The recently announced Grammy Awards field and category restructuring is perplexing for many reasons. It’s hard to understand how rational people, presumably with some depth of understanding of American music in the early 21st century, could have made some of these decisions.
(For those of you unfamiliar, in Grammy lingo a “field” is what we would think of as a genre of music. Within each field there are three or more award “categories”.)
In the jazz field, NARAS has folded best Latin Jazz album and Best Contemporary Jazz Album into the Best Jazz Instrumental album. Those who have dedicated their lives to Latin jazz are already making a passionate and articulate case for restoring the Latin jazz field; and the absurdity and unfairness of pop stars like Kenny G (the poster boy for Contemporary or “Smooth” jazz) competing with serious jazz artists is self-evident. (It should be obvious to anyone with the most basic understanding of jazz, that the “best Contemporary jazz album” award should be folded into the “best instrumental pop album” field, not the “best instrumental jazz album” field. However, a broader look at the Grammy categories indicates a more systemic problem with the categories past and present.
In perusing the new fields and categories, I notice that pop music is divided into six different fields – electronica, pop, rock, alternative, R&B, rap, and “traditional pop”. Beyond that breakdown, there are separate awards for “Best Rock Performance” as opposed to “Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance.” As another example of how sub-divided the pop music field is, one can either compete for “Best R&B Performance” or “Best Traditional R&B Performance”. Juxtaposed with these nuanced divisions, and the prestige and respect they imply, is the “JAZZ” field: one field, with only four categories. In stark contrast to the pop fields, there is no acknowledgment of the enormous diversity in the jazz genre: Latin, avant garde, fusion, big band, trad, mainstream, acid jazz, etc. are all dumped into one field, left to compete with each other in a degrading and bizarre “apples to oranges” race.
At the NARAS meeting in New York last Monday, an important NARAS official (whom I won’t name) said that there should be no boundary between jazz and Latin jazz: “Great music is great music.” By this logic, there should only be one field and one Grammy award! Is this the best answer NARAS execs can give the membership?
Ideally, peer-given awards like the Grammy and the Oscar are an opportunity to celebrate, acknowledge, and expose audiences to the best, not necessarily the most popular, of the performing arts. By now, most artists understand that the industry obsession with market share over artistry (part of the broader American obsession with money over people) is killing American culture. Will NARAS, as our representative, work to counter this trend rather than continuing to be swept up by it?
