In his performing persona as Duckmandu, accordionist Aaron Seeman plays everything from punk rock to klezmer, from Sousa marches to Broadway show tunes.

He also plays conventional accordion repertoire - polkas and tangos - at bar mitzvahs, weddings and Oktoberfest celebrations. Seeman was born in the United States to a Jewish father and Swedish mother, spent three years as a child in Sweden and started playing piano at 3.

Seeman, 46, lives in Alameda with his girlfriend. Go to www.duckmandu.com.

The accordion has a bad rap, especially in America. In the '30s, '40s and '50s, the accordion became very popular. But when rock 'n' roll came around, there was never a place for the accordion. The guitar was cooler, sexier.

The main accordion image that remained after the '60s was "The Lawrence Welk Show" - definitely geeky and uncool. But now all this stuff has sort of become retro-cool.

I think the accordion is a much more versatile instrument than its bad rap gives it credit for. People are always saying to me, "I had no idea an accordion could sound like that."

I got my first accordion from an ex-girlfriend's mother. She had played it in Brazil with her Christian evangelist family. I learned how it works, then stuck it under the bed for three years.

At that point I didn't really have control over the instrument. A lot of it has to do with synchronizing the bellows with your fingers. You have to make it sing. It's unwieldy for a long time.

Then I wrote an opera, "Opium: Diary of a Cure," for my master's thesis. It was set in a Paris sanatorium in 1928 and it had a very complex avant-garde accordion part. We couldn't locate anyone who could play it, so I ended up learning it on my own - in the middle of getting the opera produced.

I'm sort of an ambitious musician, and I'm obsessed with musical problems. The accordion excites that proclivity. I'm always trying to get it to sound as many different ways as possible. With any particular piece of music - whether it's classical, different eras of rock or 1920s jazz - I just try to apply the accordion to that genre or style as well as I possibly can.

One of my early projects, which is what made me the most notorious around here, was to make the accordion play the entire first Dead Kennedys album, with me doing the Jello Biafra vocals. (It became the album, "Fresh Duck for Rotting Accordionists.")

It was a huge technical challenge. I didn't want to turn the songs into "oompah" accordion songs. I just wanted the accordion to sound like a punk-rock band.

My gigs are all over the map. I sometimes tour to punk clubs. Last summer, I was a headliner at the Wallace Accordion Festival in Idaho. I was nervous, 'cause it's a very conservative area and most of their accordionists are the straight-ahead kind. They told me not to play any punk rock, but once I got there it seemed like there was some interest - so I ended up busting out some of the less obnoxious numbers.

I just enjoy playing the accordion. It's a much more supporting instrument for a singer than a piano is. If you're singing, both you and the accordion are facing the same direction. Also, it's more like a voice than the piano. A breathing instrument, rather than a striking instrument.

There's a video on my website that I did a couple of years ago. I wasn't trying to be Weird Al Yankovic, but I wrote cat lyrics to the Nirvana song "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I recorded it and then made a video of it in my girlfriend's backyard with her cat, Gravy.