John Kummer
Hall of Fame – 2025
John Kummer emigrated from Austria to the United States in the early 1900s and settled in Chicago, Illinois. His primary business was in “harmonika erzeug,” the production of custom button accordions and melodions that he sold from his own shop. He was an admired and talented bellows-driven, free reed musical instrument technician and his work was greatly valued by professional musicians.
Kummer was granted a patent in April 1950 (US2504538A) to “provide an accordion which may be readily handled by the performer and which provides improved tone qualities throughout a relatively wide range.”
John lived in the vicinity of the Otto Schlicht factory on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago and was an acquaintance of fellow famed free reed technician, John Friedl. In the 1930s, Friedl and Kummer began to work together on the innovation of plate reed design and the hand-crafted manufacture of these important concertina components. They would carefully hand file the reeds from high-quality Swedish steel for use in chemnitzer concertinas that were being manufactured in Chicago by Otto Schlicht and his associates.
A very limited number of vintage Pearl Queen, Patek, and Peerless brand chemnitzer concertinas were manufactured by Otto Schlicht featuring these fine sounding long plate reeds. Concertina historians believe that less than ten percent of these Schlicht-built instruments featured the famed Friedl and Kummer reeds, making them quite rare and highly desirable, even still today. Some of these reeds have been salvaged from vintage instruments and repurposed to eventually find their way into other brands of concertinas.
The innovative plate reed work by John Kummer became a model for virtually all reed designs to follow. He was truly a chemnitzer concertina pioneer.