The two-hour ceremony is hosted by Bridgewater, a Grammy- and Tony Award winner, and celebrated stage and screen actor Delroy Lindo.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — There are country award shows and hip-hop award ones,
“Jazz is a great art form, but if you don’t know it, you don’t know it, right? So now we get to take it out to the masses of people who may not quite know it on a platform now that’s large enough,” says Wendy F. Williams, the founder and executive producer of the Jazz Music Awards.
“And I think that’s what’s always been missing. It’s like jazz stayed with the jazz people. So, let’s bring jazz for everyone.”
“One of our slogans is ‘jazz is the culture,” says music director Terri Lyne Carrington. For her, putting the show together meant celebrating all of the ways in which jazz has evolved — and how it has laid the foundation for other musical genres.
“We try to have many of the styles within the genre represented to show that this is a living, breathing art form that can be historic and traditional, but in other ways, it can be modern and mixed with styles and popular today, like R&B and hip hop or rock,” she says. “And I think we did that.”
Never miss a beat: Get our daily stories straight to your inbox with theGrio’s newsletter.
The post Inaugural Jazz Music Awards will be broadcast on PBS and PBS Passport with host Dee Dee Bridgewater appeared first on TheGrio.
