55th Children's Music Grammy Nominations. And the Breakfast Club.

Last year, when the 54th Grammy nominations for best children's album were announced, I couldn't help myself and wrote a piece on the results that very night.  Clearly, I was stunned and I needed to write something to get all the thoughts bouncing around my head out of there and onto the page.

This year?  Well, it's been two weeks, and I'm finally finding the time to write about the 55th Grammy nominations for best children's album.  Why the difference?  Well, first let's list out the nominees themselves:

Can You Canoe? - The Okee Dokee Brothers [Okee Dokee Music LLC]

High Dive And Other Things That Could Have Happened... - Bill Harley [Round River Records]

JumpinJazz Kids - A Swinging Jungle Tale - Featuring Al Jarreau, Hubert Laws And Dee Dee Bridgewater - James Murray and Various Artists [JumpinJazzKids]

Little Seed: Songs For Children By Woody Guthrie - Elizabeth Mitchell [Smithsonian Folkways Recordings]

Radio Jungle - The Pop Ups [The Pop Ups]

It's true that I like the list of nominees more than I like last year's list.  (Note: I haven't heard the JumpinJazz disk, so am totally clueless regarding that nomination, though I recognize a few of those artists in the title of the album, which in my less generous moments I feel cranky about.)  But that by itself shouldn't make this list better than last year's.  Just because I like the Pop Ups (fairly new on the scene, this is just their second album) a lot more than Papa Hugs doesn't make the list better or more legitimate.

I think more importantly, for people who follow the kindie scene, four of those five nominees are going to be very familiar.  This in itself is a big change from last year, when a couple of the nominees drew a collective "who in the world is that?"  Is that an improvement?  I would say that it is.  I think in order for the category to have any legitimacy, it's important artists recognized as very longtime participants and artists recognized as among the most popular be represented in the nominee list.  They shouldn't be the only artists represented, but the presence of Bill Harley (a former winner and nominee with more than 30 years of experience in the field) and Elizabeth Mitchell (recording on the venerable Smithsonian Folkways label and a major, popular star) gives credence to the slate.

I'd seen some statistics from last year's nominees that suggested membership and participation in Grammy365, the Grammys' own social networking site for its members, significantly drove the nomination results last year.  Nominees last year had literally hundreds times more members than well-known previous nominees.  I would hesitate to attribute causation, but without a doubt there was correlation.  The Grammys have always been at least in part a personal popularity contest; Grammy365 just made it that more obvious.

So in the wake of the nomination list, I wondered how the kindie community that didn't get nominated would react.  Would they decide to completely abandon the Grammys?  Or would they embrace the social networking that clearly is now required in the niche categories.  It seems like the answer is clear.  Folks looking to grab a nomination next December, your path is now set -- make a really good album and prepare to spend more time at your computer.

***

OK, enough faux-serious consideration of the Grammy nomination process.  What you really wanted to know is why I threw a Breakfast Club reference in the title of this post.  Well, as I was thinking about the "gang of disparate outsiders" that a nominee list in niche genres like this one can sometimes feel like, my thoughts turned fairly quickly to the John Hughes teen classic about 5 (ding! blog post!) kids from very different cliques brought together in detention one Saturday.  So, without further ado: How the 55th Children's Music Grammy Nominations Are Like Characters from the Movie The Breakfast Club.

Okee Dokee Brothers: If you canoe halfway down the Mississippi River, then you clearly have some sort of athletic ability, much like Emilio Estevez's wrestling character Andrew Clark.  Joe and Justin are rebels against the idea of kids spending their time indoors, but they are, without a doubt, the nicest rebels you will ever care to meet.  (Also: not that Charlie Sheen is in the movie, but I find it amusing that you'd never really know that Sheen and Estevez -- two guys with different last names -- are, in fact, brothers while you could totally believe that the brothers-in-band-name-only Joe and Justin are also brothers in real life.)

Bill Harley: The veteran (in the kids' music field), Harley is clearly the John Bender of the group, the slightly older kid (let's face it, Judd Nelson didn't look like a kid at all), delivering sage advice.  And just like Bender and the school library, this is likely not his last trip to the Grammy breakfast club.

JumpinJazz: I haven't heard a peep out of this album, the folks behind this album, or, well, anything.  I didn't know this album existed until it was nominated.  They're even more unknown than Ally Sheedy's basket case Allison Reynolds.  I am, however, looking forward to whatever musical collaboration the Okee Dokee Brothers and Jarreau and Bridgewater and the rest provide us when they hook up at the end of the Grammys.

Elizabeth Mitchell: Elizabeth Mitchell is as close to kids music royalty this field gets (I tend to think of Harley more as the long-serving court jester), so I've assigned her Molly Ringwald's character, the "princess" Claire Standish.   She comes from the privileged background of being a Smithsonian Folkways artist and so has the fine lineage.  Yet this is her first time in the Grammy kids music breakfast club.

Pop Ups: Which brings us to the last nominee, the Brooklyn duo the Pop Ups, and the last kid in detention, Anthony Michael Hall's Brian Johnson, the nerd of the group.  I'll admit it, I'm pressed to find a logical connection here (not that the connections above aren't tenuous at best), but I think it's fair to say that if you're willing to go all in and not just record kids music but create a whole puppet musical multiple times over, then you have a bit of nerd in you as well.

54th GRAMMY Nominations: Best Children's Album

First, let's get the technical stuff out of the way -- here is the list of the nominees for Best Children's Album, with the winner to be announced Feb. 12:

All About Bullies... Big And Small - Various Artists (James Cravero, Gloria Domina, Kevin Mackie, Steve Pullara & Patrick Robinson, producers)
Are We There Yet? - The Papa Hugs Band
Fitness Rock & Roll - Miss Amy
GulfAlive - The Banana Plant
I Love: Tom T. Hall's Songs of Fox Hollow - Various Artists (Eric Brace & Peter Cooper, producers)

OK, now that I have that out of the way.

WHAT???!?

Now, let it first be said that I totally expected the GRAMMYs' decision to combine 2 children's categories into one to spell a death knell for independent artists. I was obviously completely wrong, seeing as all five nominees are independently produced. So make of that what you will regarding my understanding of the GRAMMY process.
Let me then say (as I said last night on Facebook) congratulations to all the nominees. I'm sure it feels incredible, and I would guess that all the folks involved have put a tremendous amount of effort into not only these albums but also their careers. For example, I met Amy Otey - AKA Miss Amy, one of the nominees -- at Kindiefest last year and I know that she and her husband Alex are a) nice people, and b) committed to what they do.

I don't think it's a contradiction in terms, however, if I say in the very next breath that this list in many ways has nothing to do with kids music today. I can be glad for the individual nominees without thinking that it is a group particularly reflective of the genre.

Now, I don't like confrontations, and so if it sounds like I'm stepping on eggshells, well, I probably am. I received e-mails from a number of different folks who were... less delicate than I in expressing their... frustration with the list. That's why I (almost literally) slept on this post to make sure the cold light of day wouldn't change my feelings or moderate my thoughts.

It hasn't.

For the record, if I were to choose my favorite of the nominees, it would be the Tom T. Hall tribute. (I did, after all, review the album favorably for NPR.) Also, I've only heard four of the albums (sorry, Papa Hugs). But my concern with the list is not necessarily that the albums I really liked weren't nominated. It's more that it's hard to characterize that list as fully reflecting kids music today.

It's not that the Wiggles are anywhere near my first choice to be nominated, but there's no doubt that the "kids these days" are still listening to the multi-colored men from Down Under. I'd hate to see that getting nominated for (or winning) a GRAMMY once is the de facto way to get nominated again, but from that perspective, Beethoven's Wig or Dan Zanes or Trout Fishing in America would seem to be at least up for consideration. What about TV shows like Jake and the Never Land Pirates? All of those artists are folks who tour nationally (or whose show is shown nationally), whose music should have been exposed (or at least potentially exposed) to a wide variety of families in different settings.

I know that at least a couple of the albums tangentially address those concerns. The I Love album is a compilation with a number of nationally-known artists. But it's also an album made by folks who don't typically record for kids and probably won't again. (The fact that it is a tribute album to a famous kids' album does ameliorate the concern there.) The All About Bullies... album -- in which, I should note, I was thanked in the liner notes -- does feature a wide of kindie artists who have lent (mostly previously-released) tracks to the project or have recorded spoken-word tracks. But the compilation nature of the album makes it an odd bird -- it's more like a movie soundtrack that pulls in some popular tracks to fill out the original work.

Last year, when They Might Be Giants were nominated along with Pete Seeger and Justin Roberts, as well as the Battersby Duo and Judy Pancoast, I at least thought that it represented the genre decently -- might not have been the best five albums in my view, but it combined veterans with newer artists, everyone with at least some participation in the genre. And there was a palpable sense of rooting interest for Roberts on the part of many other kids' musicians, a recognition that Jungle Gym was a special album and should be considered against the juggernaut that is one of my two or three favorite bands in the world (They Might Be Giants) and a living legend (that would be Pete).

When Pete Seeger won last year for Tomorrow's Children, it was not for his best work. It was a competently-produced album, but he won because he sang about pollution with kids, and, more importantly, he's Pete freakin' Seeger. The man should have so many GRAMMYs he's using them as key holders. So it's hard to begrudge him the win. But it, like Kids Corner's Kathy O' Connell has pointed out about all this year's nominees, seemed designed more about the "good work" of the theme rather than organically about musical expression.

For better or worse, this year's nominees have no "must-hear" album, the album that musicians -- who make up the largest component of the GRAMMY voting base -- raved about all year. Just as importantly, this year's nominees have no star or even semi-big name in the kids' world in the list. Any one of the nominees as part of a broader nominee list would have been acceptable, even healthy. But the list taken as a whole seems pretty detached from who's making kids music these days.

Even if you accept my argument that the nominee list isn't reflective of the kids music genre as a whole, the real question is, so what?

If you don't like the GRAMMYs, then ignore them. But the fact remains that the GRAMMYs are still the biggest recognition of music in the country. It does, in some small way, affect perceptions of music, no matter the genre. There are tens of thousands of artists who would dream of holding a GRAMMY, probably in part because they want the recognition of their peers and because they've seen musicians they and many others look up to also holding a tiny, shiny gramophone. While the nominee list would give encouragement to other artists that they, too, could be nominated for a GRAMMY, it seems less likely that the albums themselves would encourage other artists to make albums that should be nominated for a GRAMMY.

New Grammy Categories Announced: 50% Fewer Children's Categories

The Recording Academy, otherwise known as the folks who put on the annual music recording industry confab called the Grammys, announced today that after a year-long review review they were restructuring the Grammy categories for the 54th Grammy Awards in 2012. Reducing from 109 to 78 categories, the Academy reduced the 2 categories in the Children's Field to one, eliminating the separate awards for Musical Recording and Spoken Word.

On the one hand, this can clearly be seen as a shot at the Children's Spoken Word recordings -- some other changes in the voting process indicated that low numbers of relevant album submissions were clearly a concern, as categories with fewer than 40 entries will now have just 3 nominees, and entries with fewer than 25 will be suspended. The Spoken Word category has, for the past few years, hung around in that 25-40 range, while the Musical Recording field always has well more than 100, often approaching 200, entries.

Oddly enough, however, it's that small number of recordings that may just give the spoken word recordings a disproportionate share of the nominees in the new, combined category. Fewer nominees, easier to vote for. And that's not even getting into the discussion once the nominees are announced, when the "famous name" aspect of the spoken word category may make it even harder for great, "non-famous" musical artists to break through.

I could be wrong. I hope I am. But I think the likelihood of independent family musicians getting nominated for 2012 just went down fairly substantially.

Pete Seeger and Julie Andrews Win Children's Grammys

I didn't watch the pre-telecast awards ceremony for the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards this afternoon -- for one thing, I already had other plans, but I also had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who would win the Best Musical Album for Children. When Pete Seeger is nominated in your category, you'd probably best just get out of the way. He was my pick when the nominees were announced and sure enough, he won this afternoon for his album Tomorrow's Children. This article says Seeger was surprised -- "I never thought in a million years we'd win a Grammy," Seeger is quoted as saying -- but I wasn't. I liked Tomorrow's Children and gave away a copy of the album, but didn't feel it was quite as good as Justin Roberts' Jungle Gym or Here Comes Science from They Might Be Giants. Still considering it's only the fourth Grammy for a man who should have so many that he's using them as holders for spare rolls of toilet paper, it's not surprising that he's picking up a few late in his career.

And, yes, as predicted, Julie Andrews also won a Grammy for Julie Andrews' Collection Of Poems, Songs, And Lullabies, beating out Bill Harley and the Healthy Food for Thought kid-comp. Again, hard to begrudge Julie Andrews winning anything at this point...

Congratulations to Pete, Julie, and all the nominees...

Grammy 2011 Children's Concert

Now that the 2011 Grammy nominations have been announced, it's time once again for the now-annual concert featuring many of the 2011 Children's Grammy Nominees. On Saturday, February 12th, from 10:30 am to 11:30 am at The Mint in LA (as opposed to the Grammy Museum). For this year’s concert, the nominees are donating their performances, with net ticket proceeds going to Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation. Music nominees confirmed include Justin Roberts, The Battersby Duo, and Judy Pancoast. Spoken word nominees include Bill Harley and Steve Pullara (with Oran Etkin). More folks will be announced soon. Tickets are $12.50 in advance, $15 at the door, with non-walking babies ages one and under free. (Is there a test on this last part?) Should be fun. There's also a networking lunch after the show for folks in "the biz." If you're interested, drop Beth Blenz-Clucas at Sugar Mountain PR a line.