Friends of Bob May '05 Newsletter
FoB Annual General Meeting: Thurs., May 12, 7:30 @ LBC upstairs-everyone welcome! Get involved!
Brave Combo!!! 2005 Grammy Winners! Big fun show!!! Lafayette Brewing Co. Friday, May 20, 8:30
Ready for a whoppin' big treat? Brave Combo will amaze you with their musical chops
and their imaginations. They'll make you laugh. They'll probably make you want to
dance. Not only do they play those regular instruments-guitars & drums, etc.--but
accordions and sousaphones and whacky things. They know how to create a party
atmosphere. This year their CD Let's Kiss won a Grammy for best polka album, and
though polka is at the heart of what they do, they swirl between musical styles
incorporating Latin rhythms (salsa, cha cha, cumbia, bolero, samba, tango, bossa nova),
bubblegum pop, Tex Mex, movie themes, acid rock-well, you get the idea…anything
goes.
Testimony to their status as party band supreme is the fact that cartoon versions of Brave
Combo played the Springfield Oktoberfest in an episode of The Simpsons last year.
Included in the episode was the Brave Combo original "Fill The Stein" and the closing
credits featured a Combo-ized take on the show's theme song! (They also provide the
theme music for ESPN's Bowling Night!) Simpsons' creator Matt Groening is a devoted
Brave Combo fan. "They prove you can be hip and still be happy," says Groening.
"Really, Brave Combo should have their own cartoon."
This May 20 gig will be a party to celebrate the last show of our 2004-05 season before
FoB takes a breather for the summer. Brave Combo are well used to such grand
occasions! They have marched in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade underneath
Woody Woodpecker, and played such private fetes as David Byrne's wedding and the
200th episode party for The Simpsons.
Brave Combo are unique-just check out their website address:
www.brave.com/bo
Please help us publicize this show by downloading a poster from our website:
www.friends-of-bob.org
F R I D A Y, M A Y 2 0
2005 Grammy Award Winners!!!
from Denton, TX
Brave Combo
[www.brave.com/bo]
Lafayette Brewing Co. 8:30 21-and-over show
$8 (advance) $10 (day of show) friends-of-bob.org
From Von's Records, JL CDs, McGuire, and Laf. Brew. Co.
[Advance by mail $9; checks to FoB, Box 59, Battle Ground, IN 47920; please give name, address, phone,
and email.]
"Brave Combo is one of the world's ultimate party bands, a group that has
returned polka to a level of hipness it hasn't seen for more than 40 years, and a
group that knows about 20 other dance styles inside and out." St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Entertainers who just won't take no for an answer."
Garrison Keillor
"Brave Combo's playlist embraces (and often weaves together) norteño, reggae,
jazz, cha-chas, rhumbas, merengue, two-steps, waltzes, movie themes, acid rock
and bubblegum pop."
New Musical Express (England)
"Brave Combo delivers the goods. No, No, No Cha Cha Cha spans a remarkable
range of rhythms -- salsa, cha cha, cumbia, bolero, samba, tango, bossa nova,
and more."
Austin Chronicle
"I caught the Grammy polka award-winning Brave Combo in a working class
Cleveland neighborhood. What an enjoyable evening!...I had a great time,
even danced a bit for the first time in I don't know when. And you know if I
enjoyed myself, everyone else did." Harvey Pekar
MORE ABOUT BRAVE COMBO AT THE END OF THIS NEWSLETTER
Thanks to everyone who has volunteered their time and energy to FoB this
season. It is what makes it all happen, and a rather fabulous season it has been.
We'll take 2 or 3 months off for the summer but already have some great shows
shaping up for the fall.
Our annual general meeting will take place on Thursday, May 12 at 7:30
upstairs at LBC. As well as electing officials for the coming year, we compile our
"wish list" of performers we would like to bring to town. Everyone is welcome, but
you have to be a current member to vote in the election.
FoB volunteers will be pouring beer at the Taste of Tippecanoe on June 18. It
makes a little money for FoB and a lot for the Tippecanoe Arts Federation which
makes so many good things happen in our community.
We would like to thank the Gannett Foundation for a generous grant they
recently gave us in support of our international shows.
Other live music to make you get out and about:
LAFAYETTE CRISIS CENTER BENEFIT May 13 Carrie Newcomer / Jakob Best Outfit Duncan Hall
LAFAYETTE BREWING CO. 5/14 Michael Glabicki of Rusted Root www.lafayettebrewingco.com
ARNI'S 40th ANNIVERSARY CONCERT May 26, Long Center: The Gateway Trio, JD Crowe 7 the New South, The
Cumberlands
KNICKERBOCKER SALOON www.knickerbockersaloon.com
TASTE OF TIPPECANOE June 18 www.tasteoftippecanoe.org including Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys
BATTLE GROUND FIDDLERS June 24-26 www.indianafiddlersgathering.org
OLIVER MTUKUDZI from Zimbabwe June 19; Music Mill, Indianapolis www.TheMusicMillVenue.com
CHICAGO FOLK & ROOTS FESTIVAL July 9 & 10 www.oldtownschool.org/festival/
&
Do the Dues!!! Membership dues are by the calendar year-2005 dues are
due!
Dues pay for this newsletter and provide a safety net for when admission charges don't
cover expense-which actually happens pretty often. Our venues are small and our prices
are as low as we can make them. Please help us keep the music coming. Become a Friend
of Bob! Since our last newsletter, the following people have sent in their 2005 dues.
Jane Alexander
Al & Faye Allen
Kristi K. Boushele
Bob Brookie
Brian Brown
Bill Caddell
Adriana Cej
Karen Countryman
Pat Deevy
Debbie Denslaw
Dan & Ceola Friday
Mr. & Mrs. W.H. Friday
Keven Gipson
John S. Jones
Nina B. Kirkpatrick
Joe & Kate Kollman
Jason Parrish
John & Debbie Prewitt
Jim & Carol Siebecker
Robert E. & Christine Smith
Kevin Webb
Rosalind Wolen
We've tried our best: if there are errors or omissions, please let us
know. (567 2478 / fob@insightbb.com)
Wanna join?
Go to How Can I Help? at
www.friends-of-bob.org
Billboard Magazine August 25, 2001
Brave Combo's Kick-Ass Bohemianism
by Timothy White
One of the hardest-rocking groups in all of popular music isn't known for playing
rock'n'roll. Enjoying an enviable status among aficionados akin to being the Led Zeppelin
of horn-and-accordion-based ensembles or a kind of Rage Against the Mazurka, the act in
question is a 22-year-old dance band out of North Texas called Brave Combo.
"Some people are our champions and welcome us with open arms," concedes Brave
Combo founder/guitarist/accordionist/keyboardist/lead vocalist Carl Finch, talking after a
blistering August show at New York City's Bottom Line that ended in a standing ovation
from a largely college-age crowd. But Finch also cautions with a serene grin that "some
people are totally, absolutely, and forever threatened by anything like us."
Because Brave Combo is a polka band. That is, a fiery, guitar-propelled, watch-your-twostep, taking-no-Polonian-prisoners polka band that -- if you'll pardon the spiked beer and
double-smoked kielbasa--kicks some major-league Bohemian butt.
"That's our challenge!" Finch says of his band's artistic calling as well as its new live
album, Kick Ass Polkas. So, whether you were lucky enough to hear Brave Combo play
at David Byrne's 1987 nuptials, or knew that they won (after multiple prior nominations)
a Grammy in 1999, or have ever purchased any of their two-dozen other much-lauded
collections--including Music for Squares (1981), Humansville (1988), Group Dance
Epidemic (1997), or Polkasonic (the Grammy victor)--you owe it to yourself to connect
the polka dots and purchase their typically superb new release.
"There's no other term that really describes where polkas are right now," Finch asserts of
Kick Ass Polkas. "So a little of that title is to challenge people to look at polka
differently, to bring it up to the 21st century. At the same time, we want to protect the
music as well, and there are parts of the dumbing down of our culture that I don't want to
contribute to.
"On the other hand," Finch adds with a laugh, "[Cleveland International president] Steve
Popovich said the other day, 'I think maybe this [album title] is gonna keep us out of
Wal-Marts, Carl.' I'm thinking, well, we'll do a different G-rated jacket for them called
REALLY Good Polkas. And I see the phrase 'We're not the enemy' as something we
could put at the bottom on the back of the CD, for people who think we threaten
everything they stand for."
Which brings us to the highly charged, keister-calcitrating setting for Brave Combo's
epic, 14-cut concert recording, captured before a teeming throng at the Beachland
Ballroom in Cleveland on Halloween 2000. "See, in Cleveland, you've got two rival
polka factions--Slovenian and Polish--and they don't mix," Finch explains. "The sounds
are radically different, have had totally different stars in each movement, and they don't
sound the same. Slovenian is Yugoslavia-based and tamburitza- [a Balkan variant on the
guitar/mandolin] and string-based, with some banjo. The accordion plays melodies, and
they play at a quicker tempo. That's Frankie Yankovic's style. But you also have a strong
Polish faction, and that's Eddie B [for Blazonczyk], Jimmy Sturr on the East Coast,
[Massachusetts-born] Happy Louie [Dusseault, a graduate of the Berklee School of
Music], and Li'l Wally [Jagiello, known as Mr. Chicago Style], with slower tempos,
where the accordion is a percussion, not a solo, instrument. So your instrumentation has
been very strict: bass, two trumpets or trumpet and woodwind, drums, accordion, and
concertina for solos. That's the way it is; the way it's always been." Finch pauses with a
bemused sigh, allowing the eccentric divisiveness of such ethnic musical dogma to sink
in.
"I accept all this stuff," Finch says, "because it's been a powerful way for us to infiltrate
the music in the best sense, since we have no restrictions--and we play rancheras,
cumbias, and Greek songs, too. We're just trying to be a brave combo."
Brave Combo emerged in 1979 from the jazz-minded music program at North Texas
University in Denton, and by the early '80s was anchored by core players Finch, sax and
woodwinds whiz Jeffrey Barnes, and bassist Bubba Hernandez. Trumpeter Danny
O'Brien and percussionist Joe Cripps are 10-year vets of Brave Combo. Drummer Alan
Emert (replaced on Kick Ass by Paul Stivitts during a recent sabbatical) is a seven-year
member.
Finch, who conceived the band, was born Nov. 29, 1951, in Texarkana, Ark., the second
son of carpenter James Finch and bookkeeper Emma Bales. Finch recalls his dad teaching
him a "little bit" of guitar in his boyhood, but the parent told his son that G was C, C was
F, and D was G. "He taught me the right positions with the wrong names," chuckles
Finch, who figures the enthusiasm was far more important than the fine points--an
enduring lesson in music appreciation. Evelyn Phillips, Finch's piano and choir teacher at
the First Baptist Church and later a prominent music professor in Fort Worth, showed
him by example how to feel his way through music he sought to master. It was an
instinctive outlook that served Finch well in his seventh-grade rock band, the Creatures,
and then his high-school touring stints with the Lords of Sound and Rasputin & the
Monks.
"Texarkana was a medium-sized city," Finch says of his hometown, "but it was far
enough away from either Little Rock or Dallas that it had to develop its own culture and
its own perception of right and wrong in terms of fashion and pop culture. So it was a
little world in itself, and I think it had a lot to do with me thinking for myself. It was not
hard in Texarkana to be cool. As a kid listening to WNOE in New Orleans or WLS in
Chicago, I'd go to sleep with my transistor radio every night, hearing Jimi Hendrix for the
first time as if I was on the moon listening to stuff from Earth. But hardly a handful of
kids in Texarkana at that time were doing this or wearing bell-bottoms or aware of a freak
scene anywhere. I think I was voted most talented in my senior year at Texas High
because I was the only kid who played guitar. I can't think of another kid who expressed
himself musically at all."
Finch went to Texarkana College for one year as an art major, then transferred to North
Texas for commercial art and music, staying on for its graduate arts program and working
with renowned alternative artist/instructor Bob Wade, while also experimenting with
audio installations in art galleries. He haunted bargain bins in search of exotic five-for-adollar sound recordings and stumbled onto the subculture of polka music, which he first
deemed kitsch and alien but then re-evaluated in the context of the North Texas
University jazz scene. As Finch puts it, "Every Harry Connick-type band or Vegas lounge
act that needs a crackerjack trombonist or trumpet player, an expert percussionist on the
brushes, or a guitarist in a certain type of academic setting, will always recruit first out of
North Texas. That's where our bassist Bubba got a jazz studies degree, and our trumpeter
Danny played in the lab band program there . . . We all just fell in love with polkas and
the music and history and wanted to be part of its community and movement.
"Li'l Wally was the one who revolutionized American-pop-style Polish music," Finch
continues, sounding like the teaching assistant he became at North Texas, "by slowing it
down so you could hear the implied syncopation within the measures, getting beyond that
fast oompah thing and into the sexy, more danceable chica-chica choo-choo train sound,
with a lot of foot movements and hip-twisting. That became the most popular modern
polka style in the world, but at the same time, in the Tejano movement, Don Santiago
Jiménez, Flaco's father, and Tony De La Rosa did the very same thing at the same time in
the '50s and early '60s that Li'l Wally did, slowing their [conjunto] music down,
introducing electric bass and a full drum set, reducing the size of the band from 10 to
five. The Mexican and South Texas sound of Tejano polka became more of a shuffle,
played with feeling. That's what Brave Combo is about: playing with feeling."
But if Brave Combo thought it was out of the woods when it copped a Grammy win, it
was quite mistaken. "After we won the Grammy, there were letters to the editor in the
Polish American Journal saying that we didn't deserve it because we weren't Polish,"
Finch notes. "In the same issue was an article saying how we totally deserved it because
we weren't Polish! For myself, I've learned you don't have to be judgmental in life and
put down others to build yourself up." Finch says the musical side of this enlightenment
was sparked in 1975, when from a cutout bin he bought an Andrew Walter album,
Scandinavian Dance Music (Colonial Records), which contained a crisply exultant
instrumental, now joyfully covered by Brave Combo on Kick Ass Polkas: "Herrgard's
Polka."
"So we played that song in 2000 at Beachland," Finch recalls, "which used to be the
Croatian Hall, and we're these weird non-Polish, non-German, non-Czech guys from
Texas, with one Mexican guy in the band and we're nothing, just some hippie outsiders
who play polka. But we drew an incredible cross-section that night, including a lot of top
figures from the polka world; it was like a meeting of [legendary feuding families] the
Hatfields and the McCoys, coming together and dancing together. And we'd hired the
premier polka engineer out of Youngstown, Ohio, Gary Rhamy, and his assistant, Hank
Guscevich, who's the genius trumpet player for the Polka Family, one of the top five
Polish-style polka bands in the world, and we got them to do a live mobile recording.
And, man, it clicked.
"Our aim has been to pull the irony and the clichés away from this music," Finch
concludes. "It doesn't have to be something the inexperienced laugh at first and then
appreciate later. Pretty much, polka is a United States baby now--it doesn't belong to
Europe anymore. The innovation there has stopped, but there's a bunch of puckish bands
in Germany, Austria, and Holland who are influenced by the Pogues. For us, polka's so
clear and precise and in the groove. The most important criteria are that the passion of the
music and the precision of the players get me and all of us into the flow. As goofy and
new age-y as it sounds, I still want to be carried away by it."
The Austin Chronicle Brave Combo No, No, No, Cha Cha Cha (Rounder)
by Lee Moore
Brave Combo's latest project bears a superficial conceptual resemblance to
David Byrne's Rei Momo in that both albums explore the rich world of Latin
dance rhythms, but where Byrne managed to squeeze the juice out of the music
despite guest shots from a galaxy of Latin music stars, Brave Combo delivers the
goods. No, No, No Cha Cha Cha spans a remarkable range of rhythms -- salsa,
cha cha, cumbia, bolero, samba, tango, bossa nova, and more, all of which are
helpfully identified in the song listings -- but the band never lets musicology get in
the way. They splice "Satisfaction" together with a snippet of "The No No Song"
and graft the result to a cha cha rhythm for the title cut; "Cielito Lindo" becomes a
manic merengue; their bossa nova rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon" manages to
be both funny and touching; and retooled as a Brave Combo-fied salsa, even
throwaway radio fodder like "The Way of Love" becomes listenable. The usual
combo formula of nifty covers (including a wonderful rendition of "Hernando's
Hideaway") and typical off-center original tunes make for a terrific album. (four
stars)
Polish American Journal February 2004 Polka Jukebox by Steve Litwin
Brave
Combo is 25 years old. Using a complex mathematical formula (addition), we added all the ages of the
members of Brave Combo and they are certainly more than 25. Of course, those in Brave Combo never
really grow older. They do, however, grow! They grow in their musical venues. They grow in their
approach to their music. They grow in audience. And, they grow in polkas. "Let's Kiss" is their
"official" polka album for 2004 and it also marks the band's 25th year together.
They definitely aren't your grandfather's polka band, yet Brave Combo isn't meant to be.
They travel a slightly different road but still do it with an understanding of what was, what should be,
and how it should be connected. That's why Carl Finch knows the nuances of "Scrubby" on a particular
Dynatones recording, or the dynamics of Joe Oberitis on Polish polka music. It's why Bubba
Hernandez strives to learn the correct pronunciation of a Polish vocal on a tune, or why Jeffrey
Barnes does a lick on clarinet that fits with a classic polka melody.
Would I consider Brave Combo exclusively a polka band? Definitely not. But, would I listen to
anyone from Brave Combo in a one-on-one conversation about polka music? Yes I would and I have.
Although some may argue differently, Brave Combo produces polka music with a unique interpretation,
but with a reverence for its origins. Whether it be the "Dutch Hornpipe" schottische, with its Adams
family flavor, or the "Red River Valley" country/polka with a distinct twang, the "Combo" creates their
own musical versions of each tune. The accordion of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and the
clarinet/trumpet of an up-tempo rendition of the Oberaitis' "Starlight" polka connect the band to the
mainstream of the polka music I know, but they still manage to add their own twists and turns that
make them who they are.
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