Madeleine Peyroux, one of three winners announced early, won the The International Award. Photograph: Rafa Rivas/AFP/Getty Images
Maybe it's understandable that the BBC wanted to show off the elegantly revamped Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House by using it as a venue for as many functions as it could in the week of its reopening. But the choice somewhat took the bounce out of this week's party - usually staged in some appropriately louche and laid-back venue like Dean Street's Pizza Express - for the corporation to declare the runners and riders for its annual Jazz Awards. The outright winners will be declared during a public show at the Mermaid Theatre on July 12, with Madeleine Peyroux due to be in attendance, and that veteran jazz innovator Dave Brubeck apparently participating in a real-time jam with the BBC Big Band - with Brubeck on a New York link, and the band, presumably hoping hard that the fates are smiling on technology that night.
After a lot of milling about in the Broadcasting House foyer and distinctly unjazzy bureaucracy ("sorry, you have to have a blue ticket"), the assembled jazz hacks were hastily ushered past the inviting-looking drinks room (presumably for fear that jazzers would revert to stereotype and never make it to the main event) and into the Radio Theatre. Nothing happened, and nothing was said about it, for half an hour or more - a slow start even by jazz standards - but eventually Paul Gambaccini emerged to run down the shortlists in eight categories and the outright winners in three more. That fine singer Claire Martin, one of the Best Vocalist candidates, had the unenviable task of warming up the crowd, and with an unfamiliar band - but she and trumpeter Gerard Presencer threw caution to the winds and went for an ice-breaking uptempo blaster, for which the warm applause was close to a sigh of relief.
Gambaccini, who manages to be both imperturbable and quietly enthusiastic at once (qualities that have made jazz-award presenting something of a regular sideline with him), then warmed to his task - and the fiery alto saxist Soweto Kinch, solo guitar star Martin Taylor, and an impromptu ensemble including Kinch, trumpeter Guy Barker, and American guest drummer Billy Cobham, helped him out.
The Best Vocalist nominees were Norma Winstone, Ian Shaw and Claire Martin; Best Band contenders were Finn Peters' group, Byron Wallen's quartet, and the Stan Tracey Octet - which will be reminding fans of its formidable punch over three nights at Ronnie Scott's next week. Radio Two's Jazz Artist of The Year contenders were singers Allen Toussaint, Curtis Stigers, and Madeleine Peyroux. The Jazz on 3 show's Innovation Award will go to Evan Parker, Tom Bancroft, or Kinch. Best Instrumentalist will be chosen from Gwilym Simcock, Liam Noble or Julian Siegel, and Rising Star from saxophonists Simon Spillett and James Allsopp, or trumpeter Tom Arthurs.
Radio Two has come up with the somewhat mysterious Heart Of Jazz Award for which Abram Wilson, Georgie Fame and Martin Taylor are the runners. Album of the Year will be chosen from Neil Cowley's Displaced, Tom Cawley's Hidden, Fraud's Fraud, Byron Wallen's Meeting Ground, Abram Wilson's Ferris Wheel to the Modern Day Delta, and Soweto Kinch's B19.
Three winners were declared there and then, and one in particular was greeted with an affection that might have been accorded to a family member - which, in terms of encouraging new generations on the British jazz scene, he is in a way. That was Tomorrow's Warriors and Jazz Jamaica bassist Gary Crosby, a man who encouraged Courtney Pine to find his feet all of 20 years ago and is still doing it for aspiring young players today - particularly those from backgrounds that don't necessarily give them the breaks. The International Award went to Madeleine Peyroux, the Lifetime Achievement Award to Dave Brubeck - hence that transatlantic hook-up on July 12. Phew. Brubeck's time signatures were tough enough to play with everybody in the same room, let alone an ocean apart.
