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30/07/2004 BBC Jazz Awards avoid jazz-lite. Phew!!
Soweto Kinch, sax-playing bandleader, won the two main prizes at last night's BBC Jazz Awards, picking up the gongs for Best Band and Best Instrumentalist. Colin Steele's The Journey Home took the award for best new album. And jazz's Renaissance Man, NYC-based trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, in London to play at the Proms tomorrow, scooped the International Award. The awards are decided by a panel of experts, not, as is the fashion, by an army of inexpert TV viewers who derive their expertise from watching 5 minute video clips before voting. So the awards ignored the newly popular jazz-lite crooners: none of the faux jazz teenies currently out-selling more talented musicians were even nominated, let alone honoured, at last night's bash at the Hammersmith Palais. The annual awards, sponsored by Radios 2 and 3, are the grown-up face of the BBC. The broadcaster is funded by a retrogressive annual tax (disguised by the eupehemism "licence fee") of £100+ levied on every TV set in the UK. Most of the money goes on Television for Time Wasters. But it's not all bad news. Radio 3, the classical/jazz/world station is a beacon of quality in a sea of glossy mediocrity. As is the new digital TV channel, BBC4. And, well hidden amongst Radio 2's output of wall-to-wall poprock for the middle-aged with little discrimination, are a few gems - well-produced documentary series on important popular musicians and musics, broadcast in the mid-evening graveyard slot when the mass audience has switched over to TV for Time Wasters. Gerry Smith
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