Accordion icon Giovanni playing his swan song
Popular musician and entrepreneur sells his store after 53 years, three locations
He's long since taken his place as a musical icon in Edmonton, but John Scivoletto still feels bad about what he put his parents through as a child.
“Oh, it was terrible,” the 82-yearold accordionist and businessman, better known to Edmontonians by his stage name John Giovanni, laments with a hint of humour. “I was always practicing scales and chords and other things in the house. It must have been awful for them.”
Giovanni, who recently closed down the music shop after 53 years in three different locations, is having a little fun. It was his dad, after all, who encouraged his youngest son on the instrument back home in Modica, Sicily, and during the family's four-year sojourn in Belgium. By the time they made their way to Edmonton around 1955, Giovanni was already something of a musical savant, picking up silver and gold medals in various European schools.
Accordion was always on his mind, even when helping with the family finances. He took English lessons at night school while working dishwashing shifts at the Misericordia; after the hospital's head baker quit he asked to take over the job, arriving at 5 a.m. every morning to learn how to make pastries. In between it all, he practised on his squeezebox and found time to both teach and pick up a few radio and television gigs, enough so that experienced and older musicians around town took notice.
“I was getting quite well known,” Giovanni says.
“There was a show on Saturday afternoons with a gentleman named Louis Biamonte, who had a big band, four stacks of horns and Glenn Miller arrangements. He was known as the Italian Cowboy, and he asked me to play as a soloist. After that I was able to get dozens shows, including with Tommy Banks. I got very little sleep, I was so busy.”
His facility with the accordion was such that he got a few requests outside of his normal musical zone.
“When I was 17 or 18 I was asked by a Ukrainian band that needed an accordion player to play a gig,” he says.
“I said yes, I would love to, so we went out of town for the gig in one car. It was so cold and snowy, and nobody showed up. Nobody! I got home at 1 a.m. and my dad was so upset that he told the band never to come around again.”
He was a popular draw around town in the '60s. One Journal writer of the time describing his sound as “mood music with a Mediterranean flair,” while another noted his unique chordal approach as being that of an “accordi-organ.”
Adaptable in any setting, Giovanni and his band took over the Brass Lantern in the Coachman Inn, where every two weeks a different out-of-town musical guest would make use of them as their own backing band. Striking out with his own trio, he signed long contracts to play six nights a week at places like the Hearth and Hound Room of the Hotel Macdonald, and the Penthouse at the Sheraton-caravan.
“On Fridays and Saturdays you couldn't get in unless you made a reservation at the Penthouse, it was so popular,” he recalls. “It was strictly dance music there in 1967. We got a big sound out of that trio, and I was good at getting organ sounds out of the accordion. I was basically able to play anything.”
Then, in 1968, he and his wife Jacqueline opened their first Giovanni Music store on Stony Plain Road, providing both musical instruments and lessons in one location.
“We bought and renovated an old building that was used by a church for services on Sunday,” Giovanni recalls. “I was going more than 12 hours a day at that point. Before that, I would have to teach all over the city in different locations, which was tough.”
Thankfully for Giovanni, he was in a good spot to ply his trade as both salesman and teacher. While San Francisco was feeling the hangover from the Summer of Love, and London was still in the midst of the psychedelic rock movement, Edmonton had a hankering for the accordion.
“I worked with so many students,” Giovanni says, lighting up at the topic. “Lots of people wanted to learn the accordion at that time.”
By 1972 business was so good they tore down the old building and rebuilt it, leasing out the extra space to other businesses. When Phase 1 of West Edmonton Mall opened in the mid '80s, they took a leap of faith and moved in, eventually securing the contract with Yamaha allowing them to stock their store with the largest number of pianos anywhere in Edmonton. It was now the '90s; accordions were out, guitars, DJS and keyboards in, and Giovanni had by and large shifted from playing music to overseeing his store.
Except for one little gig with a singer named Pavarotti, that is.
“Oh, that was fantastic,” Giovanni enthuses about the 1995 show at Rexall Place where he added a few accordion flourishes to the opera legend's only appearance in Edmonton. “I was a little nervous playing an intro in front of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and Pavarotti. I was more used to playing an entire show, not just the beginning and end. It was great, though.”
Giovanni and his family made one last leap in 2011 when they left West Edmonton Mall and constructed their own building at their final location on Mayfield Road. However, retirement was looming on the horizon, so when rival music store Long & Mcquade approached Giovanni five years ago, he decided to take their offer for the building. On March 31 he said farewell to the business he'd been building up for five decades.
Which begs the question: now that he has all of this free time, will Giovanni go back to his beginnings and head up an accordion revival in Edmonton?
“I actually have been thinking about that,” he says with a genial chuckle.
“I won't be playing any shows, but I can at least practise for my own pleasure. Maybe I'll play the grandkids a tune or two.”