A Sinatra-Bono Summit? : Industry should encourage musicians to reach beyond categories

The high point in last Tuesday’s Grammy Awards was neither played nor sung. It was rock star Bono’s rhetorically dazzling presentation of the Grammy Legend Award to Frank Sinatra. The leader of the Irish band U2 honored the onstage and the offstage Sinatra equally: the pop-jazz vocalist with the uncannily perfect phrasing and the cocksure strutter with “attitude” to spare. In his acceptance speech, Sinatra, who did not hail, hail rock ‘n’ roll on its emergence, told the assembled music makers that he wanted to get to know them better. Indeed he seemed on the verge of seizing the moment to talk a little shop. His “people,” however, reportedly “felt that he would have talked for about an hour” and they gave him the hook.

Too bad: If Sinatra had talked for an hour, Bono, you may count on it, would not have kept silent, and what a conversation might have resulted! Bono praised Sinatra as a singer who turns songwriters into poets. But Bono himself has pursued the same end with different means. Each has surely thought about the evolution of the diction, the verbal music, of song. Why not let them talk about it?

Conversations across musical borders can be exhilarating. On Wednesday night, Ambassador Auditorium’s “Guitar Summit” brought together Pepe Romero and Paco Pena, representing the classical and the flamenco guitar traditions of Spain, and Joe Pass and Leo Kottke, representing the jazz and (roughly) the blues traditions of the United States. Think of flamenco as Spanish blues and of blues as American flamenco and you start hearing them afresh. But to the visibly diverse and rapt capacity crowd, the two intramural art music-folk music dialogues were at least as revealing as the overarching Spanish-American one.

Next year, National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, will you consider pre-recording a cross-border conversation or two--whether in words or in music or, ideally, in both--for your big show? Music, American music in particular, has a captivating history. Give your audience a taste of that history and it will come back eagerly for more.