BMAs // Jazz
A guide to the 2024 Boston Music Awards
The 2024 Boston Music Awards is at Big Night Live on December 11.
Hump Day News was nominated for Best Music Publication.
You can vote for all the nominees here.
To honor our glorious symbolic inclusion and insufferable clout chasing, we’re rolling out the BMAde Betterz series for 2024. In this series we send the nominees through the meat grinder to yield three main categories of sodium-enriched meat byproducts.
The “New To Us”
Never heard of them, or at least never heard them. But they’re on the list, so let’s have a listen.
The “House Specials”
We’ve covered these acts, we treasure these acts, we 100% get why they’ve been nominated.
The “New To You”
These artists didn’t make the list, but they should have!
Jazz Artist of the Year // Nominees
BT-ALC Big Band // Club d'Elf // Darren Barrett // Grace Kelly // Ize Trio // Joe Hunt // Seventh Sun // Terri Lyne Carrington // The Fringe // Tim Carman Trio
Check out “Black Narcissus” by Seventh Sun. Horn-forward jazz with spacey keys, guitar, and bass on the back end. Swanky.
Ize Trio’s latest album includes “suites” in the title. So they’re either trying to sell you some Adobe software, or they’re just real classy motherfuckers. And Club d’Elf shouldn’t be “New To Us” because the superlative jazz collective have been gigging for years in the area. But Hump Day News still doesn’t have any live coverage. That ends in 2025.
Shout out to the Lilypad (and their Live Music Venue nomination) because the Inman Square destination provides a regular landing spot for The Fringe and Joe Hunt. The former have a weekly residency, playing the late show every Monday night. The latter can be found playing with the Joe Hunt Group at least once a month.
Let’s think outside the box by listing The Blues Dream Box, which features some of my favorite experimental jazz scratchings on the electric guitar in the city. This is “Lower East Side” stuff, so it can shade off into noisy directions that the “supper club” jazz set can’t hang with. But you and me will love it. And is Clamb jazz? They’re “jazzy,” and that’s enough for me. Check out their fusion stew.