Combo Tapped
Local polka musicians nominated for Grammy
by Jen Graves - Arts Editor

Brave Combo invited Grammy to their polka party, and she accepted.

The band found out Tuesday morning that its 1998 album, Polka Party with Brave Combo: Live and Wild, has received a Grammy nomination for best polka album of the year.

This the second time Brave Combo -- the accomplished 20-year-old polka band that still calls Denton home -- has been nominated for a Grammy award. The first nomination, for the 1996 album, Polkas for a Gloomy World, came in 1997.

"We're very excited," said Brave Combo's Carl Finch, whose production work on other musicians' albums was nominated in 1992 and 1993.

"For a band like Brave Combo, this gives us an enormous amount of promotional power," he said. "It will open the doors a little bit more, and we really depend on cracking those doors even ever so slightly to keep our careers propelled."

This year's nomination puts Brave Combo's 1998 album in the running, with four other polka artist' albums, for the Grammy -- music's highest award in the United States. The polka category, unlike the art form itself, is still young -- only 12 years old in the Grammy system.

Two for 12 is not a bad record for a small, eclectic band in Denton, Texas, especially since Brave combo works in various styles.

"We tend to bounce around from style to style, so we don't record a polka album every year, so we don't get the chance to build that kind of momentum with a category that some bands do," Mr. Finch said.

But, Mr. Finch said, Brave Combo's notoriety seems to be increasing.

"The profile of the band is much higher than it was even two years ago," Mr. Finch said. "I know that when I found out two years ago (about the nomination), I wasn't being called by Billboard (magazine, from which a writer called Tuesday to inform Mr. finch of the nomination). I was being called by the record label, so I think that's a difference."

"Most of the attention is given to the first 25 categories and there are another 50 categories that don't get a lot of attention, but obviously being nominated for the Grammy is something that a lot of people desire and I don't take that lightly. I'm pretty excited, excited enough to call my mother right now," Mr. Finch said.

The band members -- Bubba Hernandez, Jeffrey Barnes, Danny O'Brien, Joe Cripps, Alan Emert and Mr. Finch -- will receive medallions from Tiffany's for being nominated, and Mr. Finch said that if that's all they get, that will be enough.

"We're going to keep our fingers crossed, " he said. "We don't have high hopes, but we're going to work really hard and then we'll just let all the pieces fall."

Reprinted with the permission of the Denton Record-Chronicle