In March 2021, the award ceremony for 2020 took place behind closed doors at the Fip radio station due to Covid-19. Thursday March 3, the Jazz Academy, an institution founded in 1955, reconnected with the public – mainly professionals – gathered in the warm hall of Pan Piper, in the east of Paris. Not without a strange misadventure: some trophies were stolen from the street when they arrived in front of the building! But the awards of the few winners present at the ceremony escaped this malicious act.
At the head of the recipients, Thomas de Pourquery, 44, composer, saxophonist, singer, showman, multiplying artistic projects and collaborations in jazz and well beyond – pop, rock, electro – for twenty years, has been distinguished by the Django Reinhardt prize which rewards the French musician of the year. On the winners of this distinction, Thomas de Pourquery succeeds another saxophonist, Sophie Alour. Thursday night, thinking “very touched” with this reward, in an allusion to the conflict in Ukraine, almost in a whisper, the musician concluded his short speech with a message that sounded like a prayer: “May our lights exist and shine brightly.”
With his group Supersonic, his greatest artistic achievement, Pourquery has been setting stages and festivals alight for several years. The Jazz à la Villette audience remembers the concert on September 8, 2021 during which Supersonic – initially created for a discographic tribute to the legendary Sun Ra and made permanent in the face of success – presented its third album Back to the Moon. A triumph of rockstars. On February 25, Thomas de Pourquery and several of his jazz accomplices set the 47th César ceremony to music, at the invitation of Antoine de Caunes.
Among the other winners, the immense pianist Martial Solal, absent from the ceremony, received the Grand Prix de l’Académie for his live album recorded during his last magical and masterful Parisian recital, at the Salle Gaveau in 2019. With their Belmondo Quintet, the brothers Lionel and Stéphane Belmondo were awarded the French Record Prize for Brotherhoodalready distinguished last October at the Victoires du Jazz (where they played their moving Song for Dad), an album conceived as an ode to the family and a tribute to their deceased father.
The Vocal Jazz Prize went to Veronica Swift, a promising 27-year-old American singer, for her album This Bitter Earthwhile the prize for European Musician of the Year was awarded to Swiss trumpeter and flugelhorn player Matthieu Michel.
Laurent Mignard and his Duke Orchestra were awarded the Classical Jazz Prize for the album Duke Ladies (vol. 1). This disc celebrates both the women who once gravitated around Duke Ellington and those, brilliant musicians, who took part in this ambitious artistic project, including, on the orchestral side, clarinettist Aurélie Tropez and drummer Julie Saury. , and on the guest side, the singer Natalie Dessay, the organist Rhoda Scott or the harmonica player Rachelle Plas.
The Academy’s Soul Prize went to Robert Finley, a sixty-year-old singer with a moving voice, for his album Sharecropper’s Son. The musician, absent at the ceremony, announced in a most radiant message that he would perform in France in the coming months.
Among the other winners, we will finally mention a very beautiful book, Chick Coreawhich Ludovic Florin devoted to the great American pianist who died in February 2021. The Jazz Academy’s awards list was established by some fifty electing members, including journalists, presenters, programmers, musicologists, photographers and writers (see complete award list below).
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Prix Django Reinhardt (French musician of the year)
Thomas de Pourquery
Finalists: Fabien Mary, Sammy Thiébault
(with the support of the BNP Paribas Foundation)
Grand Prix of the Jazz Academy (best record of the year)
Martial Solal, Coming Yesterday: Live at Salle Gaveau 2019 (Challenge / DistrArt Music)
Finalists: Snorre Kirk Quartet with Stephen Riley with going up (Stunt/UVM), Dave Holland featuring Another Land (Edition Records / UVM), Pharoah Sanders, Floating Points & The London Symphony Orchestra with Promises (Luaka Bop)
French Record Prize (best record recorded by a French musician) Belmondo Quintet, Brotherwood (B-Flat / Pias)
Finalists: Fabien Mary and the Vintage Orchestra Too Short (Jazz&People / Pias), Pierrick Pedron Fifty-Fifty (Gazebo / The Other Cast)
Vocal Jazz Prize
Veronica Swift, This Bitter Earth (Mack Avenue / Pias)
Finalists: Samara Joy Samara Joy (Whirlwind Recordings / Socadisc), Cecil L. Recchia PlayBlue (Harpo / InOuie Distribution)
European Musician Prize (rewarded for his work or recent news)
Matthieu Michel, Swiss trumpeter
Finalists: Nils Petter Molvær, Andreas Schaerer
Prize for Best Unpublished
Roy Hargrove/Mulgrew Miller, In Harmony (Resonance Records / Pias)
Finalists: Bill Evans Behind The Dikes – The 1969 Netherlands Recordings (Elemental Music / Distrijazz), Barney Wilen The Blue Note (Elemental Music / Distrijazz)
Classical Jazz Prize
Laurent Mignard Duke Orchestra, Duke Ladies – Vol.1 (Just a Trace / Socadisc)
Finalists: Jérôme Etcheberry Satchmocracy (Camille Production / Socadisc), Claude Tissendier New Saxomania (self-production)
Soul Prize
Robert Finley, Sharecropper’s Son (Easy Eye Sound)
Finalists: Natalia M. King Woman Mind Of My Own (Dixiefrog), Allison Russell OutsideChild (Fantasy/Universal)
Blues Award
Cedric Burnside, I Be Trying (Single Lock)
Finalists: Oliver Wood “Always Smilin’” (Thirty Tigers), Eddie 9V “Little Black Flies” (Ruf)
Jazz Book Prize
Ludovic Florin, Chick Corea (Editions du Layeur)
Finalists: Jean Slamowicz with Jazz Talk – Lexicological, aesthetic and cultural approach to jazz (University Presses du Midi), Frédéric Adrian with Nina Simone (The Word and the Rest), Jean Buzelin with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the woman who invented rock’n’roll (Ampelos Editions)
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