Forget the pumpkins, the turkeys, the candy canes. Forget all the conspicuous holiday trappings, because the true basso continuo of Q4 is the inchoate hum of awards season.
I’m not talking about the Grammys, which plants its flag in February. I’m talking about the much longer list of newspapers, magazines, blogs and sundry award-conferring organizations that rank everything in sight well before the New Year’s ball has dropped.
That’s right. The year’s “best of” always gets decided early. But how early?
A musician friend asked me in October whether I thought it was too late to release an album, lest it get lost in the year-end shuffle. I told him that was ridiculous, though a little part of me was reminded of Darth Vader’s line to Luke from The Empire Strikes Back: “Search your feelings, you know it to be true.”
All of the above wouldn’t be worth more than a brief sigh, except the committees that come up with these year-end lists are so damn insistent about being taken seriously. In fact, they’ve hatched some brilliant schemes to capture your attention and lobby for your credence.
Chief among these schemes is the “public voting” period. The public is invited to nominate their favorite artists, or select a winner among the nominees, or both. It goes without saying that the artists are expected to shill for votes from their fanbase, which usually involves a heavy dose of social media, sucking them deep into the morass of “content creation” for the sake of building someone else’s brand.
We don’t need to look far for examples. The public voting window for the New England Music Awards closed recently, but you can still pick your favorite artists among the nominees for the Boston Music Awards until the middle of November. Expect a few promotional songs and dances from your favorite artists on Instagram and Facebook.
If I sound cynical, it’s because I am. But let me close with a silver lining. One good reason that these award committees solicit public votes is because they don’t know what they’re doing.
I mean that in the best way. The music scene is broad and diverse, and there’s no way an awards committee made up of industry professionals, each member with their own ax to grind, is going to wrap its head around it. Inviting public participation is an admirable counterweight to the shortsightedness of “experts” and helps prevent these kinds of operations from devolving into payola schemes.
So if you have an opinion about local music, five minutes to spare and don’t mind giving your email address to strangers, vote for your favorite Boston Music Award nominees. Last I checked, a completed ballot was also good for 50 percent off a ticket to the awards show in December, so there’s that too.
Hit this
Tuesday: Post Animal (The Sinclair, Cambridge)
Chicago’s Post Animal returns to form with all six original members, touring coast to coast to promote its latest album “Iron” and spread the good word of psychedelic pop. The band hasn’t recorded and toured as a complete unit since 2017’s “When I Think of You in a Castle,” upon which Joe Curry departed to play “Steve” on “Stranger Things.” Lex Williams’ remark about “Iron” is worth quoting because it cuts in at least two ways: “It doesn’t feel quite right to call this album a comeback, as Post Animal never really went anywhere.” Whether they went anywhere or not, it still feels good to get the band back together. (Next up? Drop the final season of “Stranger Things,” already). The Slaps open this election night banger.
Nov. 7-8: George Coleman (Regattabar, Cambridge)
Saxophonist George Coleman is an American jazz legend, sometimes called a “bridge between jazz generations” on account of his sweeping range of collaborations with decades of big names that defined 20th century popular music. He taught himself to play as a child, apprenticed with Ray Charles and started touring with B.B. King at the tender age of 17. He saw his opportunities and style grow with the rising star of midcentury jazz, performing with a who’s who of the genre including Max Roach, Slide Hampton, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Lionel Hampton and Chet Baker. I’d be surprised if Coleman didn’t have a few stories to tell. But he’s also surrounded himself with a familial cast of supporting players to keep the music flowing for four shows in two nights at Harvard Square’s jazz spot.
Nov. 8: Casket Rats (Middle East, Cambridge)
The hard-charging sound of Casket Rats recalls a time when metal was king and music was “streamed” via car radios in high school parking lots while enjoying pulls off your buddy’s last Parliament. The band picks up where the heavy rock of the late ’70s left off, recontextualizing the grand gestures of arena luminaries such as Led Zeppelin and Molly Hatchet into lowbrow, blue collar, punk-influenced ditties. Its latest album “Rat City Rockers” celebrates a Pandora’s box of libidinous excess, anarchic freedoms and whiskey encounters that prove out the old “Simpsons” dictum that alcohol is the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. Helldog, Killer Kin, ICBM and Cartridge open.
Live: Pelin Su Yavuz at Lou’s
Friday night at Lou’s in Harvard Square I witnessed the most intense dinner rush I’ve seen in decades. The PTSD of my years spent waiting tables came flooding back to me as “the space where flavor and sound are intertwined” transitioned from ghost town to maximum capacity in the 20 or so minutes before Pelin Su Yavuz’s set.
The artist, who sometimes goes simply by “Su,” is a 19-year old pianist and vocalist studying at the Berklee College of Music. A full house was on hand to hear what Su and her new school coterie of fusion-minded friends were up to.
From behind her keyboard, Su led an ensemble of six through deconstructed medleys of jazz, R&B, funk, pop and neo-soul. The building blocks of the set were canonical enough to make her Berklee professors proud even as she smuggled in enough contemporary winks, such as the TikTok star Doechii cover, to make Gen Z feel seen and heard.
I, on the other hand, did not feel seen or heard as I struggled desperately to get fed. Pro tip: et your order in before the dinner rush hits at the start of the set. Were it not for the scheduled entertainment, the dinner crowd would be spread out over the entire night. But everyone arrives at the same time and wants the same thing: a drink and a plate of food in front of them as they enjoy the music.
I felt bad for the frantic waitstaff, but I felt even worse for the sound tech. He was the unlucky recipient of a top-tier, grade-A death stare from Su, who was visibly agitated by the quality of the sound coming through the speakers. The sound tech fluttered around the room in the mad attempt to fix whatever it was that was setting her off.
Sometimes there are real problems, which the tech has to fix. Sometimes there are imaginary problems, which the tech has to pretend to fix. That’s show biz. It all sounded great to me, but I suppose musicians are musicians because their ears hear things that the rest of us don’t.
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
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