. He started tickling the ivories before his feet could reach the pedals and gave his first command performance—a version of “Alley Cat” he learned listening to the radio—in kindergarten. He eventually grew into playing at weddings and continued piano lessons through his college years at St. John’s University, where he studied French and Italian and took the opportunity to travel abroad.

One evening in 1987, a couple of years after graduating from college, Chouinard was having a drink at The Gay 90’s in downtown Minneapolis when someone requested Don McLean’s “American Pie.” The club’s pianist didn’t know the song, so Chouinard volunteered to play it. “Within a few months,” he says, “I was playing Thursday-night open mike, hosted by Lori Dokken. I was the human jukebox.” The weekly gig lasted seven years—during which Chouinard met many major singers.

That same year, Chouinard was listening to a band at the Dakota when a musician approached his table and told him Prudence Johnson was looking for a piano player for that weekend. “I remembered hearing her on A Prairie Home Companion as a teenager on the farm and marveling at her voice,” recalls Chouinard. “She was the first musician I worked with in town who left me starstruck.” Their gig was at the Kahler Hotel in Rochester, where the half-dozen people at the bar did not listen to them. “But,” Chouinard says, “I was still nervous.”

Since then, Chouinard has worked a lot with Johnson, and this February, at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in south Minneapolis, they will reprise “I Love Paris,” singing French tunes and trading stories of their separate travels to Paris.

“She’s got a high level of musicianship,” says Chouinard, “and I appreciate her attention to the tiniest nuances. She’s one of my closest friends, in addition to being one of my most frequent collaborators.”

“Our working relationship has become much more collaborative,” says Johnson. “It’s a partnership rather than a singer/accompanist relationship. He’s brilliant and so intuitively musical that working with him is an absolute joy. Best of all, Dan is truly family to me and my husband, Gary.”

The list of Chouinard’s collaborators is a virtual who’s who of Twin Cities musicians—from guitarist Peter Ostroushko and gospel singers Gwen Matthews and Robert Robinson to classical soprano Maria Jette and folksingers Neal and Leandra. “We regularly interview local singers and actors,” says Dale Connelly of Minnesota Public Radio’s The Morning Show, which he cohosts with Jim Ed Poole. “When there’s an in-studio performance included in the interview, the singers usually have a pianist in tow, and increasingly that pianist is Dan. Everybody wants to work with him.”

Musicians want to work with Chouinard for many reasons. Connelly first heard Chouinard on the pianist’s weekly KBEM radio show, The Singer’s Voice. Chouinard interviewed well-known local vocalists and got them to sing their favorite childhood songs. “People talked about Dan’s fantastic keyboard skills and his sly, understated interviewing style,” Connelly says. “That this one guy could be versatile enough to accompany the variety of singers he worked with and conduct the interview amazed me.”

Jette, one of Chouinard’s guests on The Singer’s Voice, says, “It’s easy to pigeonhole Dan as a cabaret player, but he’s also a superb classical pianist. He’s got a special kind of musical wit too—he can make a gut-busting joke out of a well-placed note.” As the gowned members of a singing ensemble made their way onstage at a recent fundraiser where Chouinard and Johnson were performing, Chouinard launched into “Pomp and Circumstance.”

Ostroushko says, “Dan has no fear on the keyboard. He’s a great improviser and arranger, in addition to being one of the nicest people you would ever want to know. It’s also a great bonus that he plays the accordion.”

Ah, yes, the accordion.

Though Chouinard developed an affinity for the instrument during his teenage years, a revelation on a month-long bicycle trip around Italy in 2000 spurred him to pursue it more seriously. “It occurred to me that I wanted to be a musician not just at home—but also on my travels,” he says. “So I resolved that I would come back to Europe with an accordion strapped on my bicycle.” He also realized he wanted to live at home the way he did while he was traveling—with a bicycle for his main transportation (Chouinard owns a car but doesn’t use it often), a flexible schedule (“I have time for quiet and staying put,” says Chouinard), and an attitude of discovery.

In late summer of 2001, Chouinard took his accordion to Europe. At the end of his three-week trip, he boarded a train for Nice, France, from where he was to depart for the United States the following day, September 12. The events of 9/11 left him stranded in Nice for a week.

Though his French and Italian are “fairly good,” Chouinard says, “it was a week of feeling profoundly alone. Out of that sense of aloneness came this challenge to push myself to start conversations or play the accordion in situations where I normally wouldn’t. A number of life-altering things happened that week, and the biggest one was the camaraderie with musicians and nonmusicians.”

Chouinard joined up with a group of gypsy accordionists from Romania who were sitting on the courthouse steps. The men passed his accordion around and shared tunes. On another afternoon, Chouinard attended a grape-harvest festival in a small village. He asked the band, which was playing a lot of Dixieland, if he could join them. The band obliged, and they played late into the night. The following day, the trumpeter invited Chouinard to join him as he wandered from restaurant to restaurant in Nice, playing for change. “That was a magical connection,” says Chouinard. “I’m still in touch with those guys, and when I went back a couple of years ago, I played some gigs with them. Interesting things happen when you travel with an accordion.”

On a recent visit to Paris, Chouinard struck up a conversation with an American couple sitting next to him in a cabaret. The couple, it turned out, were newlyweds from Excelsior. The three eventually left the cabaret for the plaza outside Notre Dame, where, under a moonlit sky, Chouinard played love songs for the couple.

“The sound of the accordion is so deeply evocative for so many people,” he says. “The accordion sings. It breathes, like a singer breathes. It’s capable of a full range of accompaniment that essentially takes the place of a whole band, but it has the advantage of being portable. If you’re sitting at the dinner table and you decide you want music after dinner, you bring out the slivovitz and the accordion. It generates an immediate response of nostalgia and usually an anecdote or two about someone’s great-aunt or grandfather.”

Long known for its progressive sensibilities and vibrant musical programming, St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in south Minneapolis is Chouinard’s childhood church. (Though he spent his teenage years in Lindström, Chouinard grew up in Richfield.) Over the past ten years, his role at St. Joan’s has grown from occasional pianist to assistant music director. “I’m the leader of the band,” says Chouinard, which means he directs St. Joan’s band every Sunday at the 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Masses, hosts the church’s annual cabaret, and accompanies the cabaret acts, as well as the musicians who participate in the church’s annual concert series. On January 16, as part of that series, Chouinard hosts St. Joan’s annual tribute concert to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which features T. Mychael Rambo, Robert Robinson, and Jearlyn Steele.

On a crisp fall evening, Chouinard conducts a rehearsal in St. Joan’s gym. “Chaos among friends,” he says. Of the cabaret’s thirty-two acts, performed by the cities’ major musicians, Chouinard accompanies twenty-eight of them, including Mary Jane Alm, on the keyboard or accordion.

Onstage, from behind the keyboard, Chouinard, his sparkly red accordion slung across his chest, calls out a mike test, “OK, Mary Jane, talk to me through your soul.” The band starts playing, and Alm brings her sweet sound to “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” Often during the four-hour rehearsal, Chouinard pulls a pencil from his shirt pocket and makes notes on his music. Whether he’s accompanying Alm or the entire company for the show’s opener and closer, he is relaxed and plays with an easy style. He hears and feels every instrumental and vocal part. His entire body moves with the beat of the music.

Music is his life. Rehearsing or performing, Chouinard is comfortable and content, as though he were still back in Lindström, rocking with Neon.

Claire Joubert is arts and entertainment editor of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.