![]() Polka was dropped as a Grammy category after the 2009 awards. "Polka Freak Out" was nominated for Best Polka Album, but lost to polka legend Jimmy Sturr. "It was all coming from different places, but it was all landing at the same place. "It was just a unique mixture of all of those different kinds of music and musicians melding together, and really opened up my eyes and ears to a lot of different ways of approaching the music that I had grown up with, as well as incorporating stuff that was a little more foreign," Meixner said. The album had an impressive cast of musicians. Together they recorded an album, 2007's "Polka Freak Out." It mixed Meixner's European polka style with Hernandez's "side of the polka tree - the Mexican side." The CD was recorded in San Antonio in one of the top Tejano studios. The group had won a Grammy for Best Polka Album in 2005 and had recorded one of Meixner's arrangements. "I had met all these musicians," he said.Īmong them was Bubba Hernandez, bass player for Texas band Brave Combo. (They're now divorced.) Unexpectedly, he found his career on an upswing - but not entirely because of traditional polka.įronting his own band, Meixner said, he found that "instead of the market dying down, it sort of picked up steam." "I wouldn't be anything I'm doing today if it wasn't for him," he said.Īlex married and had two daughters, and returned to Florida to be closer to his wife's family. Meixner's grateful to his father, who has since retired. In the mid-1990s, Meixner's father returned to the Lehigh Valley, where son and father produced a lot of recordings. Even while studying, each summer he was recording albums and touring, "everywhere from Colorado to Texas to Minnesota." A polka resurgence Meixner got a degree in trumpet (the instrument his grandfather played he couldn't major in accordion) at Ithaca College in New York, then a graduate degree in trumpet at Penn State University. In his freshman year of college, he played with his father on Canadian polka king Walter Ostanek's 1995 "Music and Friends." That album won the Grammy Award for Best Polka Album. In high school, Alex did a two-week performance study with the London Symphony Orchestra. Alex by then was a regular member of his father's band. When Meixner was in middle school, his father moved the family to Orlando, Fla., to take a position playing music at Disney's Epcot Center. I don't think you can get any better than that." ![]() " was a very good musician - exceptionally good. "I knew the whole family - his grandfather, his father and his uncles all played," Groller said. And our family organized the Austrian exhibit," Meixner said.Īt 6, he was co-hosting a show with his dad on radio station WMUH at Muhlenberg College.īandleader Walt Groller, who at 87 is perhaps the standard-bearer of polka in the Lehigh Valley, said he first realized Meixner's talent when he saw him in Meixner Kinder. "Lehigh University used to have an international festival, a bazaar, every year where they had all different immigrant groups of the Lehigh Valley performing. That was what my dad played." So he took it up at age 4.īy 5, he started playing shows with Meixner Kinder, a group of children from the Meixner family that played at church picnics throughout the Lehigh Valley. The younger Meixner started playing piano at 3, but said the accordion "was my main love. His father, Al, had a band for many years in Coplay, where he had a recording studio and a record shop that was also a mail-order business for items including polka recordings. "Meixner families have been leading bands in the Lehigh Valley since the 1920s," he said. His great-grandfather and grandfather were band leaders and had orchestras in the Lehigh Valley, playing Austrian folk music and polka. Meixner was born into a musical family - part of the fourth generation of performing musicians. "He's brought it into the new millennium in terms of how he's taken the roots of the genre and created a sound that resonates with the next generation." A born musician ![]() "He is one of the musicians who's ushered in a new era for a more historical, traditional genre," Brogan said. Patrick Brogan, chief programming officer for ArtsQuest, which has hired Meixner to play at Musikfest, Oktoberfest and Christkindlmarkt, said Meixner's already done that.
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