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February 17, 2006|Volume 34, Number 19


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John Szwed



Yale professor wins Grammy

"And the Grammy goes to ..." These were the words heard in person at the Los Angeles awards ceremony by John Szwed, the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies, who says he was "stunned" when his name was then announced as the winner of the 2006 Grammy Award in the "Best Album Notes" category.

He is believed to be the first person at Yale ever to receive a Grammy.

Szwed won the award for his book, "Doctor Jazz," which is included in the eight-CD box set "Jelly Roll Morton. The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax." The set also won a Grammy in the "Historical Recording" category.

Szwed, who also has joint appointments in film studies and American studies, says he never expected to return to New Haven with a Grammy Award.

"When I was nominated I found it hard to believe, as I was up against a group of professional music writers who were involved in very commercial projects -- recordings of Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and the like," he says. In addition to writers of album notes for recordings by those performers, Szwed's competition also included the note writers for CDs featuring country musician Charlie Poole and the Motown songwriting team of Holland/Dozier/Holland.

Szwed -- whose research interests include creolization in the arts, folk music and film noir -- says he headed out to California with the thought that he was on "a kind of ethnographic adventure."

The Yale professor was invited to write an "appreciation" of the Library of Congress recordings by Anna Lomax Wood, the daughter of the noted folklorist Alan Lomax, who conducted recorded interviews about early jazz with Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton (1890-1941). Szwed, who is working on a biography of Lomax, had been impressed with Morton as a performer and a musicologist, he says, and had already written some unpublished pieces about the jazz composer and pianist. His "appreciation" turned into the Grammy Award-winning "Doctor Jazz."

Szwed notes that the presentation of Grammy Awards actually takes place over two days, with the second day's ceremony (which includes the television portion) spanning about seven hours. While the televised portion is designed primarily for national entertainment and features the most popular musical stars, the Yale professor was also on hand for awards to such groups as the Emerson String Quartet, which won for a recording that had only sold 500 copies.

Szwed describes the Grammy ceremony's staging as "hugely spectacular," adding that it "drowns out any but the most expansive performers." Among those who performed at the ceremony were U2, Paul McCartney, Madonna and the reclusive funk singer Sly Stone, who performed with his band The Family Stone.

The Yale professor also was a guest at a couple of the Grammy Award celebration parties, including some that attracted such notables as music executive Neshui Ertegun and performers Bono of U2, Solomon Burke, Jessye Norman, Alison Krauss, Burt Bacharach and others.

Dressed in a black tuxedo with a black shirt and a pale blue four-in-hand tie that he describes as his "gesture to fashion," Szwed jokes that he didn't quite feel like a star at the ceremony, but rather, "felt more like a member of the academic mafia who had crashed the party."

This semester, Szwed is on leave of absence from Yale and is at Columbia University as the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor. He will return to campus next fall to teach a seminar on the New Orleans crisis as well as courses on film noir, the anthropology of sound and "Jazz and Film." With Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson and others, he recently co-authored "Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras of the American Soul," which is expected to be released by Mardi Gras by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Szwed has also written "So What: The Life of Miles Davis" (2004) and "Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra" (1998).

The Yale faculty member spent more than a decade as a performer on trombone and bass, and he founded the non-profit music production company Brilliant Corners in 1993 with support from the New York State Council for the Arts. The company finds new performance sites in New York City for various forms of improvised music, sponsoring three to five concerts yearly.

Prior to his Grammy experience this year, Szwed says he knew very little about the awards, beyond what he has watched on television.

"I thought of them only as a glimpse of what was popular every year," he says. "I knew that they gave a lot of other awards that were not shown, but I never kept up with who was getting what."

Since his Grammy win, Szwed says, he has received congratulations from a number of Yale colleagues, and is still adjusting to his newfound "fame."

-- By Susan Gonzalez


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