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Trustees Award: Jim Marshall

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Henry Diltz and Graham Nash pay tribute to one of music's most iconic photographers
Henry Diltz and Graham Nash
GRAMMYs
Dec 2, 2014 - 4:06 pm
GRAMMY.com

(In addition to the GRAMMY Awards, The Recording Academy presents Special Merit Awards recognizing contributions of significance to the recording field, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, Trustees Award and Technical GRAMMY Award. In the days leading up to the 56th GRAMMY Awards, GRAMMY.com will present the tributes to the 2014 Special Merit Awards recipients.)

Jim Marshall was my guru. He told me so himself. He was the guru of most of today's music photographers because he was one of the first and one of the best. His mantra was "Get the picture!"

I met him in the mid-'60s. He worked mostly in San Francisco and I worked mostly in L.A., but our paths crossed at the Monterey Pop Festival and at Woodstock, and then more often as the years went by.

There are many colorful adjectives that come to mind when remembering Jim: irascible, impatient, explosive, but always very, very kindhearted. He liked to drink and tell stories and he loved pretty women. "Cars, guns and cameras always get me into trouble," he used to say. He brooked no denial as he waded right in with his little Leica clicking quietly and constantly. His eye was amazing as he caught the essence of each scene before him. His subjects loved his energy and commitment to the moment. He was always very much in the moment.

I had always known Jim for his photos of San Francisco's rich music scene: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Santana. I knew his famous photo of Johnny Cash giving the finger (a message to the warden of the San Quentin State Prison), but I was totally unprepared for the breadth of his subject matter the day I walked into a gallery in L.A.'s Bergamot Station that was exhibiting his work. There were several big rooms whose walls were completely covered with his photos from floor to ceiling with no space in between. I saw old blues singers, civil rights marches, baseball players, famous comedians, beatniks, hippies, and jazz musicians. I never saw so many pictures on a wall in my life. That huge collection of images is his living gift to us all.

Jim had no family as long as I knew him; his family was his friends, all of whom have hilarious and harried "Jim" stories they love to share. Some involve guns, some involve drugs, all involve the "F" word (his favorite), and all include an awe and a warm feeling for the man we all loved.

We still love you, Jim!

— Henry Diltz

The world is a better place because of the talent and vision of my friend Jim Marshall. He, of course, took countless iconic photographs over the years and always brought a deeper insight into the world of photography and music. His images can be likened to haiku poetry: everything in its proper place … no "extra" information … only the very essences necessary to convey what he wants us to see. Never one to be dissuaded from a good shot, he opened our eyes to the wonders of his portraits. Jim's images always have a sense of completeness and his ability to compose instantly is renowned. It's possible that I took the last portrait of Jim shortly before his untimely passing. Jim may be gone but his images will absolutely stand the test of time and be around for us to see and enjoy for years to come.

— Graham Nash

(With a career spanning more than 40 years, photographer Henry Diltz is responsible for capturing iconic images of historic events such as Woodstock and artists including Blondie; Eric Clapton; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; the Doors; and Led Zeppelin; among countless others. In 2001 Diltz co-founded the Morrison Hotel Gallery, which represents some of the most renowned photographers in music.)

(A GRAMMY-winning founding member of Crosby, Stills And Nash and the Hollies, and two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Graham Nash is also a photographer and published author. His photographic work is collected in the book Eye To Eye: Photographs By Graham Nash. In 2008 he curated others' photographic work in Taking Aim: Unforgettable Rock 'N' Roll Photographs Selected By Graham Nash (2009). Since 2005 the first IRIS 3047 printer owned by Nash's digital printing company, Nash Editions, and one of its first published works — his 1969 portrait of David Crosby — have been in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.)

Ennio Morricone

Photo: Michael Gottschalk/Photothek via Getty Images

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Trustees Award: Ennio Morricone

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A tribute to one of film and television's most prolific composers
GRAMMYs
Dec 2, 2014 - 4:06 pm
GRAMMY.com

(In addition to the GRAMMY Awards, The Recording Academy presents Special Merit Awards recognizing contributions of significance to the recording field, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, Trustees Award and Technical GRAMMY Award. In the days leading up to the 56th GRAMMY Awards, GRAMMY.com will present the tributes to the 2014 Special Merit Awards recipients.)

Hear that whistling? That's not just the haunting sound of the theme to the 1965 classic spaghetti Western For A Few Dollars More, that's the signature sound of composer Ennio Morricone. And that theme was just the prelude to one of the most classic and enduring movie themes of all time: Morricone's theme to the 1966 follow-up film, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. The series of iconic Sergio Leone-directed Clint Eastwood movies (that also included A Fistful Of Dollars) and their moody soundtracks full of kitschy instrumentation had such a powerful impact on film buff-turned-filmmaker Quentin Tarantino that decades later Morricone would score Tarantino films such as Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained.

In between, Morricone scored more than 500 films and TV shows, won a 1987 GRAMMY for Best Album Or Original Instrumental Background Score for his work on The Untouchables, has been nominated for five Oscars and received an honorary Oscar in 2006 for his contributions to film, and became a towering institution in the film scoring world.

The son of a jazz trumpeter, Morricone was born in Rome in 1928. His musical gifts developed early. He was composing by age 6. In the late '50s he found work as an orchestrator and assistant to leading Italian film composer Nascio Nascimbene. Morricone himself began writing film scores in the early '60s, and early on connected with Leone's Westerns. It was during this time he began to cultivate his unique style, incorporating whistling, flutes, electric guitars, Jew's harp, and wordless choruses (with occasional vocal grunts) into his music.

He would go on to compose scores in various styles, earning Oscar nominations for Days Of Heaven (1978), The Mission (1986), The Untouchables (1987), Bugsy (1991), and Malèna (2000).

Prolific barely describes an artist who in just one year, 1969, racked up 22 different composing credits, and whose more than 500 film and TV scores since 1960 works out to more than 10 projects a year.

The wide appeal of Morricone's music and respect for the man resulted in We All Love Ennio Morricone, a 2007 tribute album featuring artists as varied as Celine Dion, Metallica, Roger Waters, and Yo-Yo Ma.

So the next time you find yourself whistling "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" — which fellow arranger/conductor/composer Hugo Montenegro took to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 with a sleek version in 1968 — know that you're quoting the work of a true master.

News

Trustees Award: Rick Hall

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Alicia Keys pays tribute to the father of Muscle Shoals Music
Alicia Keys
GRAMMYs
Dec 2, 2014 - 4:06 pm
GRAMMY.com

(In addition to the GRAMMY Awards, The Recording Academy presents Special Merit Awards recognizing contributions of significance to the recording field, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, Trustees Award and Technical GRAMMY Award. In the days leading up to the 56th GRAMMY Awards, GRAMMY.com will present the tributes to the 2014 Special Merit Awards recipients.)

The moment I stepped into Rick Hall's Fame Recording Studios, I felt a buzz! I was giddy like a little girl with excitement! The history, fellowship and talent of the artists who'd come before enveloped and surround me and it was powerful. I tasted it on my lips, it sank down to my heart. I wanted to absorb and revel in the ambiance where this beautiful music was created and has gone on to move generations.

It's hard not to feel overwhelmed by the legacy and the names that walked through Fame Recording Studios' doors and put Muscle Shoals, Ala., on the music map. As someone who has a real love and appreciation for music, I wish I could have spent just a few moments in the presence of the artists who made magic at Fame. I wish I could have sat in on those sessions with Etta James, Andy Williams, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Wilson Pickett, just to name a few, as they found there was something incredibly special bubbling alongside the rolling Tennessee River. It had Southern charm, deep soul, R&B, rock, pop, and just the right dose of funk. It was original and Rick Hall and the musicians he brought together were the very heartbeat of the sounds that came from the now-legendary town.

Hall built Muscle Shoals from the ground up with his determined spirit. Originally an artist and songwriter, Hall understood what it was like to want to share your music with the world. When doors were closed on him, he opened his own with his first small studio and soon after laid down roots as a music producer in Muscle Shoals. Thanks to Hall, the town of about 1,000 has since become home to countless musicians, with many getting their first start and a chance to be a part of something completely original.

While the civil rights movement shook the country, the musicians entering Fame Studios were colorblind. Side by side with Hall, they created some of the most unique sounds and lasting music of their generation. Maybe Hall didn't know it then, but he was truly bringing people together through the universal language of music. The name Hall was making for himself with Fame Studios had artists from all over the world heading down south for a chance to be a part of what could come out of that magical studio.

Anyone who creates music knows that any good song comes with little magic, and I am proud to have been able to record at Fame Studios as part of the documentary Muscle Shoals. I was filled from being able to learn more about and experience a little bit of what Hall had created. He is a leader and visionary for our industry. His sheer diligence and determination are a lesson in themselves. And his desire to find the magic is the Soul of the Shoals. He is truly the father of Muscle Shoals music.

(GRAMMY winner Alicia Keys was featured in the 2013 documentary Muscle Shoals, and contributed a cover of Bob Dylan's "Pressing On" to the film's soundtrack. Keys is nominated this year in the Best R&B Album category for Girl On Fire.)

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Lifetime Achievement Award: Clifton Chenier

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Arhoolie Records President Chris Strachwitz pays tribute to the King of Zydeco
Chris Strachwitz
GRAMMYs
Dec 2, 2014 - 4:06 pm
GRAMMY.com

(In addition to the GRAMMY Awards, The Recording Academy presents Special Merit Awards recognizing contributions of significance to the recording field, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, Trustees Award and Technical GRAMMY Award. In the days leading up to the 56th GRAMMY Awards, GRAMMY.com will present the tributes to the 2014 Special Merit Awards recipients.)

In the cotton-and rice-growing prairie country of Southwest Louisiana in 1954, a black talent scout, John Fulbright, heard a remarkable Creole accordionist and singer who billed himself as "the King of the South," and his name was Clifton Chenier. Together, they went to a Lake Charles radio station where Clifton cut his first rocking accordion instrumental, "Louisiana Stomp," for the tiny Elko label. Although that first record went nowhere, it was soon leased to the bigger Imperial label, which in turn drew the attention of the even bigger Specialty firm. A year later, Clifton's Specialty release "Ay-Tete Fee" made the R&B charts, sending Clifton on a brief nationwide tour of the chitlin' concert circuit. But greater fame would have to wait. After the tour, Clifton returned to the segregated black beer joints of Southwest Louisiana and East Texas where French-speaking Creoles kept on dancing to his music.

In 1964 I was in Houston, visiting my favorite blues singer, Lightnin' Hopkins, who one night asked if I wanted to go and hear his "cousin Cliff." Keen to go anywhere Lightnin' wanted to go, I accompanied him to a tiny beer joint in what he called "Frenchtown," and there was this lanky black man with a huge piano accordion on his chest singing the most low-down blues in a strange patois for a small dancing audience. This was Clifton Chenier and I was totally enthralled by his totally unique Creole music.

Records were meal tickets in those days. As soon as Clifton heard from Lightnin' that I was a "record man," he expressed his desire to record — tomorrow! I did manage to arrange a session at the old Gold Star studio, and "Ay Ai Ai," a catchy Creole song but with English lyrics, enjoyed local radio and jukebox play. When it came time to make an album, I wanted to capture the sound of that Creole or "French music" I had heard at that beer joint. But Clifton wanted to make it rock and roll. After some debate, we settled on a compromise: half rock and roll and half "French." But it was the "French" two-step "Zydeco Sont Pas Sale," with "Louisiana Blues" on the flip side, that became a regional hit, and sent Clifton well on his way to becoming known as "the King of Zydeco."

Soon he and his Red Hot Louisiana Band were playing for wider audiences. The Rolling Stones went to hear them at a church dance in Los Angeles, they played the Fillmore in San Francisco and soon the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Tours of Europe followed as well as an appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York and in 1983 Clifton became a GRAMMY winner and an NEA National Heritage Fellow in 1984. By blending the older local rural Creole music with rhythm & blues, a touch of rock and roll and his unique personality, Clifton Chenier invented what today is known the world over as zydeco music.

(Chris Strachwitz is the president of Arhoolie Records, a label he founded in 1960 that specializes in blues, Cajun, zydeco, and other forms of roots music. Strachwitz first recorded Clifton Chenier in 1964. Chenier's Bogalusa Boogie, released on Arhoolie in 1976, was inducted into the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame in 2011. A Blues Hall of Fame inductee, Strachwitz is currently nominated for Best Folk Album as the producer for They All Played For Us: Arhoolie Records 50th Anniversary Collection.)

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Lifetime Achievement Award: Kris Kristofferson

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Rodney Crowell pays tribute to a country music icon
Rodney Crowell
GRAMMYs
Dec 2, 2014 - 4:06 pm
GRAMMY.com

(In addition to the GRAMMY Awards, The Recording Academy presents Special Merit Awards recognizing contributions of significance to the recording field, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, Trustees Award and Technical GRAMMY Award. In the days leading up to the 56th GRAMMY Awards, GRAMMY.com will present the tributes to the 2014 Special Merit Awards recipients.)

When in 1971 the news reached my small corner of the world that there was this helicopter-piloting, William Blake-quoting Rhodes scholar by the name of Kris Kristofferson, whose songs were transforming the country and popular music airwaves, I was marooned six nights a week in an East Texas Holiday Inn lounge, fielding requests for "Scotch And Soda" and "99 Bottles Of Beer" from a handful of traveling salesmen and gin swills whose nightcap needs did not include meaningful music. Fortunately, recent recordings of "Help Me Make It Through The Night," "Me And Bobby McGee," "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," "For The Good Times," and "Why Me Lord" had begun seeping into the disinterested listeners' nonmusical psyche, and, practically overnight, introducing even the most obscure Kristofferson tune seemed to trigger in the Old Mill Club clientele something resembling audience refinement.

Despite the cold fact that the typical "Mill" crowd consisted of, maybe, six inebriated tractor suppliers, a table full of box tape wholesalers and a couple of recently divorced medical assistants, experiencing this subtle shift in the public's taste bolstered in me the notion that I too could someday carve out for myself a career as an artist.

Forty-three years later, having gotten to know the man and his wife, Lisa, I feel modestly qualified to scribble down these few words framing his extraordinary musical legacy: By creating a narrative style that introduced intelligence, humor, emotional eloquence, spiritual longing, male vulnerability, and a devilish sensuality — indeed, a form of eroticism — to country music, Kris Kristofferson, without compromising the content and quality of his work, did as much to expand the mainstream accessibility of an all-too-often misunderstood art form as Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles (I'm thinking of Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music) and, more recently, Garth Brooks. And, lest we forget, the man is one hell of an accomplished actor. 

(A GRAMMY-winning singer/songwriter and 56th GRAMMY nominee for Best Americana Album for Old Yellow Moon with Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell was featured on the 2006 album The Pilgrim: A Celebration Of Kris Kristofferson with a cover of "Come Sundown," which is featured on Kristofferson's 1970 GRAMMY Hall Of Fame-inducted debut album. Six years later, Kristofferson was featured on Crowell's 2012 album Kin: Songs By Mary Karr & Rodney Crowell.)