DoghouseCharlie

At 72, he’s still the Polka King

`If it’s lively music they want, I’m the guy,’ says world-renowned Grammy winner Walter Ostanek

Aug 09, 2007 04:30 AM
Greg Quill
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE–Walter Ostanek is never late.

In 24 years, the 72-year-old triple Grammy winner, Canada’s beloved Polka King and the pride of St. Catharines, has only missed two shows at his perennial summer gig at Marineland in nearby Niagara Falls. Both times he was too sick to play, he says.

He has a thing about punctuality.

As if to prove it, Ostanek beat me to our appointed meeting place, a local Tim Hortons, by at least 15 minutes – time enough to be recognized by local fans and to be well engaged in animated conversation about his not insubstantial musical legacy.

“I’ve known this guy for 20 years,” says the affable, silver-haired champion accordionist, master of the Cleveland-Slovenian style of polka music, inductee in both Chicago and Cleveland Polka Halls Of Fame, 20-time Grammy nominee, and member of the Order of Canada. He waves a beefy hand at the man sitting opposite him, a local cop.

“He used to work security at Marineland when he was just a kid,” says Ostanek, who’s wearing a muted green-patterned Hawaiian silk shirt and sporting a tan that attests to his six-shows a day outdoors at the aquatic theme park 20 kilometres up the Niagara River.

There are few places Walter Ostanek can go in this neck of the woods without attracting attention. A local hero since the early 1950s, when he emerged as a virtuoso piano accordionist at the tender age of 13. Performing at local fairs and dances, on local radio as the leader of his own country-polka ensemble and, later, as a featured member of Abbie Andrews’ Canadian Ranch Boys, Ostanek and his music are deeply entrenched in this community’s cultural life.

Over the past 35 years, particularly with all those Grammy nods, Ostanek has become a national musical icon, as well, starring in his own shows on radio in Welland, St. Catharines, Hamilton and Kitchener-Waterloo for a couple of decades, recording more than 20 albums and performing across Canada, the U.S. and in Europe.

His musical skills have made him a star among his mentors and peers in the polka universe, as well as among rock, pop and country music artists, including American legends Roy Clark, Ronnie Milsap, Ray Price, Tom T. Hall, The Oakridge Boys and Toronto rockers Sloan, with whom he’ll be sharing the stage at the Rocktoberfest rock-and-polka Haus Party in Kitchener this fall – Ostanek’s 29th annual star turn at the city’s venerable Oktoberfest celebrations.

Ostanek is one of the featured musical guests at the CNE this month, performing in the Toronto Star Bandshell Aug. 23 as part of a 1970s flashback series. How St. Catharines became Canada’s polka hot spot was a matter of coincidence, Ostanek says.

“We moved here when I was 5, from Duparquet, Que. We were poor. My father worked in the gold mines and, when they shut down, he brought me and my mother to St. Catharines looking for work. He became a cabinetmaker and we settled on a farm in Thorold. And this is where I stayed.”

Except perhaps for the yearnings of a few immigrant German vineyard owners, the Niagara region wasn’t exactly pining for traditional Yugoslavian polka music back then. The fact that it is now so familiar to local ears is entirely due to Ostanek, who became fascinated with its good-time rhythms and feisty melodies when, as a 3-year-old, he saw his first diatonic button accordion – the concertina-like pre-descendant of the more elegant and complex keyed instrument that has made him an international star.

“My mother and father didn’t play, but music was in my mother’s side of the family,” he explains. “In Quebec, we had one big party every year. It lasted all weekend. No one slept. And always, day and night, someone was playing a button accordion. I was hooked.”

A few years later, his entreaties were rewarded when his father brought home a $75 instrument and arranged for a friend to give Walter some rudimentary lessons.

In the post-World War II years, “polka music was dynamite,” Ostanek says.

Smitten, the young Ostanek travelled with his father to Cleveland, “the immigrant home base in America, and the heart of polka country,” to see his hero, Frankie Yankovic, the American polka master and chief protagonist of the Cleveland style.

Unlike the Polish Chicago style, which features sax, trumpet and clarinet as lead instruments and accordion in the back, the Slovenian Cleveland polka bands are smaller, with banjo, bass and drums, maybe sax, and the accordion right up front, Ostanek says.

“That was my kind of music, with a few wrinkles of my own – some country inflections, and old-time dance beats.”

By the late 1960s, Ostanek was a genuine polka phenomenon in Canada.

These days, after four heart bypass operations, he is taking things a little easier.

“After 35 years on the road, I’m happy with what I’ve done. I’ve done all the TV and radio I could do, they gave me three Grammys, I’ve played the Grand Ole Opry – the real one at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville – and I’ve seen some wonderful parts of the world. I want to smell the roses.”

But when the CNE called, Ostanek jumped.

“If it’s lively music they want, I’m the guy.”

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/244075