The 2015 NEA Jazz Masters Awards Ceremony and Concert, held Monday, April 20, at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in New York, was, as big-institution presentations go, a nearly painless experience. Honoring Carla Bley, 79; George Coleman, 80; Charles Lloyd, 77; and Chicago club owner Joe Segal, 89, it was fun, and moving, and its two-hours-plus runtime seemed neither too brief nor too long. That first sentence might seem cynical-how could an all-star jazz confab be trying?-but as awards shows on network TV keep proving, just because an organization has a lot of resources doesn’t mean it knows how to utilize them. The host at Rose, bassist and broadcaster Christian McBride, was pitch-perfect, and the speeches, including introductions by other NEA Jazz Masters, were mostly prewritten, which meant they didn’t ramble. The video presentation for each awardee was meaningful and reflective of a real budget.
The occasion merited such savvy and professionalism. The Jazz Masters Fellowship, which the NEA initiated in 1982, is accurately touted as the nation’s highest honor in jazz. It comes with a one-time stipend of $25,000, and is viewed as entry into a hall-of-fame for the music. In recent years the number of annual Masters has been pared down to three musicians plus a non-player recipient of the A.B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy. Still, it’s a coup for jazz in 2015, when any new information about public arts funding is too often a tale of woe.
