Past met present at the 50th annual Grammy Awards, said Jeff Leeds in The New York Times. The 67-year-old Herbie Hancock upstaged his younger, pop-star peers Kanye West and Amy Winehouse to win Album of the Year for River: The Joni Letters. A reimagining of Joni Mitchell songs, the album pairs the veteran jazzman with such fresh faces as Norah Jones and Corinne Bailey Rae. A jazz album hadn’t won this honor since 1965: Quincy Jones, who presented Hancock with the Grammy, actually threw up his hands after reading the name and yelled, “That’s unbelievable!” But Hancock’s “unexpected victory” also brought forth a familiar criticism from certain quarters: that Grammy voters are “out of step with pop music’s cutting edge.”
One person who clearly believed that was West, said Erik Pedersen in The Hollywood Reporter. When the outspoken rap star accepted his award for Best Rap Album, he told the “Recording Academy and everyone else that he deserved the big prize.” West did let some humanity show when he eventually mentioned his mother, who died late last year. But not before he reacted to the “wrap-it-up music” by stopping his speech and demanding more time, saying, “It would be in good taste to stop the music now.”
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