And a-one and a-two and a-fourteen ...

Think about the all-time multiple Grammy-winning musicians and what names come to mind? Henry Mancini, Stevie Wonder, Alison Krauss, Georg Solti, Jimmy Sturr....

Jimmy Sturr?

Exceedingly few musicians have more Grammy statues on their mantels than Sturr, but the 52-year-old musician from New York State may be the only performer with more than a dozen Grammys for whom “household name” status remains elusive.

That’s because all 14 of Sturr’s wins have come in the category that serves as the punch line to more jokes than any other: polka.

“We’re a minority,” said Burbank resident Robert Robak between three sets Sturr and his band played Sunday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. “It all sounds alike to people who aren’t familiar with it. If you’re not Polish, it all sounds like a leaf blower.”

Consequently, Robak and his wife, Elaine, keep their polka fandom largely to themselves. “We don’ t tell [most friends] about it,” Robak says with an easy laugh. “Pearls before swine.”

To several hundred other fans at Cerritos, most of them of Polish or German descent, judging by the show of hands when Sturr polled the crowd, it was all musical pearls, from the purely traditional Polish polkas to the Tex-Mex polka of the Texas Tornados’ “(Hey Baby) Que Paso.” They even tossed off a polka-ized reworking of Duane Eddy’s growling ‘50s rock instrumental, “Rebel Rouser.”

The wide range of material generates some raised eyebrows and caustic remarks from purists who think the music should remain strictly traditional.

Sturr, however, believes this music and dance form, born nearly 200 years ago, needs to be constantly refreshed if it’s to remain healthy.

Invigorating habit

Dancing the polka in earnest certainly helps practitioners stay fit.

“I run five to six miles a day about four or five times a week, but I get out there and I’m sweating,” said Dean Starkey, 40, of Foothill Ranch, who grew up with the polka in a Lithuanian-German-Pennsylvania Dutch household in the coal mining country of Pennsylvania.

Starkey and his California native wife, Debra, 35, spent their sixth wedding anniversary Sunday hop-step-quick-stepping in Cerritos. They had a polka band play at their wedding reception but said most of their friends still ask “que paso?” -- “what gives?” -- with their passion for polka.

Like the older polka-holics who quickly befriended them as one of the few younger couples at Sunday’s performance, the Starkeys exhibit the fully developed ego-integrity required to be a fan of music that’s so often ridiculed.

That music and the culture that surrounds it are invoked in movies or on TV, if ever, only as comic relief, a la John Candy’s gag as the polka king of the Midwest in “Home Alone” or his and Eugene Levy’s lederhosen-clad Shmenge Brothers routine when they were with the Second City comedy troupe.

It doesn’t help that the music’s two key instruments, clarinet (which Sturr plays) and accordion, are also instruments most closely associated with membership in the nerdhood fraternity.

Yet despite its third-class citizen status in the music world, the polka seems nearly indestructible. The invention of the peasant dance known as the polka dates to 1830 and often is credited to a Bohemian girl named Anna Slezak from what is now the Czech Republic, though others argue that it originated in Poland.

It quickly spread to most other countries in Eastern and Western Europe, and came across the Atlantic with European immigrants, many of whom entered the U.S. through New York or Canada and settled in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, which remain polka strongholds.

Others landed in Galveston, Texas, which led to the accordion and polka soon being adopted and adapted by Mexican musicians. Today the polka, a two-step characteristically motorized by the quadruple-time pumping of chords by an accordionist, is central to the norteno sound of Mexican folk and pop music.

Sturr, who has released more than 100 recordings, is doing what he can to up polka’s “hip” factor. He has teamed up for duets on recent albums with Willie Nelson, Alison Krauss and banjomeister Bela Fleck.

His next album, due in August, will feature Krauss singing Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” part of a batch of ‘50s and ‘60s rock oldies done polka style.

“I think maybe that’s one reason we’ve been as successful as we have been,” Sturr said, following the nearly three-hour performance. “We do a lot -- the only thing we didn’t do tonight was Latin and pure rock. We do Rolling Stones-type rock at some shows.”

Varied playlist

As it was, Sturr led his 10-piece band -- two trumpets, three saxes, fiddle, keyboard, bass, drums and, natch, accordion -- through numerous polkas and waltzes as well as pop ballads, big band swing, jump blues, a patriotic medley and a quasi-bebop arrangement of Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee” showcasing alto saxophonist Nick DeVito’s Charlie Parker-esque chops.

Backstage after the show, DeVito said his residency in a polka band, albeit the Grammy-winningest polka band in history, is “something I just don’t bring up depending on the crowd I’m around. For those who snigger at it, I just tell them I’m laughing all the way to the bank.”

Sturr’s heritage is Irish, but he grew up in Florida, N.Y., a heavily Polish and German farming town north of New York City where polka was king.

“I was really a polka fan,” says the tanned, blue-eyed bandleader. “When everybody else was listening to Elvis and the Beatles, I was listening to Frank Wojnerowski and Gene Wisniewski.”

Easy for him to say.

Sturr’s dream, both for himself and for the music in general, is to be invited to perform on the televised portion of the Grammy Awards, with perhaps some of the many pop and country stars who’ve joined him in the studio.

But the man who has taken home the polka Grammy all but five times since the category was introduced in 1985 is nothing if not pragmatic. “That’ll never happen, and if it doesn’t, that’s OK.”

He seems content to continue to reign over a kingdom that may be the happiest corner of the pop music world.

“I’ve been doing this for 27 years,” says Sturr’s manager, Gus Kosior, “and I’ve never seen one fight or one argument break out at a polka event. When you hear this music, you can’t help but smile.”