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He plays mandolin and banjo on World Musette, a new CD from the group Les Primitifs du Futur, picked by Songlines magazine as one of the Top of the World releases of the year.Crumb left the US to settle in the south of France in 1990. "I'm sure I'm the only person in France interested in this music," he says "They just look at me funny like they can't understand it But sometimes it takes an outsider to know the music. Musette, like those old Polish polka bands, is a straightforward music of proletariat peoples - local dance music for the neighbourhood." The music has got into Crumb's art as well as his soul and he spent three years doing 36 drawings of little-known French accordionists for a set of cards called Les As du Musette (Musette Aces): "I'd done these cards in the States of early blues, jazz and country musicians," says Crumb, "and when I got into musette I wanted to do something similar featuring the early players from the Twenties and Thirties. They've sold more in the US to Crumb fans than to anybody else!"The music of the Paris bal-musette originated in the poor, mountainous region of the Auvergne from where migrant labourers went to Paris in search of work at the end of the 19th century. Coming from a pastoral economy, they brought with them the cabrette, the Auvergnat pipes, which eventually gave way to the accordion and both of these were played in the bars and dancehalls in the suburbs of the city. It's the music that lies behind the cliché of the Paris accordion.The accordionist credited with creating the bal-musette sound is Emile Vacher (1883-1969), and the other celebrated name of the genre is Belgian Gus Viseur (1915-1974), the star of jazz-musette. But it's the earlier, less sophisticated and much more obscure players who have caught Crumb's vivid imagination: "I love Emile Vacher, but I'm not interested in jazz-musette of the 1930s I like the older style which is less bastardised I'm fascinated by a guy called Hubert Bression His records reach deep into me, buddy.

He was very badly recorded on a small label, but his accordion style is unique. It's a sensitive, lyrical, melodic style that you don't get from anyone else."It's interesting that a lot of the musette accordion players were Italian, but you don't get that style in Italy It was a Parisian thing. There was another band called Persioni - there's no great musicianship, but the sound has something deeply French working-class about it. A lot of musicians, like the singer and guitarist Dominique Cravic [with whom Crumb works in Les Primitifs du Futur], admire virtuosity, but there is none here It's really crude. I think I'm the only person who likes their music."Although he may not be a Persioni fan, Cravic was one of Crumb's main initiators into the world of musette.

He took him to see Jo Privat, one of the legendary accordionists, in 1988 "Privat was a magician with words," Cravic explains. "He spoke in a romantic French argot and I used to explain what he was saying. Robert and I started to speak about doing a cartoon based on him, but then he died." Crumb remembers him well: "He lived in a 1920s two-storey house on the Marne It was decorated like a whorehouse. Halfway up the stairs there was a full-size model of a prostitute leaning on a lamppost."Suddenly the world of Crumb the cartoonist and Crumb the musette collector started to meet.