The Grammys kind of soft-pedaled an announcement yesterday about the next round of Special Merit/Lifetime Achievement honorees.
It’s an eclectic group that includes the Talking Heads, Salt-N-Pepa, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, plus opera great Marilyn Horne and late Latina superstar Selena.
There are Trustee Awards, too: Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, who is very much deserving; jazz legend Benny Golson, who is 91 years young; and award winning engineer Ed Cherney, who died in 2019 and at age 69. Digital tech pioneer Daniel Weiss is the Technical Grammy Award recipient.
All of these will get some kind of brief announcement on the Grammy show January 31st. Recent recipients have been honored in a subsequent PBS broadcast. If there’s one next fall, don’t look for the Talking Heads to show up; David Byrne and the other members of the group– Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison– are very estranged. Although I suppose in the new virtual award show spirit, they could send in separate videos accepting the honor.
