Voting by professional JJA members for recipients of the 24th annual Jazz Awards presented by the Jazz Journalists Association ends at midnight, April 28, but nominees for the 39 statuettes representing excellence in jazz and jazz journalism during calendar year 2018 remain on honored view at www.JJAJazzAwards.
The 400-some nominees noted by the JJA this year again provide a strong showing of generational continuity and a highly diverse, widespread array of talents currently. making music and creating media about it. Elder and younger musicians, first-time nominees and veterans with career-capping works, women in the vanguard as composers, bandleaders and instrumentalists are all among the nominees.
Among Jazz Award ballot highlights: Three unique pianists — Chick Corea (77), Ahmad Jamal (88) and Harold Mabern (83) — as well as bassist Ron Carter (81) and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (78) — are the Lifetime Achievement in Jazz nominees. All are highly acclaimed, much recorded, widely traveled innovators, composers, improvisers and ensemble leaders, whose accomplishments define six decades’ of jazz-in-development and fruition.
Jazz Musician of the Year nominees represent a different demographic: 85-year-old saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter is nominated, as are electric guitarist Mary Halvorson (39),bassist-bandleader-broadcaster Christian McBride (46) and vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant (29), requiring JJA’s member voters to appraise highly distinctive, prodigio individuals in efforts to determine the single most representative musician of calendar year 2018.
That same challenge confronts the JJA’s professional members as they vote in journalism categories, with nominees for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism including Nate Chinen, WBGO director of editorial content and former New York Times critic; Eugene Holley, Jr., a much-published freelancer; Dan Ouellette, an author, columnist and contributor to DownBeat, among other publications; Ben Ratliff, author and former New York Times critic, and John Szwed, biographer of Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Alan Lomax as well as contributor to the Village Voice and emeritus professor
at Columbia and Yale universities.
See the entire list of nominees here: https://www.jjajazzawards.org/p/2019-nominees.html
(and share that url!). Nominees are chosen by submission of the professional journalist members of the Jazz Journalists Association, based on work done in calendar year 2018 (with the exception of Lifetime Achievement Awards categories).
Winners of the 2019 JJA Jazz Awards in all categories, determined by second-round voting by the JJA’s professional journalist members, will be announced at jjajazzawards.org on May 1, with Awards presentations to be made at recipients’ performances throughout the summer. For further information about the JJA Jazz Awards or the JJA itself, email jazzawards@jazzjournalists.org If you are a 2019 Nominee, and would like a “badge” for website display, click here.
