Torch-jazz singer Jane Monheit:a Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club award-winner. Photograph: Geoff Crimmins/AP
A few weeks ago, the Parliamentary Jazz Awards - voted by an all-party group of more than 100 jazz-loving MPs, including John Prescott and Ken Clarke - declared for the inspired British pianist/composer John Taylor, risen young star Gwilym Simcock, Jazzwise and Observer writer Stuart Nicholson and plenty of other greats and goods, and pretty soon the BBC Jazz Awards, partly voted for by BBC radio listeners, go public with a high-profile bash in London on July 12.
The more venerable British Jazz Awards, now in its 21st year and run by Birmingham's Big Bear Music is still at the long-list stage but apparently in the pipeline, and on Monday, the newly revamped Ronnie Scott's Club ran its own glitzy awards ceremony.
Ronnie's, as befits an establishment of legendary status, had the one and only jazz singing superstar Tony Bennett on hand to help things go with a swing. Bennett himself (with a much-deserved Lifetime Award), Wynton Marsalis, Van Morrison, torch-jazz singer Jane Monheit, bassist Kyle Eastwood and swing saxist Scott Hamilton were among the premier-league winners, and there was a separate category for the Brits, which included trumpeter Guy Barker and Ronnie's excellent, but perhaps rather close-to-home, house pianist James Pearson among many others.
Despite the obvious snag that the more rival - and partial - awards ceremonies there are, the more meaningless the tributes become, there's little doubt that such media-friendly events are valuable profile-raisers for jazz, which as a niche artform always needs as much advancement in public spaces as it can get. But it's an affectionately reiterated truism of jazz that the great players were often liberated by minor players or teachers nobody has ever heard of, and that the music is full of overlooked artists who but for happenstance or a distaste for public relations would be strutting all over the awards shortlists too. Awards ceremonies are rarely sensitive to such ambiguous considerations.
Do you vote in polls for jazz awards - or any kind of awards for that matter? Do you think it helps the artform, or just advances reputations that were already advanced, or nominees the organisers simply happened to have an interest in? Let's have the unvarnished truth: we can take it ... we think.
