Polka Grammies

February 5, 2006
Music
The Polka King Rolls Out the Barrel for the 19th Time
By BEN SISARIO

WITH one hand, Jimmy Sturr, the polka king, reached for his pen. With the other, he picked up a glossy promotional flier featuring his brightly smiling head shot and the words "FOURTEEN TIME GRAMMY AWARD WINNER."

Sitting in his office 55 miles from Manhattan, in tiny Florida, N.Y., its walls cluttered with gold-colored castings of his records, snapshots of celebrities and dozens of albums with titles like "Polka Fever" and "Super Polka Party," Mr. Sturr, whose frozen wave of light-brown hair and chipper smirk give him a slight resemblance to Regis Philbin, made a quick correction to the text, changing "18 consecutive Grammy nominations" to 19.

"Actually," he said, correcting himself again, "it's only 18 consecutive, because last year I wasn't nominated. So let me cross that out. I'll just add the word 'almost.' "

Mr. Sturr, who at 64 lives with his parents in the house he grew up in — "the same room," he said pointedly — leaned back at his desk one sunny Saturday afternoon recently, clearly proud of a life's work in polka. He has won more Grammys than Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen, and on Wednesday he will be up for his 15th, which would place him with Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman.

His success illustrates the odd role played by the Grammys in the vast world of music beyond the Mariah Careys, Norah Joneses and Eric Claptons of the world. For a fortunate few like Mr. Sturr who have won in some of the dozens of categories not included in the televised ceremony, the Grammys can provide an important if almost invisible boost, helping musicians to build their careers and whole genres of under-the-radar music to survive.

But Mr. Sturr's 14 Grammy statues, lined up neatly on two shelves in a back room of his house, also point to the institutional inertia of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization that presents the awards. Slow to respond to changes in music and the marketplace, the academy can take years to recognize worthy new genres and, in older categories like polka, can get stuck on a small group of habitual nominees. These oversights can devalue the awards across the board.

"If Jimmy Sturr is going to win every year," said Elijah Wald, a Grammy-winning music historian who has written liner notes for Mr. Sturr, "then the polka category is useless."

A joyfully manic two-beat dance that originated in Bohemia in the 1830's, polka has taken its punches over the years. In the middle of the last century, it made Lawrence Welk a star and Frank Yankovic ("Just Because") a million-selling band leader. But the music has long since been relegated to so-unhip-it's-still-unhip status.

"Polka's taken a bad rap," Mr. Sturr said. "Everybody thinks it's for your grandmother or your grandfather. Everybody thinks of 'Lawrence Welk' — which was a great show, don't get me wrong — but it's not like that. It's very updated. We've Americanized polka a lot."

Dressed in shiny, Vegas-tinted outfits like a polka Elvis and with his 10-piece band playing slick, showbizzy arrangements, Mr. Sturr, who sings and plays clarinet and saxophone, has built a small musical empire. He tours constantly, playing at casinos, state fairs and festivals (including his own Polkapalooza) — more than 150 dates a year, he said. And he has released a steady string of albums with guest appearances by mainstream stars like Willie Nelson, Duane Eddy, Alison Krauss and the Oak Ridge Boys. A successful album in polka sells about 10,000 copies, a hurdle that Mr. Sturr regularly crosses.

Churning out albums like sausage links within a few weeks of the Grammy deadline each year, Mr. Sturr is nothing if not efficient. He records his band in New Jersey over a weekend, then adds the vocal stars in Nashville later. Over decades of work his band has perfected a quick-footed and precise style, so confident in its bopping beat and pealing horns that it seems able to absorb any song, be it the Beach Boys' "Fun, Fun, Fun" or "St. Patty's Polka Medley."

He is not without competition. The polka has developed a rich regional variety; besides Mr. Sturr's zippy, big-band Eastern style, major variants include the heavy-on-the-trumpets Chicago school and the Cleveland or Slovenian style, which emphasizes the accordion and the banjo. Today hundreds of polka bands crisscross the Midwest, Northeast and Appalachian states, as well as Florida and Texas, and the most successful have found ways to modernize the sound and connect it to a broad stream of American ethnic music.

"The biggest stigma is the name polka," said Eddie Blazonczyk Jr., 38, a Grammy nominee this year who took over his father's long-running Chicago band in 2001 and outfits it in sharp gangster black-and-white. "Today's polka is definitely alternative dance music, related to zydeco and Cajun and Tex-Mex and conjunto and so many vibrant and exciting kinds of music."

But the scene remains largely invisible to the music industry. Today no polka artist is on a major label, and few have national distribution. Of the five albums nominated for the Grammy this year, only Mr. Sturr's, "Shake, Rattle and Polka!" is registered with Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks 90 percent of the music purchases in North America. The SoundScan figures for "Shake, Rattle and Polka!" are negligible, with only about 200 sales recorded since it was released in September. But a spokeswoman for Rounder, Mr. Sturr's label for the last decade, said that it sells about 10,000 copies of his albums each year, and that Mr. Sturr sells hundreds of thousands at concerts and on television.

"The stuff I do on the road," he said, "I don't even report to SoundScan. I mean, I should, and Rounder gets upset with me. I got the forms —" he gestured to a pile of papers on his desk — "I just get so busy and stuff that I just don't do it."

When Mr. Sturr was growing up, polka was mainstream music. He is of Irish descent, but his hometown had large numbers of Eastern European immigrants, and the music was everywhere. "Our high school dances had a polka band," he said. "The local radio station had a daily polka show. All the weddings had polka bands." He played in polka bands from the age of 11, he said, and devoted himself to the music full time by his early 30's. "I just thought polka was the biggest thing going," he said.

By the mid-1980's, polka world began to see its profile slip, and lobbied the recording academy for official recognition. The first polka Grammy was awarded in 1986 to Mr. Yankovic, who died in 1998.

POLKA is only one of many new Grammy categories that have been created because of campaigns from particular musical constituencies. In the last 10 years, the number of categories has swelled by 19, to 108.

One result is a sprawl of musical taxonomy that doesn't always make sense. There are eight categories for gospel but only one for Mexican music, which accounts for about half of all Latin music sales in the United States. There are no categories at all for Cajun or zydeco. And while a Hawaiian category was added last year, so far there is none for reggaetón, the hybrid of hip-hop and dancehall reggae so popular that it has already spawned a new radio format.

Neil Portnow, the president of the academy, explained that alterations to the category list is a slow and considered process. "We're not really interested in recognizing a fad," he said. "We're more interested in recognizing a category that has staying power."

That staying power can sometimes look like stasis. In jazz, for example, Michael Brecker has won nine times (plus two awards in other categories); so has Chick Corea — and he has been nominated 49 times across all categories.

"The Grammys often miss quality," said Tom Sarig, an artists' manager who has helped found two alternative awards, the Shortlist and the New Pantheon. "They tend to recognize the things that are the most popular, and established, familiar names, over truly good music."

Mr. Sturr has long heard a similar complaint: that he wins because his albums are filled with stars who appeal to Grammy voters. But he dismisses the idea. "That's baloney," he said. "The reason we win is quite frankly because our recordings are the best. And that's what should win. When I didn't win, the reason was our recording wasn't the best that year."

This year only 20 albums were considered by the academy for the polka category, about half as many as it has had in its strongest years. "Interest does seem to be dwindling" in the Grammy, said Carl Finch of Brave Combo, an eclectic polka group from Denton, Tex., that has won the award twice. "It doesn't seem to matter to anybody except us and Jimmy Sturr."

But Mr. Blazonczyk said everyone could feed off Mr. Sturr's bounty. "He's taken our music to Nashville, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center," he said, "and a few years later I did as well. We've played places that maybe that door might not have been open if Jimmy didn't do it first."

Mr. Sturr beams when showing off his rows of Grammy Awards, though he seems most proud of the smooth efficiency and constant activity of his business. He has dates booked throughout the year, including a polka cruise through the Caribbean for which fans must buy a ticket through his own Jimmy Sturr Travel Agency. For landbound gigs, his group has its own customized tour bus, a sleek black fortress he bought from Billy Ray Cyrus. (Its license plate is, of course, POLKA.) He parks it in the driveway behind his family house, and said that during the summer there was nothing he liked more than to mow the lawn and wash the bus.

He said he was not planning to attend the Grammys this year. First, his father is ill. Then he said he felt snubbed since once again polka would not be a part of the live broadcast.

"Look, I know where my place is," he said. "And I know the whole thing has to do with ratings. I know they're after young people, and that's all well and good. But there's always the old people out there."