You could call it polka music. You could call it dance music. But there are many other influences at work in this Grammy-winning band’s sound. Just call it good-time music and be done with it.

Their newest album, The Process, which was released in March, continues the band’s steady trek of making music that’s extremely hard to pigeonhole.

“One thing that the album does is establish us as more of songwriters,” bassist Bubba Hernandez said in a telephone interview last week. “We’ve never done a full-out album of pop — through our eyes, anyway — kind of songs.”

The band in the past has received plenty of airplay on National Public Radio. But as NPR turns more and more to pop, the band realized they needed to expand to other radio formats.
“NPR was one of the few mediums where we could get airplay,” Hernandez said. “Getting into a bigger market has been more difficult. The radio people seem to know who we are, but since they can’t categorize us they have a problem of ‘Where do we put them?’ It’s been a good thing for us but it’s also been a curse.”

In Europe and Japan, radio programmers don’t have those kinds of hang-ups. Brave Combo has always been able to find success there.

Those audiences — unlike some in American cities — also don’t have a problem with a Mexican-American such as Hernandez playing polka music.

“I come from where I come from,” he said. “A Polish person can’t shoot me down, although some have tried. I told them, ‘I bet my grandfather wrote 100 more polkas than your grandfather did.’ I’m Mexican. We had polkas. Europeans emigrated to Monterey, to Mexico City, to South Texas. And people like me were there. They picked up the accordion and said, ‘Hmm, what can we add to this.’ They adapted the polka.”

Stereotypes cut both ways, he said. He told a story of meeting up with high school buddies recently. After congratulating him on the Grammy win, they expressed amazement that “all these Anglos are dancing to polkas.”

Hernandez joined the band in 1985 while living in Denton, Texas, attending the University of North Texas. “I wanted to get a college degree so I came up to North Texas. One of my co-writers from San Antonio goes, ‘Hey, Bubba, there’s some band in Rolling Stone that’s from Denton. They’re playing polkas or something. Check ‘em out.’ Yeah, whatever. I saw them and I was thoroughly disturbed.

“I went, ‘Oh my God.’ It hit me the same way it hit a lot of people. I think we can rub people the wrong way at first. Then the next time I saw them I had a pretty good time. A gradual transition occurred where something happened and I really dug it. I really caught something.”
Prior to joining Brave Combo, Hernandez was struggling as a musician. “My second week in town and I was depressed. I was about to be on a major label in Mexico City and I came here and found I really sucked as a player,” he said, laughing.

“I went in for the first audition in ’85 and they were playing a lot of the music that I grew up hearing in my household. I also realized that they really loved this music, that it really took them away.”

Brave Combo will be playing Wednesday, July 5 at the Rathskeller, 401 E. Michigan St. Tickets are available in advance at the venue or on the day of the show. Admission is $3.

shammer@nuvo.net