The Unfettered Critic – March 2024

CARTOONIST DAVID SIPRESS NAILED IT with his recent illustration in the The New Yorker, titled “Two Baby Boomers Watch the Grammys.”

Two old geezers (Hey, that’s us!) sit on a sofa in front of their telly, watching the festivities. The individual thought bubbles above their heads read, “Who?” “Who?” “Who?” And then, suddenly, a joint thought bubble connects to each of their heads:

“Joni!”

As in Joni Mitchell, the only person that the couple recognizes during the four-hour extravaganza. Other than the perfect performance of “Both Sides Now” that the eighty-year-old Ms. Mitchell performed (celebrating her recovery from a near-deadly brain aneurysm), the Grammy spectacular centered, as one would expect, on the music of today.

We let our DVR record the broadcast while we went out to dine with a large group of baby-boomer acquaintances. Oddly, while many in the group are local professional musicians, no one mentioned missing the Grammy telecast. The dinner conversations included stories about cute grandchildren, near-death experiences (failing organs, freaky accidents), and various symptoms of creeping age syndrome (hot flashes, too little sleep, etc.).

When we returned to our abode, we changed into our pjs, dropped into our matching recliners, and watched the Grammy show from the beginning.

Did we go “who-who-who?” like the above-mentioned pair of old coots?

Not really, actually, and we’re happy about that. While some newer performers aren’t on our personal playlist (Killer Mike, SZA, etc.), we’ve watched enough TV, from Saturday Night Live to Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, to be familiar with others (Olivia Rodrigo, Phoebe Bridgers, Dua Lipa, etc.).

And being realists, we’re aware that the Grammy broadcast, for the sake of drawing a youthful, dedicated audience, typically concentrates on current “pop” performances. So the show was noticeably short on mentions of rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, country, and OTHER styles of music that we cut our teeth on.

Which is why we were ecstatic the next day when our email que lit up with comments like, “Hey, have you heard that Teddy Abrams won a Grammy?”

Well, no—we hadn’t! Classical music typically gets even less airtime than the genres we mentioned above.

So we checked it out online—and yes, indeed: in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo, right there in the winning position, stood the Louisville Orchestra’s Teddy Abrams. You remember Teddy—until scant months ago he was an honorary Jacksonvillian. Yes, that Teddy Abrams, who served for a full decade as the conductor of our beloved BrittFest Orchestra. He received his Grammy for “The American Project,” a piece he composed for his co-winner, piano soloist Yuja Wang!

(A Grammy broadcast production “business” note: Because of the huge number of awards presented, the “additional” categories share a non-televised gala, promoted as “The Premiere Ceremony,” earlier in the evening. That’s where/when Teddy received his prize.)

We’ll always retain our memories of Teddy’s magnificent performances at the Britt, of the groundbreaking concert he conducted at Crater Lake in 2016, and even of the yearly end-of-season jam sessions he participated in at the J’ville Tavern.

For those of you who, like us, still feel a bit like geezers, here’s a final conciliatory note: The Beatles won the Best Music Video Grammy, for a new animated version of “I’m Only Sleeping,” a song initially released in 1966!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in case you wonder, Billie Eilish’s plaintive “What Was I Made For?” won Song of the Year, Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers” won Record of the Year, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” won Album of the Year, an honor she’s now received a record (no pun intended) four times.