Grammy-worthy work

The Recording Academy has mailed out some 11,000 Grammy Award nomination ballots to voting members, who have until Nov. 7 to consider the possibilities and return them for tabulation. While they’re mulling the countless options, Calendar’s pop music staff and contributors offer a few humble suggestions -- artists or individual works of exceptional merit, but perhaps under the radar of most voters -- that deserve to be heard before those final nominations are chosen.

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Ann Powers

Pop Vocal Album

M.I.A.

“Kala” (Interscope)

The first problem that arises when stumping for M.I.A.’s second album, “Kala,” is trying to figure out what category it belongs in. Hip-hop? Though she has flow and wicked beats, Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan-British former art school girl, is hardly a typical MC. She raps about the streets, but her streets are often in Angola or Chennai.

So maybe world music? Sure, except M.I.A.’s sensibility was shaped not only in South Asia, where she spent her early childhood, but in London, where she returned at 11, was schooled, and discovered punk rock. She sits gingerly on the barbed-wire fence between the culturally privileged West and the emergent, vibrant, at-risk developing world. Her grounding in electronic dance music doesn’t sit well next to the “authentic” sounds of most Grammy winners in this category, either.

Speaking of electronic/dance, “Kala” could easily fit into that category. Yet M.I.A.’s music transcends it. She makes club bangers that work as political anthems and lessons in cross-cultural semiotics. Top honors in this still marginalized Grammy grouping isn’t enough of a prize for what she’s done.

Well, then . . . alternative remains. A diverse array of classics have won in this slot, including R.E.M., the Beastie Boys, Sinead O’Connor and Gnarls Barkley, which broke the category’s color barrier when it collected the award earlier this year. M.I.A. deserves to join that elite group. But in a year when the White Stripes, Arcade Fire and Foo Fighters all have the rock snobs out and voting, I worry she wouldn’t have a chance.

Honestly, I don’t care all that much where the nominators place M.I.A. Put her everywhere! Her brand of kaleidoscopic globalism will eventually take over pop anyway, though perhaps in a more commercial form than she chooses to produce.

What I’d really love is for her to win for overall album of the year. Fat chance.

Maybe they should invent a category for Album of Tomorrow.

Alternative Music Album

Of Montreal

“Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?” (Polyvinyl Records)

It’s a gloriously tough year for Grammy voters who love indie rock. The White Stripes, Arcade Fire, the Shins and Spoon all released killer albums, as did indie-friendly semi-rockers Amy Winehouse and LCD Soundsystem. With so much to choose from, I’m pretty sure that the eighth album by dance-rock nonconformist Kevin Barnes and his Athens, Ga.-based troupe will get overlooked.

But it shouldn’t. Always an agile experimenter, Barnes spent 10 years following the path of psychedelic pop toward the ecstatic dance flow. After he finally found his groove, his personal life fell apart, and he discovered his inner tortured singer-songwriter.

Sounds awful, right? In fact, this garishly named album offers the best of both worlds. It’s a courageous confessional account of Barnes’ nervous breakdown and a mind-blowing disco fantasia that hits all seven chakras, from the sexy root to the brainy crown.

Of Montreal spent the year supporting “Hissing Fauna” on a tour that had Barnes wearing Ziggy Stardust-meets-Dr. Funkenstein outfits and climbing up on stilts to incite the crowd. This guy may have made his home in the indie minor leagues, but this year he reached for the moon.

Please, Grammy voters, reward him.

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Richard Cromelin

Solo Rock Vocal Performance

Beck

“Timebomb” (Interscope)

Beck’s “Nausea” lost to Bob Dylan’s “Someday Baby” in this category last year, but he should definitely get back in the ring with this knockout punch. Released only digitally and not promoted by any attendant album or tour, it’s easy to overlook, but this taut, propulsive anthem of modern anxiety (“tick tick tick tick. . . .”) is not only in tune with the times but is also one of the most dynamic tracks to come along this year in any genre, combining Devo dumbness, Prince-ly swagger and a bit of Beach Boys chorale. This is what you want when you’re dancing to the Apocalypse.

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Randy Lewis

Country Song

Gretchen Wilson

“To Tell You the Truth” (from “One of the Boys,” Sony/BMG Nashville).

The Redneck Woman seems to have fallen out of favor with Nashville -- she got shut out of nominations for next month’s Country Music Assn. Awards. Yet even though she’s also lost some of her commercial bite, she remains one of the sharpest writers in Music City, and this cut from her third album is a classic piece of country. When she comes back to the title phrase time after time -- “It’d hurt you . . . to tell you the truth,” it’s masterful double-edged wordplay not for the sake of cleverness but one that creates the heartbreaking impact of the song.

Contemporary Folk Album

Mindy Smith

“Long Island Shores” (Vanguard)

Smith’s sophomore album came out in the very early part of the eligibility period and was largely overshadowed among the big-name fall quarter releases of 2006. But her intensely vulnerable songwriting and beautifully unvarnished vocals make her worthy of joining the likes of Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams in this catch-all category, the repository for all manner of Americana acts that don’t sell the massive quantities it would take to catch the attention of the mainstream fields.

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Agustin Gurza

Traditional World

Music Album

Andy Palacio & the Garifuna Collective

“Watina” (Stonetree/Cumbancha)

The only reason this entrancing album does not appear among official Grammy contenders is because its U.S. label missed the submission deadline. Sad if it were overlooked on that technicality. The artist, singer Andy Palacio, and his producer, Stonetree’s Ivan Duran, just won this year’s Womex Award, a world-music industry honor, for their work in preserving the threatened folk music of the Garifuna people of the Belize region. A blend of Indian and African traditions, this is rootsy, gently rhythmic music that is at once joyous, soulful and mystical, quite moving even without understanding the native language. Write it in.

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Greg Burk

Rock Performance by a

Duo or Group With Vocal

John Doe with Kathleen Edwards

“The Golden State” (from the album “A Year in the Wilderness,” Yep Roc)

“I am the pain in your neck,” Doe deadpans; “I am on the tip of your tongue,” Edwards teases. And it’s country-sweet. When they get together for “We are the feeling I get when you walk away,” though, simultaneously fading and exploding, the shiver is physical. And the way their harmonies weave a different pas de deux in every chorus makes for the opposite of “arrangement” -- more like passion.

Hard Rock Performance

Marilyn Manson

“Putting Holes in Happiness” (from the album “Eat Me Drink Me,” Interscope)

The perfection of a heavy riff against a Crazy Horse rhythm. A magnificent guitar avalanche from Tim Skold. A crushed, bitter vocal from Manson: “It was a day to take the child out back and shoot it.” When a kid wearing a Manson T-shirt shot four and killed himself at a Cleveland school Oct. 10, it began to feel like a post-Columbine tradition. But Manson dissects rather than promotes violence, a distinction all the more obvious when he sings about love.

Contemporary Folk Album

Rickie Lee Jones

“Sermon on Exposition Boulevard” (New West)

It’s tempting to pump up the grandiosity when the Gospels are your inspiration, but Jones is true to her sources. Often speaking from Jesus’ point of view, she offers simple words and bare, repetitive structures coated with the dust of desert roads. A sermon that doesn’t preach, fundamental in the best way.

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Don Heckman

Jazz Instrumental Album,

Individual or Group

Robert Glasper

“In My Element” (Blue Note)

With new releases this year from Wynton Marsalis, Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard and others as well as a pair of final releases from Michael Brecker and Joe Zawinul, jazz voters will be facing their predictable attraction to headliner choices. But they shouldn’t overlook pianist Robert Glasper’s adventurous “In My Element.” Glasper is one of numerous jazz players in their 20s attempting to percolate jazz rhythms with the beats and accents of rap and hip-hop. But he is one of the few to do so with an authenticity that reaches out to the audiences of each genre.

Traditional World

Music Album

Shahram and Hafez Nazeri

“The Passion of Rumi” (QuarterTone Productions)

In the world-music categories, the line between “traditional” and “contemporary” has often been blurred, a reflection of the increased marketability of cross-genre world recordings. The result too often has been a shotgun marriage between exotic ethnic sounds and studio-produced grooves. Not so with Shahram and Hafez Nazeri’s “The Passion of Rumi.” Shahram’s extraordinary singing soars through his improvisations on Rumi poems, accompanied by his son Hafez’s stunning blend of Middle Eastern musical structures with the trappings of Western orchestration.