Bad Bunny or Billie Eilish? Olivia Dean or Lola Young? These are a couple of the matchups taking center stage at the 68th Grammy Awards this Sunday, Feb. 1 in Los Angeles. But here at WRTI, we have different rooting interests — naturally focused on jazz and classical music, with a foothold in Philadelphia.
So here are a handful of nominees we’ll be watching with interest during the Grammy Awards Premiere Ceremony, which is when most of the awards (including those for jazz and classical fields) will be announced. The Premiere Ceremony will stream live from Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. ET on the Recording Academy's YouTube channel and at live.GRAMMY.com, several hours before the main event is broadcast live on CBS, streaming at Paramount+.
Stay tuned for our full coverage of the winners, in both classical and jazz fields. For now, let’s get acquainted with some Philly Made nominees.
Best Orchestral Performance
No classical institution is more closely associated with our city than The Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. This year will mark the ensemble’s 125th anniversary, and we’ll join them in celebrating with some special programming. What brings them to the Grammys this year is their album Still & Bonds, released on Deutsche Grammophon last summer.
The album turns a spotlight on two pioneering African American composers of the 20th century whose music has enjoyed a resurgence in the 21st: William Grant Still and Margaret Bonds. Each has become a beloved staple of the Orchestra’s repertoire, and this album contains some of their most acclaimed works: Still’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4, Bonds’ Montgomery Variations.
Regular listeners of The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert will recognize these performances from a stirring episode that we aired last April (and again in September). And the album has been widely acclaimed. “The Philadelphia Orchestra play this music with sensitivity and sumptuousness under Yannick Nézet-Séguin,” wrote Andrew Farach-Colton, reviewing the album for Gramophone. “I only hope this team go on to record Still’s remaining three symphonies. In the meantime, this shoots straight to the top of my list of this year’s best albums.”
We’ll obviously be rooting for the Philadelphians in this category — and for Yannick, who is also in the running for Best Opera Recording, as conductor of The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, for Tesori: Grounded.
Best Choral Performance
The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, has become a juggernaut in the Best Choral Performance category, racking up 10 nominations in nine consecutive years, and winning four times: in 2018, 2019, 2023 and 2025. This year, they’re in the running with poor hymnal, David Lang’s concert-length work co-commissioned by The Crossing and Nally, along with the Nederlands Kamerkoor. Its concert premiere came under the auspices of Penn Live Arts on Dec. 15, 2023.
Lang constructed the text for his work by pulling phrases and lyrical scraps from a range of sources: the Biblical Old Testament, Tolstoy, the speeches of Gandhi and Obama. As he put it: “This piece is trying to say: The reason we are coming together is to remember how important we are to each other, and to remember how important it is that we take care of each other.”
“With a somber, tear-stained tone, Lang mourns his project’s impossibility,” critic Oussama Zahr wrote of the album in the New York Times. “Perhaps as countermand, he instructs the singers to be ‘direct,’ ‘plain-spoken’ and ‘not overly sentimental.’ The canny chamber musicians of the Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally, oblige with smooth, dry-eyed luminosity that sustains a gently haunted air.” Don’t be surprised if this brings Grammy No. 5.
Best Jazz Instrumental Album
No jazz artist — hardly any artist in any genre, in fact — has a better track record at the Grammys than the late pianist-composer Chick Corea, who has won 28 times. His most recent win landed posthumously, when Remembrance, a collaboration with banjoist Béla Fleck, won for Best Jazz Instrumental Album last year.
Corea could well do it again, because Trilogy 3 (Live) is in the running. The album features his intuitive trio with Christian McBride on bass and Brian Blade drums — a band that has already gone two-for-two, winning Grammys for Trilogy 2, in 2021, and Trilogy, in 2015. Setting aside our feelings about another posthumous win for a legend who doesn’t exactly need the boost, we’re following this nomination because McBride will always and forever be a Philly guy. That said, there are other categories (see below) where he has a chance at a golden gramophone.
Also in the running for Best Jazz Instrumental Album is Belonging, by the Branford Marsalis Quartet. This is a track-by-track tribute to a landmark of the 1970s, by Keith Jarrett’s so-called European Quartet. Marsalis has long been a vocal admirer of that band, and his own quartet — whose drummer, Justin Faulkner, is not only Philly Made but also a faculty member at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance — tackles the material with gusto. (I won’t soon forget a rampaging version of “‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours” that the quartet played in concert at Penn Live Arts a couple of years ago, before the album was announced.)
“I’m glad I didn’t try to do this 15 years ago,” Marsalis told Michel Martin of NPR’s Morning Edition. “I think we would have failed, or it just wouldn’t have been very good. We would have succeeded to a degree. But the songs have beautiful melodies and great emotional depth, and you have to be a mature musician to grasp the emotion in each song and tailor the sound of your instruments and of your group to reproduce the emotion that’s required.”
Best Jazz Performance
The aforementioned Trilogy 3 has also delivered a nomination in the Best Jazz Performance category, for “Windows - Live,” a version of a vintage Corea composition first heard on albums by flutist Hubert Laws and saxophonist Stan Getz. Corea notably included it on his 1967 trio album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. If you’re listening for McBride, you should know that he enters the picture at 2:20, and his bass solo begins around 5:45.
Among the other contenders in this category is alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, who has received five previous nominations. Benjamin is a New Yorker, but on “Noble Rise,” the track in contention here, she welcomes a fellow alto from Philly, Immanuel Wilkins. That’s good enough for us.
Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
We hope you haven’t gotten tired of McBride, because here is a category where he’s the odds-on favorite. Without Further Ado, Vol 1 is the latest from the Christian McBride Big Band, which won in this category in 2022 and 2018. What makes this entry unique is its guest list, featuring a starry array of vocalists — including Dianne Reeves, Sting, José James, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Samara Joy.
But here’s where a Philly partisan might have to confront divided loyalties, because McBride is up against the Sun Ra Arkestra, for Lights on a Satellite, a studio album recorded about a month after Marshall Allen’s 100th birthday. It’s just one more stop on Allen’s well-deserved victory lap, which also included his induction as an NEA Jazz Master last spring. Still, wouldn’t it be nice to see the Sun Ra Arkestra win a Grammy? Sun Ra never did, which robbed the world of what surely would have been an acceptance speech to remember.
Best Alternative Jazz Album
Best Alternative Jazz Album was added as a new Grammy category in 2024, and so far it has been monopolized by one artist, bassist and singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello: she won the first time for The Omnichord Real Book, and the second time for No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin. She isn’t in the mix this year, which bodes well for her labelmate, the aforementioned alto saxophonist and Upper Darby native Immanuel Wilkins.
Blues Blood, released in the fall of 2024, certainly fits the spirit of Alternative Jazz, with its interweaving of several strikingly different vocalists, and its fluid approach to both genre and mood. As we noted last year, around the time that Wilkins presented the project at the Penn Museum, it’s a work of art that considers history and lineage as both foundational and fungible.
Wilkins is up against perhaps the stiffest competition in any jazz-related Grammy category: trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire; pianists Robert Glasper and Brad Mehldau; and drummer Nate Smith. But he has more than a fighting chance, and we at WRTI will be watching to see if he pulls off the win.
