Fewer than 50 self-playing Otto Accordions exist, and one is for sale in Minnesota

Before there were robots, self-driving cars and AI, there were automated mechanical music machines: self-playing pianos, organs, even banjos and violins.

And sitting in a piano storage warehouse in New Brighton looking for a buyer is one of the weirdest examples around: a self-playing accordion.

The so-called Otto Accordian was owned by Larry Reece, a late Twin Cities collector of automated mechanical music machines.

Reece, who worked as an electrician at Minneapolis City Hall, collected vintage musical machines, such as early 20th-century speakeasy player pianos and nickelodeons and a 100-year-old band organ designed to provide music for carousels.

But Reece’s Otto Accordian wasn’t an antique. It was custom built in 2020.

The Otto Accordian is made by a tiny business in Kirksville, Mo., called Miner Co., as a sideline to its main business of making brass whistle calliopes.

The Otto Accordian is actually several instruments: an accordion plus a xylophone, bass drum, snare drum and wood percussion block. It’s a sort of one-man robotic band housed in a 5½-foot-high hardwood cabinet with leaded glass windows.

That’s a type of perforated, multi-song, paper roll used by nickelodeon style coin-operated player pianos to play songs such as the “Oh! Sister, Ain’t That Hot” foxtrot or the “Just a Girl That Men Forget” waltz. That was musical entertainment in saloons before there were jukeboxes.

But these days apparently not many people want a 250-pound music machine that can play a live accordion/xylophone duet of “Jingle Bells” with a drum solo.

Dan Dohman, owner of Miner Co., said his company has sold hundreds of calliopes, but fewer than 50 Otto Accordians have ever been made.

“It’s kind of a rare build,” said Dohman, who will build you a new one for $11,990. “This is a niche project.”

Reece died in January 2024 at the age of 74. Most of his mechanical music machines were sold to fellow collectors.

“The collectors want the old stuff,” said Les Hazen, Reece’s brother-in-law, explaining why the Otto Accordian has been the last instrument to be sold.

Hazen is currently seeking buyers on Facebook Marketplace for the self-playing accordion with a custom cherry wood case accented with rose-colored glass. The asking price is $8,000, although Hazen will entertain offers. The instrument includes a box of 15 G-rolls.

Although the Otto Accordian isn’t the sort of vintage machine that collectors prize, it is rare.

If you bought the Reece machine, you’d be the only person on your block with an automated accordion, unless you happened to live next door to Steve Klosinski.

Klosinski, a Richfield resident, is the vice president of the Snowbelt chapter of the Musical Box Society International, a group of automated music machine enthusiasts.

Klosinski found his for sale about three years ago. It had been built in the late 1970s and may have been one of the first ever made. It had been on display in a railroad museum, but the accordion bellows had deteriorated. He got it for a good price, about $3,000.

“I didn’t know such a thing existed until I found the one I own,” he said. “It’s a quirky, oddball instrument. You have to be a certain kind of crazy to own it. But I think it’s really cool. You don’t see something like that.”

In an age when you can instantly command any song to play on your phone or Bluetooth speaker, it may be a bit eccentric to want to listen to music performed by a coin-operated mechanical band.

But Klosinski said music played by a robot instrumentalist has a live, acoustic quality that you don’t get with digital recordings.

“There’s no screen involved,” he said. “There’s a physical action to it. I had a Christmas roll in there and I was playing it all through Christmas.”

“I don’t have room for dueling accordions,” he said. “I’m trying to convince anyone I know to give it a good home.”