Cohen, Bell among Grammy nominees

By Jayne Spencer

Joshua Bell

Ron Cohen

The Best of Broadside 1962-1988 was destined to make a splash.

Broadside, wrote Fricke, is “a grand tribute to a stubborn ideal, is also, in its way, a profound reflection on loss. Heard next to the greed and plasticity of early 21st-century pop, the conviction and selflessness in these songs sound like a long-dead language.”

Five months after its release, Broadside has been nominated for a 2001 Grammy in the category of “best historical album.” That leads to Indiana University historian Ron Cohen, who teaches on the IU Northwest campus. He will be in the audience Feb. 21 for the 43rd annual Grammy ceremony as co-producer of the nominated work.

Cohen, who co-directs the Calumet Regional Archives on IU’s northernmost campus, also will be waiting for the reading of the winner in the “best album notes” category for the 89-track collection that brings together “anthems of the American underground” that first debuted in the influential folk journal Broadside.

A personal friend of nonagenarian Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, co-founder with partner Gordon Friesen of the journal that would help define the American political and folk music movement begun in the 1940s, Cohen also recently edited the book Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography from the writings of political activists Cunningham and Friesen, who died in 1996.

The recording collection represents 25 years of major historical events in the works of such artists as Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, Buffy St. Marie, Janis Ian, Arlo Guthrie, Peggy Seeger, Phil Ochs, Mark Spoelstra, Peter La Farge, Malvina Reynolds and Bob Dylan, who recorded under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt.

Violinist Joshua Bell, who received his artist’s diploma in 1989 from the IU School of Music, is nominated for his world premiere recording of Nicholas Maw’s Violin Concerto, which also was the only classical recording nominated for the United Kingdom’s Mercury Music Prize this year. He was nominated along with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the category for “best instrumental solo performance with orchestra.”

Bell performed on last year’s broadcast of the Grammy ceremony, a television and Web simulcast that brought in nearly 60 million TV viewers from 185 countries, including, for the first time, the People’s Republic of China. That program was the first to beat the ratings of time-slot giant Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Bell, a native of Bloomington, has been nominated for a Grammy several times before, including last year, when he was nominated with fellow IU alumnus and double bassist Edgar Meyer for their album Short Trip Home.

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