After grime won big at last year’s Mercury, the album prize is back to playing it safe, rewarding commercial success rather than creative innovation
The “token jazz album” has been part of the Mercury’s DNA since the prize’s inception in 1992. These brassy outliers – from that year’s Bheki Mseleku to Dinosaur in 2017 – never win, making their nominations seem like that Christmas card to a long-estranged acquaintance that you can’t quite bring yourself to stop sending. Once again, there is a jazz album on this year’s list – Sons of Kemet’s excellent Your Queen Is a Reptile – but for the first time in years, British jazz feels central to culture: vivid, youthful and relevant, intertwined with sweaty dancefloors rather than confined to rarefied enclaves.
Just as 2017 was the year the Mercury gave grime its dues (this year limited to Novelist, for Novelist Guy), in 2018 we might have seen the token choice taken seriously, with – humour the thought – more than one jazz contender. Kamaal Williams’ The Return is oddly absent, and albums by Tenderlonious (The Shakedown featuring the 22archestra), Zara McFarlane (Arise) and Joe Armon-Jones (Starting Today) were similarly worthy of recognition.
Continue reading...by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian
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