 |
At the end of this year’s Grammy Awards broadcast last February, Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) faced the star-studded audience in the Staples Center in Los Angeles and the viewers at home. “The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival has been keeping the cultural flame of New Orleans alive,” he said. “The city is now looking towards Mardi Gras and this April’s Jazz Fest to herald its rebirth. This year, more than ever, folks, your presence in New Orleans would represent an important show of support. So as we leave you tonight with an all-star celebration of the Crescent City followed by a loving tribute to one of the South’s legendary performers, I ask you to go to New Orleans. Let’s join in giving something back to this singular city that has given so much to our world and keep the music playing forever.”
Portnow’s address was the clearest, most unequivocal speech in support of New Orleans and its culture to that point made by someone outside of the city. His speech was then followed by a performance of the Lee Dorsey hit “Yes We Can Can,” led by the song’s writer, Allen Toussaint, accompanied by Dr. John and Elvis Costello with Irma Thomas singing backing vocals. It was a remarkable moment that became slightly confusing when it segued into a tribute to the late Wilson Pickett and a performance of “In the Midnight Hour,” with Sam Moore, Bruce Springsteen and Irma Thomas handling the vocals. Still, Portnow and NARAS embraced the city and its music when politicians were blaming New Orleanians and local politicians for the devastation.
Portnow and NARAS have done more than give airtime to the plight of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Under the auspices of NARAS, MusiCares helped area musicians with quick checks that made it possible for them to replace lost equipment and get back to work. NARAS is also working with Music Rising, the charitable foundation started by U2’s The Edge, producer Bob Ezrin and Gibson Guitars’ Juszkiewicz to help replace musicians’ instrument across the Gulf South.
On the eve of this year’s Jazz Fest, NARAS hosted a party at Harrah’s Casino with music by Kim Prevost and Bill Solley, Susan Cowsill and the New Orleans Social Club, all of whom were helped in one way or another by MusiCares. Portnow was in town for the event, then stayed in New Orleans for the first weekend of Jazz Fest. On the first Friday of Jazz Fest, he made his way to OffBeat’s booth near the Jazz & Heritage Stage where he chatted informally with OffBeat publisher Jan Ramsey.
What happened that made you focus on New Orleans with MusiCares?
The Motion Picture Academy for 75 years had an infrastructure to help people in their industry in crisis. You look at the music industry and there’s nothing; there’s no centralized organization that had the credibility to do that. We thought this is a good mission for the Recording Academy as we represent the whole music creative community. We set up this foundation and it’s now 16 years old.
The mission is to help music people in crisis, regardless of what that is. Over the years, we’ve helped thousands and thousands of folks with all kinds of problems as simple as the drummer who breaks his leg and can’t work for two months. How’s he going to pay the electric bill? You come to MusiCares, it’s anonymous, no need to be ashamed, and we’ll take care of that — to the much more serious substance abuse and addiction recovery work that we do.
So it’s broad-based organization?
Very broad-based, and we do it around the country. We have 12 chapters in 12 of the major music markets, and that’s the hub. We service the whole country that way. That becomes the infrastructure for finding out about people who need help because not everybody who’s in trouble knows where to get help. We have 18,000 members around the country — we’re a big organization — they put the word out. Conversely, they are the recipients of information about people who need help, and then our health and human services people come in and do what they can to try to help the problem.
I was watching the devastation in New Orleans and in the Gulf Coast and thinking, obviously there will be major problems. Hopefully the government will get here, hopefully there’ll be the Red Cross, hopefully there’ll be all of that. But our constituents are music people. They’re our blood brothers number one, and number two they’re going to need some special assistance that they’re not going to get anywhere else. Aside from food and water and shelter, where are they going to get new instruments to go out and work, and where are they going to get help to fix their recording studios that were damaged? So we thought, this is something we want to do, and I called a conference call of all our senior managers and our folks in the closest chapters, like Memphis for example, and Texas, and Tennessee, and we decided, “We’re going to step up here. We’re going to create a special fund, the MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund, and the Recording Academy is going to write a check to the fund — today — for a million bucks.”
We needed to send a message. We needed to send a clarion call to others in our business that we needed to support our folks down there and we needed to get the ball rolling, and we could be sort of a central repository for all the people that want to do good.
The phone rang off the hook in my office with artists and musicians, saying we want to help. How do we help? What are you guys doing? How do we get involved? We took that and we ran with it, and had a great reaction. People started coming in and helping. We had the concert in Madison Square Garden in New York City [From the Big Apple to the Big Easy], where we were one of three charities. We got $1.6 million donated from that one event.
It’s so ironic that it takes a tragedy like Hurricane Katrina to bring notoriety to Louisiana musicians. Do you see anywhere in the future the creation of a Grammy category that would include traditional music like R&B, Cajun, zydeco — Louisiana music?
The simple answer is that everything’s possible. We have what we call an Awards and Nominations Committee, and it’s a committee that’s made up representatives from each of our 12 chapters around the country, plus experts in various musical fields. Every year we review the categories and look at the musical landscape and how it is changing. It’s not only adding categories. Sometimes we eliminate them or combine them because this is a very fluid environment where music changes based on the culture. We try not to have a knee-jerk reaction to something that is just a quick trend, and set up a category and find out the trend is fleeting and not lasting. So in terms of the music you’re talking about, it’s really a matter of critical mass. In other words if there’s enough recording that’s going on, if there are enough people putting out records in any particular field.
What are the criteria for number of records?
It varies. If we see that there are not 50, 60, 100 recordings in an area, then we start to think well, it’s very much of a niche and maybe it’s not something that should have its own category.
The other thing we try to look at, too, is we have 108 categories now. It’s a lot. Sometimes we get criticized for it, and I try to have people remember that of the 108 categories, a lot of them actually aren’t necessarily musical. There are other areas of the field — the people that write the liner notes, the video production, the producers and so on.
We would also look at whether the music, because it doesn’t have a category, is getting disenfranchised and doesn’t have the chance to compete somewhere where it has a chance to be successful. We have R&B categories and we have traditional R&B versus contemporary R&B, and we have other areas where some of this music has fit in before. The question is A) is there enough critical mass on its own, and B) is it fair to have it compete in another category where time after time after time it has no chance of winning. Then we want to take a look at it.
So every year we look at these things. Typically it takes two, three, four years for something to actually get hatched and become a category. But we saw it in Hawaiian music recently, which was very interesting.
They tell me there’s 60 to 80 Hawaiian music CDs that come out each year. Is it just from Hawaii, or does it sound Hawaiian?
No, it’s predominantly Hawaiian from Hawaii, and the requirement of the music is that it’s not something that’s just commercially released in Los Angeles that has a slack key guitar.
There is a very vibrant, full-time recording industry there. It’s those kinds of things that we look at. And obviously with the focus here now, that’s good news, because it will come more under the microscope. Hopefully it will be revitalized as the region gets rebuilt and more people will listen to it.
And it depends on a critical mass of your members as well, isn’t that right?
That’s right. Something we announced last night [at Harrah’s] is that all members of the recording academy in the gulf region, whether it’s Louisiana or Alabama or so on, we’re giving all our members a one-year free extension, on us. We know it’s tough, and we want to help those people rebuild.
Do you have to be a member of NARAS to qualify for MusiCares?
Absolutely not. We help anybody and everybody. MusiCares is a direct offshoot, an output of the Recording Academy. It’s because we have 18,000 members and we have the clout that we have that we can establish a foundation and collect that kind of money. So people say to themselves, maybe I won’t win a Grammy, maybe that’s not the reason to join. But look at what those guys have done here, and it’s a network, and let’s support and grow that network of people to help each other. And all of the educational things, the Grammy in the schools and all that. It’s going to be very vital here that we have the music community helping us to help you all rebuild down here.
So tell me about the Grammy Hall of Fame?
The museum that was supposed to be here? It’s a strange situation for me because I was more of the elected volunteer leadership, but I wasn’t an employee of the company, so I didn’t have all the facts. As we got into looking at some of the business plans and some of the issues, there were a lot of things there that just didn’t feel like good business propositions, for a variety of reasons. We just decided that until we can straighten that out or have it changed to a way that makes sense, we should just put the brakes on it, which we did. We still haven’t set up a museum, something we ought to do.
I don’t know if it’s appropriate to have a Grammy museum here, but maybe a music museum?
That’s another story. It has to be well thought out, because frankly, the museum business is a tough business. The Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and Paul Allen’s [Experience Music Project] in Seattle — they’re struggling. So you’ve got to think it through, and hopefully out of all this something will emerge, that there’s some caring folks and some people that want to preserve all of this as it gets back on its feet.
This is the first time you’ve ever been to Jazz Fest. What do you think?
I’m blown away. I love it. Not only is it fun, but to see the turnout this year — Quint [Davis, Jazz Fest’s producer] was gracious enough to ask me if I wanted to say a couple words [on the Acura Stage], and the reason I wanted to wasn’t because I wanted to talk, but because I wanted to take that Grammy moment on the stage in February and bring it forward and continue to use the bully pulpit to talk about how people coming here, spending money, resources, was vital. Quint said, “Would you be so kind as to —” and I said we were thinking about this anyhow. What a great place to say, ‘We said it in February, we talked the talk, and now we’re walking the walk. We’re here, we’re back, and we continue to encourage people to come.’
