Sad day for Ostanek as Grammys drop polka
Bad news for Canada's polka kings.
The Recording Academy, which puts on the Grammy Awards, has decided to eliminate the category for best polka album.
"I don't like to see it happen," legendary bandleader and three-time Grammy winner Walter Ostanek said Thursday from his home in St. Catharines, Ont.
"There's room for our music."
John Gora, who's been nominated four times in the polka category but has never won, was more blunt.
"That sucks," he said from Burlington. "Of course I'm disappointed."
In a statement, the academy said polka was scrapped to "ensure the awards process remains representative of the current musical landscape." Grammy organizers also split a folk category in two and combined two Latin categories into one.
There will be 109 awards handed out at next year's Grammys instead of 110. The ceremony takes place Jan. 31, 2010 in Los Angeles.
Polka was by no means the only obscure category at the annual music bash.
Trophies will still be handed out for best packaging, liner notes, surround sound album, classical crossover album, Hawaiian music album and zydeco or Cajun music album.
Gora blamed the polka decision on politics, pointing out that American bandleader Jimmy Sturr has won the category 18 times.
"You can't have a polka guy holding world records," he said. ``You can't have Jimmy Sturr winning more Grammys than Quincy Jones, for example."
But Sturr has long had competition from Ostanek, the undisputed Canadian polka king.
Ostanek's treks to Los Angeles have practically become an annual Grammy tradition – after all, he's racked up more than 20 nominations (his three wins came in consecutive years, from 1992-94).
In fact, the gregarious musician was nominated at this year's show but lost out to – who else? – Sturr.
Still, even though his category is gone, Ostanek, 74, didn't have a bad word to say about his experiences with the glitzy show.
"I personally don't have any regrets," he said. "I've met a lot of nice people. The Grammys have treated me good."
A member of Canada's Walk of Fame and the Order of Canada, Ostanek has appeared on The Tonight Show and some have speculated that he was the inspiration for SCTV's famed Shmenge Brothers.
Ostanek, who owns a music shop in St. Catharines, says the Grammys have given him tremendous exposure and lamented that young polka musicians would not receive the same boost.
"I personally have had a good ride and I feel sorry for the future artists coming up," he said. "There are fans out there and there will be more fans down the line. But that's the way it is."
Meanwhile, Gora worried about the effect the academy's decision could have on polka music in general.
"It's a bad thing (for polka)," he said. "A Grammy nomination just recognizes you, puts you on another level. It just recognizes the talent of the local guys that really don't have the big budget to operate but are still excellent musicians."
Gora, who plans to begin recording a new CD this weekend, said he intends to submit his recordings in the world music category now.
He certainly isn't giving up on trying to win his first Grammy.
"Why should I?" he said. "The guys work hard and we put out good material.
"I even have a new song about the crazy bailout that's going on with the financial and automotive companies. We have a new song about it. It's just a 2/4 beat and why shouldn't it be heard by others?"
Ostanek, who diligently collected autographs from his favourite artists during his trips to the Grammys, said the show made him feel special.
"Everybody wants to be a somebody," he said. "You're mingling with Tony Bennett and other people like him on a one-to-one basis .... I've had a wonderful ride."
'Land of the Lost' may be summer's first flop
If pre-release audience polling proves right, not many moviegoers will find "Land of the Lost" this weekend.
Universal and Relativity Media's $100-million comedy based on the 1970s TV show is tracking to sell $30 million to $35 million worth of tickets this weekend. That's in line with other recent films starring Will Ferrell, such as "Step Brothers." But for a big-budget summer event movie, it would be a weak debut.
The movie's marketing campaign doesn't seem to be drawing enough teenagers or adults. Its best hope is to draw families with older kids who aren't interested in "Up."
Universal surely picked this Friday to open the film in hopes it would launch in a dominant first-place position. But a movie that originally looked like counter-programming, "The Hangover," will probably end up close and could possibly beat it.
Warner Bros. and Legendary's modestly budgeted comedy is tracking to open in the mid-$20 millions. Both men and women seem to be drawn to the film's hilarious advertisements -- you can never go wrong with a baby in sunglasses -- despite the lack of a major star.
Regardless of which new movie comes out on top, the No. 1 film this weekend almost certainly won't be a new one. If it follows the pattern of previous Pixar animated features, "Up" will drop less than 50% on its second weekend in theaters, meaning it should gross close to $40 million. Strong weekday ticket sales as children start getting out of school have boosted "Up's" total gross to $86.9 million after a $68.1-million opening weekend.
Fox Searchlight is also opening the low budget Nia Vardalos comedy "My Life in Ruins." It will probably gross under $10 million.
In international markets, the major new release will be "Terminator Salvation." Sony Pictures is releasing the film in 61 countries on behalf of the Halcyon Co., which has to hope the fourth series entry will do better overseas than it has at home. After a two full weeks, "Salvation," which had a production budget around $200 million, has grossed only $95.9 million in the U.S. and Canada, suggesting its own salvation has yet to come.
Carol Burnett ready for your questions
Legendary comedienne Carol Burnett used to begin her TV variety show with a few questions from the audience, in a segment that both reinforced that the show was taped before a live audience and demonstrated her considerable skills as a spontaneous funny woman.
This June, she will take the stage in Winnipeg, Toronto, Regina and Saskatoon with a show Laughter and Reflection with Carol Burnett that recreates those Q&A sessions. She also returns to Vancouver this fall to headline the Comedy Festival.
The Q&A sessions, like the sessions in her TV variety show, which ran from 1967 to 1978, will be completely unplanned.
No planted questions "because that wouldn't be honest," Burnett said in an interview Thursday with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.
"They ask a lot. I get certain questions every place I go," she said. "Like how did you find Harvey [Korman] and Tim [Conway] and Vicki [Lawrence] and Lyle [Waggoner] — how did you get with them? How did you teach yourself the Tarzan yell? Why do you pull your ear at the end of every show that you do?"
The late Korman and fellow comedians such as Conway, Lawrence and Waggoner were part of the sketch team that made The Carol Burnett Show a hit for so long.
At 76, Burnett said she doesn't need to keep entertaining, but still welcomes the chance.
"The reason I'm doing it is a) I'm enjoying it and b) it keeps the grey matter ticking. I have to be on my toes as I never know what anybody's going to ask and I have to turn it around to make it entertaining to the audience," she said.
The idea for the Q&A session came from The Garry Moore Show, a New York variety show that Burnett worked on regularly in the 1950s.
In the beginning, she was terrified
"He would go out before the show and he would warm up the audience by having a conversation with them," Burnett recalled.
Harvey Korman holds the face of Carol Burnett during a routine on The Carol Burnett Show in 1967 in Los Angeles. (Associated Press)"When I got my own show, my executive producer Bob Banner said, 'You know, Carol, if you are going to be doing a lot of characters, it's really important for the audience to know you.' I said, 'I'm not a standup comic. I'm not going to come out there and do jokes or anything.'"
Burnett admits she was initially terrified at the idea of facing questions, but it soon became a favourite part of the show.
"I never knew what anybody was going to ask or want to do — sometimes we got people up on stage who would sing," she said. "It was a great opening for us to get know each other. Then we went on with the show."
Burnett is credited with blazing new trails for women in comedy. She has won the Peabody Award, Kennedy Centre Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
She still follows comedy keenly and admires how far female comedians have come since her day. But she regrets the loss of variety shows on network TV.
Nine variety shows were on the air at the same time as The Carol Burnett Show, including The Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In, she said.
"You couldn't do it today because of cost," Burnett said, adding that TV viewers are missing some of the "flat-out belly laughs," that made TV so much fun in the 1970s.
Laughter and Reflection with Carol Burnett starts June 10 in Winnipeg, followed by June 12 in Toronto, June 14 in Regina and June 16 in Saskatoon.
Whitney Houston Comeback Album Due Sept. 1
The wait is over -- Whitney Houston is finally making her comeback on Sept. 1 with an as-yet-untitled album on Arista Records. For her return, the label has set up a countdown on the New Jersey-bred artist's official site,
WhitneyHouston.com, which will also preview selected tracks slated to appear on the album in coming weeks.
Producers and songwriters said to aid with the set include will.i.am, Sean Garrett and Akon, although there is no confirmation on whether a duet with Akon, "Like I Never Left," which leaked last year, will make the cut.
"The voice is there; I don't think anyone could ever take that from her. As long as we apply that voice to hit records, she'll be right back where she left off," Akon told Billboard.com back in 2007.
Houston made her first high-profile public appearance at her mentor Clive Davis' pre-Grammy gala back in February, where she performed a four-song set that included brief renditions of "I Will Always Love You" and "I Believe in You and Me" plus a tent revival-style take on "I'm Every Woman."
Houston has been dogged in recent years by drug and health issues -- including rehab stints in 2004 and 2005 -- a legal dispute with her father, John Houston, rumored financial problems and a troubled marriage to fellow singer Bobby Brown that ended in divorce.
Houston's last album was 2002's "Just Whitney," which sold 737,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Blues queen Koko Taylor dies at 80
CHICAGO — Koko Taylor, a sharecropper's daughter whose regal bearing and powerful voice earned her the sobriquet "Queen of the Blues," has died after complications from surgery. She was 80.
Taylor died Wednesday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital about two weeks after having surgery for a gastrointestinal bleed, said Marc Lipkin, director of publicity for her record label, Alligator Records, which made the announcement.
"The passion that she brought and the fire and the growl in her voice when she sang was the truth," blues singer and musician Ronnie Baker Brooks said Wednesday. "The music will live on, but it's much better because of Koko. It's a huge loss."
Taylor's career stretched more than five decades. While she did not have widespread mainstream success, she was revered and beloved by blues aficionados, and earned worldwide acclaim for her work, which including the best-selling song Wang Dang Doodle and tunes such as What Kind of Man is This and I Got What It Takes.
Taylor appeared on national television numerous times, and was the subject of a PBS documentary and had a small part in director David Lynch's Wild at Heart.
In the course of her career, Taylor was nominated seven times for Grammy awards and won in 1984.
Taylor last performed on May 7 in Memphis, at the Blues Music Awards.
"She was still the best female blues singer in the world a month ago," said Jay Sieleman, executive director of The Blues Foundation based in Memphis. "In 1950s Chicago she was the woman singing the blues. At 80 years old she was still the queen of the blues."
Born Cora Walton just outside Memphis, Taylor said her dream to become a blues singer was nurtured in the cotton fields outside her family's sharecropper shack.
"I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas and he would play the blues," she said in a 1990 interview. "I would hear different records and things by Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Sonnyboy Williams and all these people, you know, which I just loved."
Although her father encouraged her to sing only gospel music, Cora and her siblings would sneak out back with their homemade instruments and play the blues. With one brother accompanying on a guitar made out of bailing wire and nails and one brother on a fife made out of a corncob, she began on the path to blues woman.
Orphaned at 11, Koko — a nickname she earned because of an early love of chocolate — at age 18 moved to Chicago with her soon-to-be-husband, the late Robert "Pops" Taylor, in search for work.
Setting up house on the South Side, Koko found work as a cleaning woman for a wealthy family living in the city's northern suburbs. At night and on weekends, she and her husband, who would later become her manager, frequented Chicago's clubs, where many the artists heard on the radio performed.
"I started going to these local clubs, me and my husband, and everybody got to know us," Taylor said. "And then the guys would start letting me sit in, you know, come up on the bandstand and do a tune."
The break for Tennessee-born Taylor came in 1962, when arranger/composer Willie Dixon, impressed by her voice, got her a Chess recording contract and produced several singles (and two albums) for her, including the million-selling 1965 hit, Wang Dang Doodle, which she called silly, but which launched her recording career.
From Chicago blues clubs, Taylor took her raucous, gritty, good-time blues on the road to blues and jazz festivals around the nation, and into Europe. After the Chess label folded, she signed with Alligator Records.
In most years, she performed at least 100 concerts a year.
"Blues is my life," Taylor once said. "It's a true feeling that comes from the heart, not something that just comes out of my mouth. Blues is what I love, and blues is what I always do."
In addition to performing, she operated a Chicago nightclub, which closed in November 2001 because her daughter, club manager Joyce Threatt, developed severe asthma and could no longer manage a smoky nightclub.
Survivors include her daughter; husband Hays Harris; grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements will be announced, the label said.
Actor David Carradine found dead in Bangkok
BANGKOK – Much like the character that made him famous, David Carradine was always seeking, both spiritually and professionally, his life forever intertwined with the Shaolin priest he played in the 1970s TV series "Kung Fu."
Just as the character, Kwai Chang Caine, roamed the 19th Century American West, Carradine spent his latter years searching for the path to Hollywood stardom, accepting low-budget roles while pursuing interests in Asian herbs, exercise and philosophy, and making instructional videos on tai chi and other martial arts.
Carradine was found dead Thursday in Thailand. The 72-year-old actor appeared to have hanged himself in a suite at the luxury Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel, said Lt. Teerapop Luanseng, the officer responsible for investigating the death.
"I can confirm that we found his body, naked, hanging in the closet," Teerapop said. He said police were investigating and suspected suicide, though one of his managers questioned that theory.
"All we can say is, we know David would never have committed suicide," said Tiffany Smith, of Binder & Associates, his management company. "We're just waiting for them to finish the investigation and find out what really happened. He really appreciated everything life has to give ... and that's not something David would ever do to himself."
Carradine had flown to Thailand last week and began work on "Stretch" two days before his death, Smith said. He had several other projects lined up after the action film, which was being directed by Charles De Meaux with Carradine in the lead.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, Michael Turner, said the embassy was informed by Thai authorities that Carradine died either late Wednesday or early Thursday.
"I was deeply saddened by the news of David Carradine's passing," said director Martin Scorcese. "We met when we made 'Boxcar Bertha' together, almost 40 years ago. I have very fond memories of our time together on that picture and on 'Mean Streets,' where he agreed to do a brief cameo."
Carradine came from an acting family. His father, John, made a career playing creepy, eccentric characters in film and on stage. Half-brothers Keith, Robert and Bruce also became actors, and actress Martha Plimpton is Keith Carradine's daughter.
"My Uncle David was a brilliantly talented, fiercely intelligent and generous man. He was the nexus of our family in so many ways, and drew us together over the years and kept us connected," Plimpton said Thursday.
Carradine was "in good spirits" when he left the U.S. for Thailand on May 29 to work on "Stretch," Smith said.
"David was excited to do it and excited to be a part of it," she said by phone from Beverly Hills.
Filming began Tuesday, she said, adding that the crew was devastated by Carradine's death and did not wish to speak publicly about it for the time being.
The Web site of the Thai newspaper The Nation said Carradine could not be contacted after he failed to appear for a meal with the rest of the film crew on Wednesday, and that his body was found by a hotel maid Thursday morning. It said a preliminary police investigation found that he had hanged himself with a curtain cord and there was no sign that he had been assaulted.
Police said Carradine's body was taken to a hospital for an autopsy that would be done Friday.
Carradine appeared in more than 100 feature films with such directors as Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman and Hal Ashby. One of his early film roles was as folk singer Woody Guthrie in Ashby's 1976 biopic, "Bound for Glory."
But he was best known for "Kung Fu," which aired from 1972-75.
Carradine, a martial arts practitioner himself, played Caine, an orphan who was raised by Shaolin monks and fled China after killing the emperor's nephew in retaliation for the murder of his kung fu master.
Pursued by revenge assassins from China, Caine wanders the American West in search of his half-brother Danny. His conscience forces him to fight injustice wherever he encounters it, fueled by flashbacks to his training in which his master famously refers to him as "Grasshopper."
Carradine left after three seasons, saying the show had started to repeat itself.
"I wasn't like a TV star in those days. I was like a rock 'n' roll star," Carradine said in an interview with Associated Press Radio in 1996. "It was a phenomenon kind of thing. ... It was very special."
Actor Rainn Wilson, star of TV's "The Office," said on Twitter: "R.I.P. David Carradine. You were a true hero to so many of us children of the 70s. We'll miss you, Kwai Chang Caine."
Carradine reprised the role in a mid-1980s TV movie and played Caine's grandson in the 1990s syndicated series "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues."
He returned to the top in recent years as the title character in Quentin Tarantino's two-part saga "Kill Bill." Bill, the worldly father figure of a pack of crack assassins, was a shadowy presence in 2003's "Kill Bill — Vol. 1." In that film, one of Bill's former assassins (Uma Thurman) begins a vengeful rampage against her old associates, including Bill.
In "Kill Bill — Vol. 2," released in 2004, Thurman's character catches up to Bill. The role brought Carradine a Golden Globe nomination as best supporting actor.
Bill was a complete contrast to Caine, the soft-spoken refugee serenely spreading wisdom and battling bad guys in the Old West.
"David's always been kind of a seeker of knowledge and of wisdom in his own inimitable way," Keith Carradine, said in a 1995 interview.
After "Kung Fu," Carradine starred in the 1975 cult flick "Death Race 2000." He starred with Liv Ullmann in Bergman's "The Serpent's Egg" in 1977 and with his brothers in the 1980 Western "The Long Riders." But after the early 1980s, he spent two decades doing mostly low-budget films.
Tarantino's films changed that.
"All I've ever needed since I more or less retired from studio films a couple of decades ago ... is just to be in one," Carradine told The Associated Press in 2004.
"There isn't anything that Anthony Hopkins or Clint Eastwood or Sean Connery or any of those old guys are doing that I couldn't do," he said. "All that was ever required was somebody with Quentin's courage to take and put me in the spotlight."
In the 2004 interview, Carradine talked candidly about his past boozing and narcotics use, but said he had put all that behind him and stuck to coffee and cigarettes.
"You're probably witnessing the last time I will ever answer those questions," Carradine said. "Because this is a regeneration. It is a renaissance. It is the start of a new career for me.
"It's time to do nothing but look forward."