Brave Combo

For 30 years, Texas' Brave Combo has wedded polka with rock and Tex-Mex sounds to create a hipster's dance party. There is no better illustration of its M.O. than the latest CD, "The Exotic Rocking Life," which features "Louie Louie" as a cha-cha and the "Mission: Impossible" theme as a cumbia. (Jon Bream, The Big Gigs, Star Tribune)

Brave Combo. Rarely, if ever, has a band name been more apropos, not only at the group's inception, but even more so 30 years after the fact. At first glance, back in 1979, the Denton, Texas, based outfit was, in shorthand, pegged as a New Wave polka band, a courageous if not almost oxymoronic endeavor during that particular rebirth of the cool. Yet it clicked and launched a stunning run that has now catapulted it into the new century.   Over the last 30 years, Brave Combo has collected a dizzying array of descriptive musical pegs, boldly going where few bands have gone before, and even fewer could (or would) dare to venture. Succeeding in its first mission, Brave Combo is America's premier contemporary polka band, and a two-times Grammy winning one at that. In the same breath, to name some but hardly all of the colors found on Brave Combo's musical palette, one can describe them as a groundbreaking world music act, a hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock'n'roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America's dance bands par excellence. It's all in a night's music for Brave Combo, often in a synergistic fashion that includes everything from klezmer surf rock to rocking cha cha to what The Washington Post calls "mosh pit polka," as well as to the hokey pokey and the chicken dance. And zydeco, acid rock, Muzak, bubblegum, cumbia, classical, and the twist, to still not exhaust the list. This plethoric multitude of musical styles and flavors is frequently mixed, matched, and melded, into delicious, new concoctions by an imaginative team of musical gourmet master chefs.

"We're just trying to be a brave combo," is how bandleader Carl Finch explains what Billboard calls the band's "world-wise, unclassifiable music." The prime directive is to "break down people's perceptions about what's cool to like in music. Our deal is to shake up people's ideas about what they label hip, or right or wrong." In the process Brave Combo also shakes listeners' hips and tail feathers, sparks delight, provokes imaginations, rocks all night long, and elicits more than a few chuckles.

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Tickets are on sale now from Cedar Ticketline (612-338-2674 ext 2), Cedar outlets (Electric Fetus, Homestead Pickin' Parlor and Irish on Grand), and online at Ticketweb

Brave Combo

Trying to describe Brave Combo’s music requires a pretty extensive vocabulary – at least when it comes to musical styles.  For the past three decades the Denton, Texas based quintet has perfected a world music mix that includes salsa, meringue, rock,...