[dar-list] Joan Baez to receive lifetime achivement grammy

[Sharon G]

The quintessential jam band. Opera's most renowned diva. An L.A.
quartet whose flame still burns bright 25 years after the death of
their frontman. The first lady of folk rock.

The artists chosen by the National Academy of Recording Arts &
Sciences to receive a 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award not only
represent a broad swath of the music that has influenced the last 80
years in rock and roll, jazz, blues, opera and country.

The Grateful Dead, the Doors, folk star and activist Joan Baez, opera
legend Maria Callas, saxophonist and jazz composer Ornette Coleman,
country singer-songwriter Bob Wills and soul band Booker T. & the MG's
also are part of that regretfully large number of highly influential
artists who have never won a Grammy for their efforts.

But, just as the film industry honors Oscar-less titans year after
year with lifetime achievement awards, the Recording Academy works to
remedy its inevitable oversights, one year at a time.

"This year's group of accomplished honorees are as diverse as they are
influential as creators of the most renowned and prominent recordings
in the world," Recording Academy president Neil Portnow said in a
statement.

"Their contributions exemplify the highest artistic and technical
standards that have positively affected the music industry and music
fans."

In terms of Grammy glory, Baez, 65, has come the closest, collecting
six nominations over the years. Starting on the folk circuit in 1959,
the New York native was one of the earlier champions (and girlfriends)
of Bob Dylan. She followed him along the more socially conscious
songwriting path back in the 1960s on her way to becoming one of the
best-known protest artists of that era.

After a memorable appearance at Woodstock in 1969, Baez began to move
toward more of a pop rock sound, scoring a U.S. top 10 hit in 1971
with her cover of the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and
releasing her highest-selling album, 1975's Diamonds & Rust. She has
continued to record and perform for a number of causes, appearing at
Earth Day events, benefits for Hurricane Katrina and Iraq war
protests.

Perhaps it was the Grateful Dead's status as one of the most
boot-legged acts, ever, that kept the Recording Academy from bestowing
any official kudos until now. Fifty albums later and 11 years after
the death of ex post facto frontman Jerry Garcia, however, the Anthem
for the Sun rockers are getting their due.

The country's most successful touring band has seen a few faces come
and go since it rose out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury
counterculture in the mid-'60s, but the Academy will be paying tribute
to original members Garcia, drummer Bill Kreutzmann, guitarist Bob
Weir and bassist Phil Lesh, along with eventual second drummer Mickey
Hart.

Meanwhile, although lead singer Jim Morrison broke on through to the
other side at the age of 27 in 1971, the surviving members of the
Doorsguitarist Robby Krieger, drummer John Densmore and keyboardist
Ray Manzarekalso continue to rock out, albeit separately.

Densmore and Morrison's estate won a permanent injunction against
Krieger and Manzarek in 2005 preventing them from performing under any
incarnation of the Doors name (although they can call themselves
"former members of the Doors"). But although these are strange days
for the remaining Doors, their eclectic early recordings continue to
sell and their tunes are always popping up in movies. Densmore has
refused to license the band's music for television commercials,
though, feeling it would violate Morrison's wishes and the spirit in
which the songs were created.


estern swing pioneer Bob Wills, a Texas native who was a major
influence on last year's Lifetime Achievement Award winner Merle
Haggard, led his band, the Texas Playboys, for 30 years before a heart
attack sidelined him in 1964.

A triple threat on the guitar, fiddle and mandolin, Wills crisscrossed
the U.S. with the Texas Playboys throughout the 1940s and '50s.
Utilizing electric guitar and drums (which were forbidden at the Grand
Ole Opry when Wills took them onstage in 1944), the group was known
for being able to churn out big-band swing and pop music along with
Dixieland tunes.

Haggard's 1968 album A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player sparked
a western swing revival and moved Wills back into the public eye until
his death in 1975 at 70.

Southern soul band Booker T. & the MG's likewise inspired a generation
of artists, including Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and the Queen of
Memphis Soul, Carla Thomas. The multiracial groupan uncommon
attribute in the 1960s-era Southserved as Stax Records' house band,
churning out bluesy tunes such as "Green Onions," "Groovin'" and "Time
Is Tight," all top 40 hits.

Drummer Al Jackson died in 1975, but frontman Booker T. Jones still
tours with guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn, who
replaced original member Lewis Steinberg in the mid-'60s.

Now one of the elder statesmen of jazz, saxophonist Ornette Coleman,
76, known for his emotional, improvisatorial style, recorded a series
of albums for Atlantic Records that were later reflected in the
recordings of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and other "free jazz" stars
of the '60s.

In the 1970s Coleman pioneered a sound he dubbed "harmolodics" with
his double quartet Prime Timetwo guitars, two electric bassists, two
drummers and his alto sax. The music, focusing equally on harmony,
melody, and rhythm, influenced a younger generation of jazz artists,
including the M-Base Collective.

And even people who have never been to the opera, listened to an
operatic recording or who think that Rent's storyline was a nifty
original idea have heard of Maria Callas.

The New York-born and Greek-raised soprano, who passed away in 1977 at
54, added her interpretation to nearly all of the most well-known
classic and bel canto operas, whether through onstage performances or
studio recordings.

Callas sang parts in, among many others, Verdi's Aida and Macbeth,
Puccini's Tosca and La Boheme, Bizet's Carmen, Cherubini's Medea and
Richard Wagner's Die Walk|re, part of the German composer's famed Ring
Cycle.

The Lifetime Achievement Awards will be handed out at a private
ceremony during Grammy Week in February. The 49th Annual Grammy Awards
ceremony takes place Feb. 11 in Los Angeles.