Esperanza Spalding got some more Grammy love last night.
Ben Ratliff made an interesting observation to begin his piece in today’s New York Times on last night’s Grammy Awards.
Grammy voters want popular music to have credibility, breadth and a kind of moral weight. But they are also, and always have been, tired of new complications. It’s not just that they are behind the curve; they are starting to bet that things really were better in the old days. Simple preference has turned into style. They are perforce becoming antiquarians.
It’s not clear where jazz sits within this Grammy time warp, or if it even has a comfortable place at all. I suppose jazz means antiquarian artifacts to most Grammy watchers. For years now, the jazz Grammys have aligned so little with either critics’ picks or popular taste that they amount to something of a curiosity—landing as often as not on worthy music, but reflective of little other than the forces of influence within and without the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
Speaking of which, The Clare Fischer Latin Jazz Big Band’s win for Best Latin Jazz Album (for its “¡Ritmo!”) was notable just for its having happened. Two years ago, when NARAS eliminated 31 categories in a consolidation meant to ensure “that the Grammy remains a rare and distinct honor,” according Neil Portnow, the organization’s president, one of the categories wiped away was Latin Jazz. (“I can feel it in my heart,” said nine-time Grammy winner pianist Eddie Palmieri, at the time. “It’s like a Grammy scar.”) Consistent protests led to the reinstatement of the category. So even though my favorite Latin-jazz albums of this year failed even to make it as nominees, and from the list assembled I’d have gone with Bobby Sanabria’s “Multiverse,” just by giving this one out the Grammys got it right.
At this year’s Grammys, there was no jazz bombshell, as when Herbie Hancock’s “River: The Joni Letters” took Album of the Year, in 2008, or when Esperanza Spalding earned Best New Artist in 2011, competing against the likes of Justin Bieber and Mumford & Sons (the latter, big winners at this year’s awards).
Yet pianist Robert Glasper’s Grammy for Best R&B Album, for his “Black Radio,” has to count as big one, beating back the likes of R. Kelly, and changing the game a bit for what arists and music labels can shoot for by challenging what we mean by things like “R&B” and, well, “black radio.”
Spalding’s continued career ascent made Grammy news once more. She took home two awards this year too, representing her “Radio Music Society” album: one for Best Jazz Vocal Album and the other, shared with Thara Memory, for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s), for “City Of Roses.” That last one strikes a nice note for jazz educators everywhere. It was through Memory, a trumpeter, and his essential role in Portland, Oregon’s American Music Program that Spalding first learned “the discipline that comes with loving to learn music,” she once told me.
Another arranger, Gil Evans, got a nice posthumous nod for Best Instrumental Arrangement to “How About You,” via Ryan Truesdell’s notable “Centennial” album.
I’m not sure I think of Dr. John’s “Locked Down” as a blues album exactly. Then again, anything Dr. John plays or sings qualifies in my book as Grammyfied bluesology or bluesified Grammyology. Or something worthy of an award of some kind. So let’s all celebrate that one.
It was pleasing to see two fine elder statesmen, vibraphonist Gary Burton and pianist Chick Corea, cop two Grammys for their collaboration, “Hot House.” One went to Corea for his composition, “Mozart Goes Dancing,” the title of which is worth hearing someone announce from a podium. The other honored the title track, Best Improvised Jazz Solo.Never mind that, from the nominees listed, I’d have selected saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, for his “Cross Roads.” But more to the point:
Can we all now agree that this is the silliest of all jazz categories, and should be the first one cut should NARAS again go on a purifying purge?
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I was up the street from this narcissistic orgy of adolescent entertainments at the Cathedral for our god daughters children choir Festival of Worship event. While the quality wasn’t much better than the Grammy’s, no Bach or Coltrane as all recent European musics, at least spirituality was present.
God is in all true art, was listening to Miles’ My Funny Valentine CD on the way, but lacking from most music including alot of jazz. But Latin jazz has been the most spiritual over the last couple of decades, probably why it was marked for death by the hedonistic music biz. It show pops weakness by being both sensual, sexy, and spiritual.
Missed the Clips game as I was painting, sports having attracted much of the audience for art and music now, otherwise stuck with Grammy and Contempt art stuff. But true creatives will always be with us, a small minority but we never quit. Its a battle we are losing at the moment, but the war always ebbs and flows, its about maintaining a balance.
Artists must be warriors. And so we love our sports too. Can’t fake athletic talent, unlike academic arts. Coached my sons in basketball and they played with teh likes of Aaron Afflalo to Russell Westbrook. That takes talent AND commitment to developing real skills in purusuit of excellence. You had a better day than Grammy partiers, you didn’t miss anything.
I have long said same thing—artists must be warriors. These days, anyone who cares about culture must be a warrior for a cultural life and for the arts, because so much is stacked against it. Much liek what I do for a living, journalism, which so few seem to mind the gradual but sure disappearance of. Latin jazz is healthier than ever if you ask me mostly because jazz has finally and mesmerizingly begun to fully absorb and integrate its Afro Latin identity. Thanks for the comment.
Much of Latin jazz and arts vitality has been because the predators and mediocratizing forces of marketing have been exorcized from Cuba. Musicians pay their dues and grow into mature adults, not stunted by the PC PR campaigns of the music industry. As while one must learn their language(technique), again they must have something to say(style) that is of the highest common denominator to all.
Instead we get the Whitney Houston’s and Alicia Keys who get led astray into pop, and never mature beyond early adulthood at best. Mostly permanent adolescence. As a good friend and beautiful vocalist who recorded with the like of Wallace Roney told me, only the mediocre bother to graduate from art schools(Berklee). The talented move on after taking what they can use and making connections, a long history in jazz witness Miles and Wynton at Julliard and Branford, who my ex brother in law went to Berklee with.
Art Blakey and Betty Carter were our true Universities, who is the Master now to hand on knowledge? Kids are presumptuous and think they know it all(my friend told me of a kid who kept on calling Ron Carter “Ron”, and he said “When do I get the respect of ‘Mr. Carter’?) Warriors know and understand respect. We revere our Master, not in copying them, as Cezanne said “those who loved my work will never make a school of it”. But in building upon their strong foundations. We must learn our craft to wage war. And learn the strategy to combat our enemy. Together. Or we fall.
Money rules at the moment, but moments change.
Those of Latin America are however being rapidly corrupted as well. Marketed Meism leads to Materialism. The PC era has learned to market the sterilized and glorified individual to profit, while the true artist goes the Buddhist and Sufi way, annihilating the ego to get beyond this hubristic world(Hancock and Shorter are both Buddhists, Tyner a Muslim)
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable to being conquered.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Martin%20Luther%20King/MLKing_quotes.html
“It is time to put aside childish things”
St Paul and some guy named Obama.