For Karl Hartwich, the sound is the thing. A professional polka musician from age 13, he quickly eschewed the uniforms and painted bandstands, trappings of the earlier Dutchman polka bands who patterned their on-stage appearance after the popular swing bands of their era. Karl is farm bred. He doesn't put on any airs. He just plays the Dutchman concertina better than anybody has ever played the instrument.

     Now about to turn 40, by the time he was 20 Karl had launched a musical revolution in the German-American oom-pah style of polka known as "Dutchman music." Using the original acoustic instrumentation of traditional bands, Karl, a musical omnivore, has incorporated more improvisation, more syncopation and plenty of just plain novel ideas into traditional Dutchman music. He is able to execute any musical idea that pops into his head on his chosen instrument, the Chemnitzer concertina, which in the era of good microphones has emerged as the main lead instrument - - no longer drowned out by the louder horns and woodwinds as was the case in the big pioneering Dutchman bands like Whoopee John or the Six Fat Dutchmen. And Karl has pulled off his stylistic paradigm change in this musical idiom and brought everyone with him. His music is overwhelmingly accepted by the largely rural, German- Slavic - Scandinavian-American Upper Midwestern Dutchman audience. More than accepted, everyone says he's the best.

     The early Dutchman bands relied on written arrangements. But Karl doesn't read a note. It's head music to him. But that doesn't mean he's not precise. In rehearsals, he'll school his sidemen to their parts, playing on his concertina the exact notes he needs from a trumpet or saxophone player. Some of the sidemen jot down the notes to help them memorize the part but in Karl's band they never perform with their noses in sheet music. Then there are the solos where the musicians can cut loose - - especially Karl. But his improvisation respects the sense of the basic melody. Like Robert Frost who commented that he didn't write poetry in free verse because he liked to play tennis with the net up, Karl's genius is in finding novel interpretations within the genre's musical rules, bending them often, breaking them occasionally, and then with a laugh.
Karl's music is gentler and more cheerful than the amplified and intense Polish polka, whose crucible was in Midwestern urban industrial neighborhoods, the same milieu that produced Chicago Blues. His music gambols, hops, skips, frolics over a bouncing tuba line and sparse but insistent drumming. And everybody dances.