Brave Combo's Kick-Ass Bohemianism
Column: Music To My Ears
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-two-step, 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 (Cleveland International, due Sept. 11). 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-a-dollar 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."