Special Guests

Special Guests
Saturday, November 8, 1997

Sharon Isbin is one of the world's top classical guitarists. She grew up in Minneapolis and started playing guitar at the age of nine. When she was 14, she won a guitar competition and a chance to play with the Minneapolis Symphony in front of an audience of 5,000. Isbin has performed all over the world. This season she will do more than 60 concerts in the United States alone. She is on the faculty at The Juilliard School of Music as the director of the guitar department, which she founded in 1989, following up on the dying wish of her sometime teacher Andres Segovia. She is an avid researcher of the history of the guitar and the author of The Acoustic Guitar Answer Book. She began to study South American music when she was a teenager and studied for a summer with the great Venezuelan, Alirio Diaz. She has since collaborated with artists such as Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Laurindo Almeida, and Gaudencio Thiago de Mello. Her latest recording is Journey to the Amazon (Teldec Classics), featuring Paul Winter and Guadencio Thiago de Mello.
Gaudencio Thiago de Mello dreamed of becoming a musician during his childhood in the Brazilian Amazon, but his career developed along different lines-he became a professional soccer coach in Brazil. Finally, at age 33, he moved to New York and began studying music. He has now become an acclaimed percussionist, arranger, and composer. Thiago de Mello has toured throughout the Americas, performing as a solo act, with his band Amazon, and in collaboration with musicians such as Carlos Barbosa Lima and Sharon Isbin. Thiago de Mello has written music for theater, dance, and film. He is the founder of the Guitar Society at the United Nations and of the Jazz Ensemble program at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York, where he taught music for 29 years.

John Filipczak & the Classics are an exceptional polka band playing in the Polish "honky-style," which came out of Chicago in the '50s and has been called "the Dixieland of polka." In this form of polka, the trumpet is the lead instrument, the clarinet plays above and below the melody line, and the concertina, string bass, and the drums keep the band together. John Filipczak (trumpet, concertina) started out his 40-year career as the original trumpet player with the Jolly Brothers Polka Band. Gary Jasicki (clarinet, saxophone) has played with the Jolly Jokers and Father Capone-The Polka Padre. Linda Jasicki (vocals, trumpet) has played trumpet with her father's German-style group The Country cousins. She and Gary Jasicki currently play with the Classics and with Billy Jasicki and Polka Joy. Darleen Hansen comes from a long line of musicians and began her musical career at age six, doing commercials for the Howdy Dowdy Show. Fred Axberg (drums) has played for rock, jazz, country, and polka bands. He's been with the Classics since 1993 and also does voicework for the radio show It's Polka Time. The Classics write their own music and have recorded two albums-Classic Honky Style Polka and Encore-with both Polish and English vocals. Their third album will be released this coming spring. John Filipczak & the Classics will again appear on A Prairie Home Companion on November 22, which is PHC's Polka Show, to be broadcast live from the Gibbon Ballroom near Gibbon, Minnesota.

In the early '80s, Steve Ross was hurled into the spotlight with a three-year run at the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room. He began playing in bars when he was only a teenager in his native Washington, D.C. In 1968, he moved to New York and got a big break a few years later at Ted Hook's Backstage in Times Square, where he played piano for stars like Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers. He then began his run at the Algonquin. He has since performed in the best clubs of New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. For the past few years, Ross has been touring a tribute show to Fred Astaire. His show, "I Won't Dance," at the McKnight Theatre in the Ordway, continues to pay tribute to Astaire, but adds in Cole Porter, another of America's finest popular composers. "I Won't Dance" continues at the McKnight through November 30.