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      Grammys Drop Anonymous Nominating Committees After Backlash

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      Since 1989, small groups have whittled down 61 of the awards’ 84 categories. The Weeknd, who criticized the process, applauded the change but said he would not lift his boycott.The governing body of the Grammy Awards voted on Friday to change its nominating process, eliminating a step that has recently come under fire — the use of anonymous expert committees to decide who makes the final ballot in dozens of categories.Each year, the Recording Academy convenes music professionals to serve on its nomination review committees for 61 of the Grammys’ 84 categories. They whittle down the initial nomination choices by the academy’s thousands of voters to determine the ballot, and their work is intended to protect the integrity of the awards process.The committees began in 1989, but in recent years they have come under intense criticism from artists, music executives and even Grammy insiders as examples of an unaccountable system rife with conflicts of interest and mysterious agendas.Before this year’s Grammys, in March, the pop star the Weeknd — who had been shut out of the nominations despite the success of his latest album, “After Hours” — announced that he would be boycotting the show from now on, and focused his blame on the nomination process.“Because of the secret committees,” the Weeknd told The New York Times, “I will no longer allow my label to submit my music to the Grammys.”The Weeknd’s rebuke came after years of complaints by musicians, particularly Black artists in genres like hip-hop and R&B, many of whom have been lauded repeatedly in genre categories but blocked in the four most prestigious awards: album, record and song of the year, and best new artist. Among the most outspoken have been Jay-Z, Drake, Kanye West and Frank Ocean.In a statement to The Times early Monday, the Weeknd, whose real name is Abel Tesfaye, applauded the move by the academy but said he would not lift his boycott.“Even though I won’t be submitting my music, the Grammys’ recent admission of corruption will hopefully be a positive move for the future of this plagued award and give the artist community the respect it deserves with a transparent voting process,” the Weeknd said.At this year’s ceremony, Beyoncé became the most-awarded woman in Grammy history, with 28 wins. But of her career total, only one prize was in a major category, when she took home a song of the year trophy in 2010 as one of the credited songwriters on “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”In a statement, Harvey Mason Jr., the interim chief executive of the Recording Academy, praised the decision by the academy’s board as part of “a year of unprecedented, transformational change” at the institution.“This is a new academy, one that is driven to action and that has doubled down on the commitment to meeting the needs of the music community,” Mason added. The proposal was discussed for over a year, and involved a special committee of academy members and leaders, the organization said.The workings of the nomination committees have long been a subject of intrigue in the music industry. The identities of the committee members are kept secret to protect those people from outside influence and fan attacks, according to the academy.But the process came under particular scrutiny last year, when Deborah Dugan, the academy’s former chief, made a number of detailed accusations as part of a legal complaint over her ouster from the organization.According to her complaint, many people on the committees had conflicts of interest. In one example she gave, one artist who was up for the song of the year category was allowed to sit on the committee for that category, and was also represented by a board member.Last year, the academy instituted a rule that musicians on the committees must sign disclosure forms to prevent conflicts.The decision to cut the committees was made during a meeting of the academy’s board of trustees. Although they are being eliminated for the four top prizes and all genre categories, review panels will remain for 11 so-called craft categories, which cover awards for production, packaging, album notes and historical recordings.The board also decided to reduce to 10 from 15 the number of genre award categories the academy members may vote on, beyond the top four prizes, and added two awards: best global music performance and best música urbana album, a Latin category.The changes will take effect with the 64th annual Grammy Awards, to be held on Jan. 31, 2022, which will cover music released during a 13-month window from Sept. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021. More

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      Al Schmitt, Maestro of Recorded Sound, Is Dead at 91

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      The winner of multiple Grammys, he engineered or produced records by Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane and many others.Al Schmitt, who as a boy watched Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters record music in his uncle’s studio, and who went on to become a Grammy Award-winning engineer for a long roster of artists including Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Diana Krall, died on Monday at his home in Bell Canyon, Calif. He was 91.His death was confirmed by his wife, Lisa Schmitt.For more than 60 years, Mr. Schmitt brought deft engineering skills and a sixth sense about what made a song great to his collaborations with dozens of musicians and singers. He was renowned for his ability to make subtle but critical changes during a recording session.His gentle, informed guidance from behind the recording console was an essential, if unseen, element in 15 of Ms. Krall’s studio albums.“It’s how he heard things,” she said by phone. “Sometimes he’d adjust the mic a bit or put his hand on my shoulder and say, ‘It’s OK.’ I don’t know if he was adjusting the mic or me.”While recording at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, she added, “Al would say, ‘Why don’t we bring out the Frank Sinatra stool?’ And you’d do the best take in your life.”Mr. Schmitt, whose engineering credits also included Sinatra’s popular “Duets” albums in the 1990s, won 20 Grammys, the most ever for an engineer, and two Latin Grammys. He also won a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement from the Recording Academy in 2006.In 2005, Mr. Schmitt’s contributions to Ray Charles’s own duets album, “Genius Loves Company,” brought him five Grammys. (He shared four with others, for album of the year, record of the year, best pop vocal album and best engineered album. One of the five, for best surround-sound album, he won on his own.)As an occasional producer, his credits include albums by Sam Cooke, Eddie Fisher, Al Jarreau, Jackson Browne and, most notably, Jefferson Airplane. In his autobiography, “Al Schmitt on the Record: The Magic Behind the Music” (2018), he described the zoolike atmosphere during the recording of the Airplane’s album “After Bathing at Baxter’s” in 1967.“They would come riding into the studio on motorcycles,” he wrote, “and they were getting high all the time. They had a nitrous oxide tank set up in the studio, they’d be rolling joints all night, and there was a lot of cocaine.” In spite of those obstacles, “After Bathing at Baxter’s” was well received, and Mr. Schmitt went on to produce the group’s next three albums.A tamer atmosphere existed in 2015, when Mr. Schmitt engineered “Shadows in the Night,” Mr. Dylan’s album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra. (Mr. Dylan produced the album under the name Jack Frost.) Between sessions over three weeks, they listened on Mr. Dylan’s small player to Sinatra’s renditions of the songs that they were about to record.Mr. Schmitt recalled that they were trying not to approach each song “in the same way” that Sinatra had, “but to get an idea of the interpretation,” he told Sound on Sound magazine in 2015.“We then would talk for maybe a couple of hours about how we were going to do the song,” he said.He was initially uncertain about whether Mr. Dylan could sing the Sinatra standards, he said, but he was thrilled by what emerged from the speakers from the start.“If there was something slightly off-pitch, it didn’t matter because his soul was there, and he laid the songs open and bare the way they are,” he told Sound on Sound. “He also wanted people to experience exactly what was recorded, hence no studio magic or fixing or turning things or moving things around and so on.”Mr. Schmitt at the 2014 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles with the 20th and final Grammy of his career, which he won for the Paul McCartney DVD “Live Kisses.” He also won two Latin Grammys and a lifetime achievement award.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesAlbert Harry Schmitt was born in Brooklyn on April 17, 1930. His father, also named Albert, made PT boats at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and later worked for a printing company and for a record processing plant. His mother, Abigail (Clark) Schmitt, was a homemaker.In his Uncle Harry Smith’s recording studio in Manhattan, Al discovered his future.“I loved my mother and father, but life with Uncle Harry was glamorous,” Mr. Schmitt wrote in his autobiography. (His uncle had changed his surname from Schmitt.)At first his father escorted him to the studio on weekends. But by age 8 Al was taking the subway on his own. He reveled in listening to Crosby, being asked by Orson Welles if he believed in Martians (soon after Welles’s nation-rattling radio broadcast of a Martian invasion in “The War of the Worlds”) and being taken to bars by his uncle and his close friend Les Paul.His uncle put Al to work — setting up chairs for a big band, cleaning cables. And Al learned about the proper placement of musicians in a one-microphone studio.After Mr. Schmitt was discharged from the Navy in 1950, his uncle helped him get a job as an apprentice engineer at Apex Studios in Manhattan. He had been working there for three months, still not certain of his capabilities, when he was left alone in the studio on a Saturday. He was taken aback when the members of Mercer Ellington’s big band arrived, along with Mr. Ellington’s father, Duke.Fearful of fouling up the session, he fetched a notebook with diagrams about how to set up the seating and place the microphones. He apologized to Duke Ellington.“I’m sorry, this is a big mistake,” he recalled telling him. “I’m not qualified to do this.”“Well,” Ellington said, “don’t worry, son. The setup looks fine, and the musicians are out there.”Over three hours, Mr. Schmitt said, he successfully recorded four songs.He worked at other studios in Manhattan before moving west in 1958 to join Radio Recorders in Los Angeles, where Elvis Presley had recorded “Jailhouse Rock” and where Mr. Schmitt in 1961 was the engineer for both the celebrated album “Ray Charles and Betty Carter” and Henry Mancini’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” soundtrack, indelibly featuring the Mancini-Johnny Mercer song “Moon River.”Mr. Schmitt was nominated for a Grammy for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” but he did not win. His first Grammy came the next year, for his work on Mancini’s score for the film “Hatari.” (He was also nominated that year for “The Chipmunk Songbook,” by Alvin and the Chipmunks.)After five years at Radio Recorders, Mr. Schmitt was hired by RCA Studios, where he moved into production. He left RCA after three years to become an independent engineer and producer.Those years were among his busiest as an engineer. In 2018, during an interview on “Pensado’s Place,” an online series about audio engineering, he remembered one two-day period.“From 9 to 12 I did Ike and Tina and the Ikettes; we’d take a break, and from 2 to 5 I’d be doing Gogi Grant, a singer with a big band, and that night I’d be doing Henry Mancini with a big orchestra. The next day, Bobby Bare, a country record, and then a polka record.“I hated polka music,” he added, “but what I’d concentrate on was getting the best accordion sound anybody ever heard.”Mr. Schmitt began his career after leaving the Navy and continued working well into the digital age.Chris SchmittMr. Schmitt kept working until recently, helping to shape artists’ sound well into the digital era. His most recent Grammy, in 2014, was for Mr. McCartney’s DVD “Live Kisses.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Schmitt is survived by his daughter, Karen Schmitt; his sons, Al Jr., Christopher, Stephen and Nick; eight grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; his sister, Doris Metz; and his brothers, Russell and Richy. His previous three marriages ended in divorce.In 2015, Mr. Schmitt received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Speaking at the unveiling of that star, the record producer Don Was said that Steve Miller had recently played him several new songs.“I listened for a minute and I said, ‘Did Al Schmitt record this?’” Mr. Was said. “He was taken aback and said, ‘Yes, how did you know?’ I said, ‘Because your vocals sound better than I ever heard them before.’” More

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      Bob Porter, Jazz Producer and Broadcaster, Dies at 80

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      Hundreds of albums bore his name, notably reissues of classic material. And he helped make WBGO the biggest jazz radio station in the New York area.Bob Porter, who as a record producer guided the reissue of vast swaths of the classic jazz canon, and who as a broadcaster helped build WBGO into the largest jazz radio station in the New York City area, died on April 10 at his home in Northvale, N.J. He was 80.The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, his wife, Linda Calandra Porter, said.Rock ’n’ roll had mostly eclipsed jazz in the public ear by the time Mr. Porter produced his first album for Prestige Records, the organist Charles Kynard’s “Professor Soul” (1968), for which he also wrote the liner notes. Mr. Porter began regularly producing sessions for the label, mostly in the soul-jazz style of the day, including outings by the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, the organists Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland and the guitarist Pat Martino, among many others.He went on to take part in the creation of hundreds of albums as a producer and author of liner notes for a variety of labels. Much of that work was on boxed sets and reissues of archival material.He won a Grammy in 1978 for his liner notes to the five-disc “Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions,” which he also produced. He later won the best historical album Grammy in 1986, for producing the compilation “Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974, Vols. 1-7.”Interviewed that year by Rolling Stone, Mr. Porter recalled putting together the Atlantic box alongside Ahmet Ertegun, the label’s famed co-founder. Some of Atlantic’s original master tapes had burned in a fire, so Mr. Porter drew upon his network of fellow vinyl collectors to track down original pressings. His main goal, he said, was accuracy and completeness.“We tried to list in copious detail everything we could about the original recording date — the singers, the bands, every piece of information we could unravel,” he said. “The most important thing in doing any work of this nature is that you get it right.”But he also wanted to make a historical point about how social history shapes genre. “We decided to stop in 1974 because that, in a sense, marked the end of an era,” he said. “When you get into disco and rap music, you’re really talking about something that’s very different. The conditions in the country were a lot different when this music was being made. I think that the demise of soul and R&B may ultimately be viewed as a casualty of integration.”In the 1980s, jazz’s commercial fortunes perked up, in thanks partly to the advent of compact discs, which led listeners to buy reissues of old albums. Working most often with Atlantic, Mr. Porter led the remastering process for CD reissues by the likes of Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and Lester Young.As soon as WBGO hit the airwaves at 88.3 FM in 1979, broadcasting out of Newark but reaching across New York City, Mr. Porter started volunteering as a host. Two years later he began a daily show, “Portraits in Blue,” which went on to be syndicated by NPR stations around the country and would continue for the next 40 years. He later hosted two additional shows: “Saturday Morning Function,” which focused on R&B and jump blues, and “Swing Party,” heard on Sunday mornings.On his own podcast earlier this month, Nate Chinen, the director of editorial content at WBGO, called Mr. Porter “a Mount Rushmore figure when it comes to Newark public radio — someone who was on the air, really, from Day 1.”Robert Sherwin Porter was born in Wellesley, Mass., on June 20, 1940, to David Porter, who ran the financial advisory firm David L. Babson & Company, and Constance (Kavanaugh) Porter, a homemaker. The eldest of four siblings, Bob attended Whittier College in California, where he studied English before serving in the Army, stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brothers, John and William Porter; a sister, Linda (Porter) Owens; a son from a previous marriage, David Porter; two stepsons, Michael and Rick Tombari; and a granddaughter.After his military service, he returned to Whittier to complete his degree. While still in school he began contributing to DownBeat magazine. His articles caught the attention of Bob Weinstock, the head of Prestige, who was impressed by Mr. Porter’s erudition and offered him a job with the label.Mr. Porter’s passion for the artistic and cultural history of African-American music stretched back to its earliest known recordings, and he was deeply knowledgeable about blues as well as jazz.He received awards from various music societies and foundations. In addition to his two Grammys, those included a 1986 W.C. Handy Award (now known as the Blues Music Award) from the Blues Foundation and a 2003 Community Service Award from the Bergen County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In 2009, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.Mr. Porter became a published author late in life, self-releasing “Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975” in 2016. That book gave a detailed history of the jazz musicians who were especially popular in Black communities just after World War II, but who at the time had rarely come under the gaze of white critics.A white writer himself, Mr. Porter felt compelled to redress the omission. “Black communities had their own heroes, and Black fans of jazz had their own way of responding to the music,” he wrote in the book’s preface. “I have helped dozens of researchers and writers through the years, and I always hoped that one of them would tackle this untold story. Nobody did, and now most of the greatest players are gone. Thus, I decided to do this myself.” More

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      The Grammys, Improbably, Made It Work

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      So the Grammys this year were … good? Given the persistent clouds of uncertainty and scandal that have hovered over the ceremony and the voting process behind the awards in recent years, compounded by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, it was a welcome surprise that the ceremony was, more or less, a success.There were big wins for Megan Thee Stallion, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift. Hip-hop stars DaBaby, Lil Baby, Roddy Ricch, and Megan all had impressive performances. Mickey Guyton, Miranda Lambert and Maren Morris showed the power of women in country music. With her four wins, Beyoncé is now tied for the second-most Grammys of all time.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the Grammys navigated a year of crisis, the minting of a new generation of stars, deserving downballot winners and what happens when the Grammys doesn’t invite the boomer generation?Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorJoe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterBen Sisario, The New York Times’s music industry reporterLindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times and others More

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      The Best and Worst of the 2021 Grammy Awards

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      Megan Thee Stallion owned the stage, struggling indie venues got a much needed spotlight and the event proved a pandemic awards show doesn’t have to look like a video conference.The 63rd annual Grammy Awards promised to be different: There was a new executive producer at the helm for the first time in decades; a new host; and a new challenge — assembling a pandemic awards show that didn’t feel like a video conference. With a small audience of nominees outside in Los Angeles, the show highlighted the contributions of women and the impact of Black Lives Matter protests, offered screen time to workers at independent venues crushed by the pandemic and extended tributes to musicians we lost during this challenging year.Here are the show’s highlights and lowlights as we saw them.Best M.V.P.: Megan Thee StallionThough she didn’t win the night’s final and biggest category, record of the year, Grammy night belonged to Megan Thee Stallion. She took home the three other awards she was nominated for: best new artist and, for the remix of “Savage” featuring Beyoncé, best rap song and best rap performance. Each speech was a wholesome gift: words of exuberance from an artist experiencing the first flush of truly widespread acclaim. But her self-assured performance was the loudest statement of all. It opened with a bit of “Body,” and pivoted into her part from the “Savage” remix. But the main focus was a performance of “WAP” with Cardi B that was wildly and charmingly salacious, frisky and genuine in a way that the Grammys has rarely if ever made room for. That it took place on CBS, historically the most conservative of all the broadcast networks, was chef’s kiss. JON CARAMANICABest Accessory: Harry Styles’s Boa“Watermelon Sugar” never sounded better than when Harry Styles and his boa performed it on the Grammys stage.Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyThe first-time nominee Harry Styles kicked off the show with a groovy, casually charismatic rendition of “Watermelon Sugar,” complete with an excellent backing band (Dev Hynes on bass!) and an instantly iconic feather boa. Styles often gets the knee-jerk Mick Jagger comparisons, but Styles possesses a much more laid-back — if no less magnetic — stage presence. “Watermelon Sugar” never sounded better than it did during this performance, which made its subsequent surprise win for best pop solo performance all the more understandable. Something tells me boa season is approaching. LINDSAY ZOLADZWorst Twist Ending: Billie Eilish’s Record of the Year Win“This is really embarrassing for me,” said Billie Eilish, accepting record of the year with her producer brother Finneas O’Connell.Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyAt the very end of a Grammys ceremony that did its best to pretend like the Recording Academy has always supported and centered Black artists, women and especially Black women, Billie Eilish was put in an impossible position that we’ve seen too many times before. Awarded record of the year for “Everything I Wanted,” a mid tempo in-betweener of a track, only a year after sweeping the top four categories with her debut album, Eilish could only gush over Megan Thee Stallion.“This is really embarrassing for me,” Eilish, a white teenager who — like many in her generation and beyond — worships Black culture, said. “You are a queen, I want to cry thinking about how much I love you.” She went on. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of Adele praising Beyoncé when “25” beat “Lemonade” for album of the year in 2017, and also of that infamous Macklemore text to Kendrick Lamar. Some online bristled at the performative white guilt on display, while others applauded Eilish’s apparently sincere fandom. But only a stubbornly old-fashioned voting body that still just honors rap when it’s convenient could be blamed. JOE COSCARELLIBest Reality Check: Presenters From Shuttered VenuesThe Apollo in Harlem, which has been closed for a year during the pandemic.George Etheredge for The New York TimesNeither musicians nor fans can forget that the pandemic has shut down live music. Sprinkled among the awards presenters — instead of the usual actors promoting CBS shows and stray sports figures — were people who work at long-running clubs and theaters: the Station Inn in Nashville, the Troubadour and the Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles, the Apollo Theater in Harlem. They spoke pretaped from their empty music halls and announced the winners live. Billy Mitchell, who started working at the Apollo in 1965, recalled that James Brown had demanded to see his report card, insisted he improve his grades, and later gave him money that Mitchell put toward business school and a lifelong career at the Apollo, where he eventually became the official historian. Music changes lives offstage, too. JON PARELESBest Disco Fantasy: Dua LipaDua Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” has lived its entire life in quarantine, but it begs to be let loose into the night and onto dance floors around the world. At the Grammys, the British pop singer and songwriter gave us a glimpse of the other side — glitter, flashing lights, throbbing bass lines, people dusting off ’70s dance moves, slight awkwardness. Her two-song set started with “Levitating,” a funky roller-rink jam with a charming DaBaby feature, and ended with “Don’t Start Now,” the powerhouse kiss-off that was nominated for both record and song of the year. The track didn’t take home either prize, but Lipa left with a trophy for pop vocal album and the honor of coaxing the most at-home viewers into a few minutes of spirited couch dancing. CARYN GANZBest Confrontational Politics: Lil Baby and DaBabyLil Baby released “The Bigger Picture,” a stream-of-consciousness, autobiographical protest song, less than three weeks after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis last summer, on the very day that Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by police in the rapper’s native Atlanta.With appearances by the actor and activist Kendrick Sampson, who reenacted Brooks’s killing; the organizer Tamika Mallory, who addressed President Joe Biden in a speech; and Killer Mike, who added some Run the Jewels to the mix, Lil Baby’s performance managed to invoke the despair and anger of that moment without it feeling co-opted by the institutions that were playing host.Earlier in the show, DaBaby did the same, adding a new verse to “Rockstar,” his sneakily wrenching ode to firearms, and making eye contact with America as he rapped in front a choir of older white people in judge’s robes: “Right now I’m performing at the Grammys/I’ll probably get profiled before leavin’.” COSCARELLIWorst Queen Worship: The Grammys to BeyoncéBeyoncé won four awards at this year’s Grammys ceremony, bringing her lifetime total to 28.Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyDid you know that Beyoncé has now won more Grammys than any other female artist in history (28)? Of course you did; the Grammys could not stop reminding you. To be clear, this is a monumental achievement, and one that goddess among mortals Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter absolutely deserves. But there was a Grammys-doth-protest-too-much quality to the way Trevor Noah and the show’s presenters kept reminding us of this fact over and over, almost as though the Recording Academy was trying to make amends to Beyoncé for its past transgressions on live television. (Those transgressions include, but are not limited to, icing the woman who has basically redesigned the modern pop album over the past decade out of wins in the big four categories since 2010.)It was awkward. Even Beyoncé’s recognition for “Black Parade” — a good song, sure, but hardly among her best or most impactful work — felt strangely conciliatory, a mea culpa for not giving “Lemonade” its proper due several years ago. The always gracious Beyoncé certainly made the most of it, though, and her acceptance speeches were among the night’s highlights — especially her beaming big-sister energy as her “Savage” collaborator Megan Thee Stallion accepted their shared, very deserved award for best rap song. ZOLADZBest Use of Quarantine Time: Taylor Swift’s Album of the Year ‘Folklore’Taylor Swift is now the only female artist in Grammy history to win album of the year three times.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressGoing into Grammy night, album of the year was Taylor Swift’s award to lose. Perhaps no other LP has come to symbolize our pandemic year more thoroughly than “Folklore,” which Swift created entirely during quarantine and embellished with a warm and woolly homebound aesthetic. Her Grammy performance — a medley of the “Folklore” songs “Cardigan” and “August,” along with “Willow” from her second 2020 album, “Evermore” — relied perhaps too literally on that aesthetic.The flickering visual whimsy all around her and her producers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner (who both joined her onstage, in a set made up to look like a one-room cottage) detracted a bit from the direct power of her songcraft, which was more easily appreciated in the other awards-show performance she has given in support of “Folklore,” a beautifully bare-bones interpretation of “Betty” at last year’s Country Music Awards. But Swift, a one-time Grammy darling who before tonight had not had a win since 2016, has been out of the show’s spotlight for long enough that her win felt triumphant. In keeping with a night defined by female artists’ achievements it added an impressive feather to her cap, making her the only female artist in Grammy history to win album of the year three times. ZOLADZBest Blasts (and Ballads) from the Past: Silk Sonic and In MemoriamBruno Mars is nothing if not a diligent archivist, digging into the details of vintage styles, and Anderson .Paak joins him on the retro quest in their new project Silk Sonic. They went all in on “Leave the Door Open,” a period-piece homage to smooth 1970s vocal-group R&B. In three-piece mocha suits and shirts with collars that spread almost shoulder-wide, they traded off gritty leads and suave backup harmonies, choreography included. From another time capsule, Mars and Paak returned for the In Memoriam segment, paying raucous tribute to Little Richard with Mars whooping it up into an old-fashioned microphone and Paak slamming a kit of tiger-striped drums. The memorial segment continued with tasteful modesty: Lionel Richie delivering Kenny Rogers’s “Lady” with elegiac melancholy, Brandi Carlile singing John Prine’s last song, “I Remember Everything,” with affectionate respect.The closing tribute probably made more sense in the United Kingdom. With Coldplay’s Chris Martin on piano, Brittany Howard worked up to belting “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel”) over a country shuffle. It was a convoluted memorial to Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers, who remade the song in 1963 and saw it adopted as the Liverpool Football Club’s anthem. Even odder, the song reappeared moments later, with Howard singing over a better backup track, in a commercial. PARELESBest Juggling Act: Trevor NoahChris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressHosting an awards show during pandemic season is a job without precedent, or sturdy rules. At this year’s Grammys — a mélange of live performances, pretaped segments and award presentations handed out on a downtown Los Angeles rooftop — the remit of the job was deeply confused. And still Trevor Noah proved mostly adept: vibrant energy, a little bit of awe, some topical-humor fluency and a bit of cheek, but not too much. Occasionally he literally inserted himself into the end of a performance, or purposely overlapped with something happening elsewhere onstage, which in moments felt awkward, but actually helped to add glue to a patchwork affair. There were some lumpy spots, and his cringey joke about sharing a bed with Cardi B felt like an attitudinal relic of the 1980s, but on the whole, Noah made something that could have felt like several competing shows feel like one. CARAMANICABest Self-Criticism: Harvey Mason Jr.“We hear the cries for diversity, pleas for representation and demands for transparency,” said Harvey Mason Jr., interim president and chairman of the Recording Academy.Rich Fury/Getty Images for the Recording AcademyThe obligatory Grammy speech by the head of the Recording Academy tends to mingle platitudes about the power of music with mild lobbying. Harvey Mason Jr., who took over as interim president and chairman after the academy fired Deborah Dugan just before last year’s Grammy Awards, offered something different: the closest the Grammys have gotten to a mea culpa. “We hear the cries for diversity, pleas for representation and demands for transparency,” he said, over a soundtrack of earnest piano. “Tonight I’m here to ask that entire music community to join in, work with us not against us, as we build a new Recording Academy that we can all be proud of.” He added, “This is not the vision of tomorrow but the job for today.” Promising sentiments — will they be enough? PARELESBest Overdue Nomination: Mickey GuytonTrevor Noah awkwardly introduced Mickey Guyton as “the first Black female solo artist ever nominated in a country category” — far more a reflection on country music and the Grammys than on her own clear merits. (She lost best country solo performance to Vince Gill in the pre-telecast ceremony.) But Guyton, who will be co-hosting the Academy of Country Music Awards in April, gracefully seized this prime-time moment, singing “Black Like Me,” a blunt indictment — “If you think we live in the land of the free/You should try to be Black like me” — that strives to end on a hopeful note. It’s a hymnlike song that welcomed a backup choir and a big buildup on the way to a climactic, “Someday we’ll all be free.” And it made Guyton a very hard act for Miranda Lambert and Maren Morris to follow. PARELESBest Mixed Emotions: HaimDanielle Haim started “The Steps,” nominated for best rock performance, seated behind the drums, with a pugnacious look on her face and a beat to match. She was singing about being underestimated and misunderstood, and the Grammys simply stuck the three-sister band — Danielle, Este and Alana — in the middle of the floor. But Haim switched instruments as well as moods mid-song; Danielle moved from drums to guitar and back while her voice briefly changed from annoyed to wounded; it can hurt to be misunderstood. By the end she was back on the counterattack, but the song was no longer simple. PARELES More

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      The Grammys Discover Youth

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      A pandemic awards show that seemed poised to disappoint ended up pivoting instead, shifting its focus to women, hip-hop and most crucially, the next generation.The annual postgame bemoaning of the Grammys rarely fails to disappoint. Between its consistently fraught relationship with Black artists, its weighing down of the young with the old, and its stoic resistance to the ways in which pop music is evolving, the ceremony has become as powerful for its symbolic out-of-touchness as for its commemorations.So it would be easy to look at the 63rd annual Grammy Awards, which aired Sunday night from Los Angeles, and underscore what was broken. Beyoncé won four trophies, giving her a total of 28 for her career, the most of any vocalist, tying her for second-most of all time. But these wins, like almost all of them, came in genre categories, not in the biggest, all-genre categories, despite her undeniable influence across the whole spectrum of pop. After sweeping the big four categories last year, Billie Eilish won record of the year for “Everything I Wanted” — a safe choice — and spent her speech repenting by uncomfortably fawning over Megan Thee Stallion.In most years, those would have been the defining moments — well-intentioned acts gone awry. And yet. The Grammys this year were frisky, energetic, largely well-paced and sometimes surprising. They often met popular music where it actually has been over the past year, with performances by central stars of pop, hip-hop, rock and country. Women dominated all the major categories — in addition to Eilish’s victory, Taylor Swift won album of the year for “Folklore,” H.E.R. won song of the year for “I Can’t Breathe” and Megan Thee Stallion won best new artist.But the most crucial aspect of the show was this: Almost all of the performers were under 40, and plenty were under 30. This may seem like an obvious move, but at the Grammys, youth and current relevance have often been treated as inconveniences to be navigated deftly, lest older generations — of artists and, presumably, viewers — feel left out. (This year, given the coronavirus pandemic, there was also likely an impetus to keep elders as far from harm’s way as possible.)Most vividly, that meant several largely unvarnished performances by hip-hop stars, still a shock on the Grammys stage despite the genre’s role at the center of pop evolution for decades. Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B paired for a clever and buoyantly sexual performance of “WAP” that was more erotically direct than any Grammys moment in memory. (Think Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, and then some.) Lil Baby’s protest anthem “The Bigger Picture” was rendered as full social justice theater, with a building in flames, a square-off between protesters and shield-bearing police officers, and spoken-word calls for policy improvements.When these performances nodded to the Grammy tradition of melding the new with the old — typically an act of suffocation — it was done cheekily. During Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s performance, there was a brief tap dance routine acknowledging the pioneering Black tap dancers the Nicholas Brothers. And DaBaby delivered an intense and fantastically odd performance, in which he was backed by a choir of older women in church robes who appeared to have been given direction to look as comedically shocked as possible.Early in the show, during a Jools Holland-like performance with several acts on adjacent stages, Eilish was theatrically morbid, and Harry Styles was lithe and sinuous. Later, Bad Bunny and Jhay Cortez performed wholly in Spanish, a rare acknowledgment of the power of contemporary Spanish-language music. BTS scaled a rooftop to deliver a dizzying rendition of its hit “Dynamite,” a hyperchoreographed taunt at any performer who opted to be bound to, you know, a stage. And Dua Lipa advertised herself as a nu-aerobics queen, with an impressive set of hi-test disco.For a second year in a row, the Grammys put a spotlight on the teen singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, and her producer, Finneas.Kevin Mazur/The Recording Academy, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThrough another lens, Lipa’s performance could be seen as a wink to the music of yesteryear — a classicist with a high-gloss veneer. Typically, those sorts of artists are Grammy stock-in-trade, and there were a handful of them this year, like Silk Sonic, the recently formed union of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, who played pointedly retro, shimmery luxury soul. And despite becoming less central to pop music in general, guitars were not in short supply. Black Pumas scuffed up their typically modest rock-soul ever so slightly. Haim played loose, lovely, harmony-rich rock, and Taylor Swift performed a medley of songs from her quarantine albums, reimagining the Grammy stage as a mystical forest haunt.That said, consider it a victory that the Grammys largely opted in favor of youth, even when the mode of creation was old-fashioned. That reflects a dawning awareness that the show — the performances, at least, if not always the awards — has the power to be prescriptive, not simply hoary. Take, for example, its treatment of country music this year: None of the country performers were men, and given that almost every major star of country radio is a man, this was a meaningful gesture. It provided a huge showcase for Mickey Guyton, the first Black woman solo artist ever to receive a nomination in a country category — her rendition of “Black Like Me” was deeply invested and bracing. (Guyton still lost best country solo performance to Vince Gill, a Grammy perennial.) She was followed by sharp, but less pointed performances by Miranda Lambert and Maren Morris (who was inexplicably saddled with a John Mayer cameo).For a sense of the confusingly evolving and ongoing conundrum the Grammys finds itself in, look no further than this year’s hip-hop awards. Best rap album was won by Nas, one of the defining rappers of the … 1990s. This was his first Grammy, won for a little-heralded late-career album — the sort of years-late-dollars-short gesture that is a frequent Grammy occurrence. But best rap song and best rap performance went to Megan Thee Stallion (with Beyoncé), who is in almost every way, besides popular acclaim, a rookie. That the Grammys have honored her so thoroughly so early in her career must feel baffling to the pioneering rappers of decades past. On the other hand, hip-hop has come far enough to have its elders pull out head-scratching wins, just like rock, country and pop old-timers have for generations.The Grammys remain, at heart, a balancing act — a big tent that aims to satisfy everyone, fully pleasing no one. Even the distribution of this year’s major awards, after last year’s Eilish sweep, felt overly conspicuous. But Swift is 31, Megan Thee Stallion is 26, H.E.R. is 23, Eilish is 19. That no one is making them wait for their acclaim is its own sort of victory. More

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      Beyoncé Makes History With 28 Grammy Wins

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBeyoncé Breaks Grammy Record; Top Prizes for Billie Eilish and Taylor SwiftBeyoncé not only came to the Grammys, she won four and made history.March 14, 2021, 11:20 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 11:20 p.m. ETBeyoncé had a record-breaking night and now holds the most Grammy wins by a female artist.Credit…CBSBeyoncé not only showed up at the Grammys (surprise!) — she won four, broke a record, and then got onstage to offer gracious remarks on a night when she was nominated nine times but did not perform.By the end of the night, Beyoncé had become the female artist with the most ever Grammy wins (28), a record previously held by Alison Krauss.More than two hours into the telecast, viewers were surprised to see a camera show Beyoncé seated at the award ceremony. Minutes later she would win best rap song with Megan Thee Stallion, who gushed about her collaborator in her acceptance speech.“I definitely want to say thank you to Beyoncé,” she said. “If you know me, you have to know that ever since I was little, I was like, ‘You know what, one day I’m going to grow up, I’m going to be like the rap Beyoncé.’ That was definitely my goal.”Then Beyoncé herself won another Grammy for best R&B performance for “Black Parade” and gave her own acceptance speech.“It’s been such a difficult time, so I wanted to uplift, encourage, celebrate all of the beautiful Black queens and kings that continue to inspire me and inspire the whole world,” she said. “This is so overwhelming. I’ve been working my whole life — since 9 years old — and I can’t believe this happened.”With those two awards under her belt, plus the awards for best rap song (again for “Savage”) and best music video that she earned before the broadcast, Beyoncé broke the record for most Grammy wins ever by a female artist, previously held by Alison Krauss.“History!” the host, Trevor Noah, exclaimed. “Give it up for Beyoncé. This is history right now!”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Taylor Swift Wins Album of the Year, Again

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBeyoncé Breaks Grammy Record; Top Prizes for Billie Eilish and Taylor SwiftTaylor Swift takes album of the year, becoming the first woman to win three times.March 14, 2021, 11:37 p.m. ETMarch 14, 2021, 11:37 p.m. ETTaylor Swift broke a record with her album of the year win for “Folklore.”Credit…Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressTaylor Swift’s “Folklore” won album of the year on Sunday, making the singer and songwriter the first woman to win the prize three times, following her victories for “Fearless” in 2010 and “1989” in 2016. Swift tied Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon as the only artists with three career best album trophies. (The mastering engineer Tom Coyne has won four, including one for “1989.”)“You guys met us in this imaginary world that we created,” Swift said during her acceptance speech, flanked by her collaborators Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, Laura Sisk and Jonathan Low. Dessner, who collaborated remotely with Swift on the pandemic album, called her “one the greatest living songwriters, who somehow put trust in me.”[embedded content]A surprise release in July, “Folklore” represented Swift’s foray into more acoustic sounds and indie-rock textures following years of pop bombast. She was nominated six times in all on Sunday, but lost in five other categories before taking home album of the year.“Evermore,” the “sister record” to “Folklore” and Swift’s second secret pandemic release, came out in December, meaning it could be nominated at next year’s Grammys and represents her fourth potential album win.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More