The Laden Bough

They tell me the Grammy awards are tonight. God, I love music and, god, I hate the Grammys. While I'll admit I haven't even heard most of the records nominated, I loathe what I have heard and know enough about the rest to know I wouldn't like them, either. 

There was a lot of great music released in 2023, and none of it is represented in the Grammy nominations. FWIW, here are my nominations for the award categories:

Record of the Year/Album of the Year

I don't understand the difference between these two categories (what's the difference between an album and a record?), so I'll combine them and the hands-down winner is Echoes by Fire! Orchestra.  Echoes is a protean "two hour work of epic proportions; full of beauty, energy, haunting passages and stunning musicianship, embracing progressive rock, contemporary avantgarde, cosmic free jazz, ethnic experimentalism, and more," according to its Bandcamp page. It all flows together in a natural and consistent way from beginning to end and is just jaw-droppingly powerful and beautiful. The closest antecedent to this work is the 1971 album, Septober Energy, by Keith Tippett and Centipede, but Echoes is still its own and completely unique thing.  

Song of the Year

How is this even a contest? It's Nurse! by the London band bar italia. I guarantee you, if you made a playlist of all the songs nominated for a Song of the Year Grammy and included Nurse! on the list, Nurse! would be the first song you'd return to and the one you'd play again the most often. Imagine a post-punk version of Velvet Underground, and then imagine someone with a far greater imagination than yours took that prompt and ran with it.

Best New Artist

Victoria Monét was nominated in this category, and Janelle Monáe was nominated for Album of the Year, but they're all barking up the wrong Monet tree - the Best New Artist of 2023 was poet and spoken word artist Aja Monet. Her debut album, when the poems do what they do, was nominated for a Grammy in the Spoken Word category (one of those awards handed out during a commercial break and then later announced along with Best Traditional Hebrew Music, Best Non-Euclidean Performance by Large Ensemble, and other non-commercial categories), but the album is far more musical and varied than the category suggests.  Just because Monet doesn't sing or rap the words doesn't mean it's a dry, words-only presentation. It's a compelling listen, and she pulls you in with the beauty and the veracity of her poetry.

Producer of the Year

Who cares?

Best Rock Performance 

The Bunker Sessions by Yo La Tengo. Four songs from the band's 2023 album This Stupid World, plus Stockholm Syndrome from 1997's I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, performed in Brooklyn's Bunker Studio. The band may have been around for some 30 years now, but they've lost none of their fire or their obvious love of music 

Best Rock Song

Black Earth, WI by Ratboys.  Go ahead, I dare you to suggest a better song (other than Nurse!).  I'll fight you. A deceptively simple song that builds into a breath-taking instrumental and then returns in an even simpler incarnation of its earlier self.

Best Jazz Album

Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) by Jaimie Branch.  I'm still mourning, sometimes literally crying, over the untimely loss of Branch in 2022, and her last studio recording indicates the incredible potential she and her band represented. Musically and stylistically, the songs on the album touch down all over the place, just like Jaimie's playing in any particular passage. The last sounds from a great voice in jazz. She will be missed. How was this not even nominated, or otherwise even mentioned by the Grammys?

Best Samba Album

I know there's no such category, but there should be. Curyman by Rogé doesn't fit as Best Latin Pop Album, Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album, or Best Tropical Latin Album, and is too true to its samba heart to qualify for the broad-based Best Global Music Performance or Album categories. But it's a beautifully written, performed, and recorded album of modern samba that wouldn't have sounded out of place among the best tropicalia of the 1970s. It's a round peg that doesn't fit in the square holes of Grammy categories.

Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album

Are you fucking kidding me?  How did the Grammys manage to overlook Andre 3000's New Blue Sun, not only hands down the best new age/ambient album of 2023, but one of the best new age/ambient albums ever? It's not like Andre 3000's some obscure or unknown musician, and it's a fascinating 180° reversal by one of the most accomplished rappers in history.  This one will be played years, maybe decades, from now, just like Music for Airports and The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid.  

Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media (Includes Film and Television)

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Music from the Motion Picture) by Soundwalk Collective.  Get outta here with your Barbenheimer and cliched John Williams soundtracks if you haven't heard this. If you have heard it and still think there's something better, I'd love to have a conversation to find out what's wrong with you. 

All that, and the list still doesn't include The Necks' Travel, Chaos Magick's Parrhesiastes, Mike Reed's The Separatists' Party, The Red Hot Organization's Red, Hot & Ra tributes to Sun Ra (Solar, Nucelar War and The Remixes), Cyro Baptista's Chama, and Dave Lombardo's Rites of Percussion.  

There's a whole world of great music out there, and you'll hear almost none of it in tonight's Grammys.