Album inspired by Sandy Hook victim gets Grammy nominations
By Mesfin Fekadu,Music Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --For saxophonist Jimmy Greene, whose daughter died in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, earning Grammy nominations for his album inspired by late daughter is "bittersweet."
Greene earned his first pair of Grammy nominations Monday, including best arrangement, instruments and vocals for "When I Come Home" and best jazz instrumental album for "Beautiful Life," which he created in honor of Ana Márquez-Greene and also features her vocals.
"It's amazing, but to be honest with you I wish the album never had to be made," Greene said in a phone interview Monday. "I wish my little girl were here; that I didn't have to pay tribute to her, that I could have her here. It's very bittersweet."
"Beautiful Life," Greene's 10th album as a band leader, was released last year. He started working on the album not long after his 6-year-old daughter was gunned down with 19 other first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Co nnecticut.
"It was incredible painful at the time the songs were written. It was a few months after she was killed," he said. "I was at my work station where I compose and my face wet with tears doing a lot of the writing, but I really felt like I wanted the world to hear a little bit about how my daughter lived."
Greene said Ana enjoyed singing and he juxtaposed home video recordings of her voice with his own composition on "Saludos/Come Thou Almighty King," the opening track of his latest album.
"It was important for me also to have people hear her own voice. She loved to sing and she had a beautiful singing voice," he said.
Greene made the album – which also features his 11-year-old son Isaiah – with the help of Norman and David Chesky of Chesky Records, who helped fund and produce the album.
"It wouldn't have happened without them, and they sought no profit from this at all. They gave me complete ownership of the masters they paid for," he s aid. "It's an amazing gift they gave."
A portion of the proceeds from "Beautiful Life" will benefit two organizations: The Artists Collective, where Greene studied and taught, and The Ana Grace Project, founded by his wife Nelba Marquez-Greene, a marriage and family therapist.
"(We're) trying to promote empathy and compassion in young kids to hopefully prevent these instances of gun violence like the one that took my daughter's life," he said of The Ana Grace Project. http://anagraceproject.org/
Greene has appeared as a sideman on roughly 75 albums and is a professor at Western Connecticut State University, where he also coordinates the jazz studies program. He's also working on his doctorate in jazz studies at the Manhattan School of Music.
"I'm very thankful I have music as a vocation. It's a language on its own and it has a way of communicating when words just don't cut it," he said.
After 20 Years of Acting, Megan Park Finds Her Groove In The Director’s Chair On “My Old Ass”
Megan Park feels a little bad that her movie is making so many people cry. It's not just a single tear either — more like full body sobs.
She didn't set out to make a tearjerker with "My Old Ass," now streaming on Prime Video. She just wanted to tell a story about a young woman in conversation with her older self. The film is quite funny (the dialogue between 18-year-old and almost 40-year-old Elliott happens because of a mushroom trip that includes a Justin Bieber cover), but it packs an emotional punch, too.
Writing, Park said, is often her way of working through things. When she put pen to paper on "My Old Ass," she was a new mom and staying in her childhood bedroom during the pandemic. One night, she and her whole nuclear family slept under the same roof. She didn't know it then, but it would be the last time, and she started wondering what it would be like to have known that.
In the film, older Elliott ( Aubrey Plaza ) advises younger Elliott ( Maisy Stella ) to not be so eager to leave her provincial town, her younger brothers and her parents and to slow down and appreciate things as they are. She also tells her to stay away from a guy named Chad who she meets the next day and discovers that, unfortunately, he's quite cute.
At 38, Park is just getting started as a filmmaker. Her first, "The Fallout," in which Jenna Ortega plays a teen in the aftermath of a school shooting, had one of those pandemic releases that didn't even feel real. But it did get the attention of Margot Robbie 's production company LuckyChap Entertainment, who reached out to Park to see what other ideas she had brewing.
"They were very instrumental in encouraging me to go with it," Park said. "They're just really even-keeled, good people, which makes... Read More