May News & Notes...

Greetings, Scandinavian Fans! May is off to a very good start for your favorite polka band. Last night we celebrated Norwegian Constitution Day, Syttendemai, at Leif Erikson Hall in Ballard. We had a very good and lively crowd that stayed all the way until midnight! That's almost unheard of, especially on a Thursday night. Tomorrow we head over to the U District for the Street Fair and then it's off to Union, a little town on Hood Canal, for the Annas Bay Music Festival. The Olympian did a nice write-up on the concert here that you can check out. I'm looking forward to it!

Next weekend we're playing the Northwest Folklife Festival at the Seattle Center. We've become a regular at Folklife. This year, unlike past years, we're not appearing as a polka band but rather as a Western Swing band. I love Western Swing so I'm very excited about trotting out some of our best Bob Wills music for the crowd. And if a couple polkas just happen to sneak in there, well, who's going to care?

On Memorial Day we fly down to Missouri for Big Joe's Polka Show in Branson. They're taping a new season of TV shows for the RFD-TV network. This is big for us. We'll be getting national TV exposure for the band which always helps. Hopefully this will open the door for my ultimate goal of playing at the Corn Palace Polka Festival.

Speaking of exposure, our Web presence has been paying some exciting dividends. Last night at the Syttendemai dance in Ballard we had a new fan come to the show. He found us by doing a Google search on "polka seattle" and he found our MySpace page. Regular Cyber-posten readers will no doubt recall last fall when my lovely wife Danna launched our own MySpace page. More and more people have been finding us just because of this website and our MySpace page. Promotion is always a good thing and this proves it. We may even be able to build a whole new audience for polka music in the Seattle area just because the Internet gives us a way to connect every one.

Looking into the future, we have a few gigs coming up that you should put on your calendar right now. Most important of those is July 28th at the Ballard SeaFood Fest where we'll be playing twice. What makes it so important is not that we're playing twice, but that two-time Grammy winning polka band Brave Combo will be there playing their unique blend of traditional polka and other kinds of music. If you've never seen them, imagine a mix of Jimi Hendrix, Esteban Jordan, Joe Oberaitis and Gloria Estefan. Brave Combo can do almost anything in a set of music and they routinely do. It's a transcendant polka experience which I highly recommend.

Also notable in our future is the Western Washington Fair in Puyallup, September 20th & 21st. Being a Pierce County native and having returned to the Garden Spot of South Pierce County, I'm extremely proud to be performing at the Fair this year. The only reason we got the booking is because the mother of one of my friends from high school (Bethel HS) works for the fair. This year I will be the local boy who made good.

That's more than I was planning on writing! I guess when there are a lot of things going on there's a lot to write about. Be sure and check our Upcoming Gigs page to find out where we're playing next and come out and hear the band. You can also download my podcast from iTunes and listen to some great polkas. I'm a couple months behind on doing another episode but that's OK. I might get around to that this weekend after the gig in Union. Have fun and I hope to see you at one of our upcoming performances!