New Age ETC. Grammy Awards 2025

In the Best New Age, Ambient, Chant, Whatever-the-Fuck Album Category the nominees are:

Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album
Break of Dawn — Ricky Kej
Triveni — Wouter Kellerman, Éru Matsumoto & Chandrika Tandon
Visions Of Sounds De Luxe — Chris Redding
Opus — Ryuichi Sakamoto
Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn — Anoushka Shankar
Warriors Of Light — Radhika Vekaria

The what-ever-the-fuck was as true this year as many others, but after the initial shock of totally inappropriate nominees like Chris Redding and inconsequential ones like Radhika Vekaria, my reaction became more calibrated.

Why The New Age etc. category can never get it even close to right is an unending mystery to me. Every year is full of inconsequential, unknown, downright godawful or absolutely in-the-wrong-category nominees. And this year has one of the most egregiously wrong nominees ever. I’m saving the worst for last.  It seems that the New Age, Ambient, Chant category committees and voters do not know what those genres mean, do not know the difference between art and artifice, or are simply corrupt.

Except for one glaring exception, the music in this year’s NAAC nominees is not bad. They just don’t really represent the category which the Recording Academy describes as “ambient, exploratory, journey-like, and welcoming dissonance and consonance.” (See complete rules here.)

There is one album that is close to ambient and surprisingly, from one of the most unlikely sources. There is one and a half albums that might be New Age and one that might be chant and one that purports to be chant. So I guess they covered the stylistic spread, but. . .

While many feared that André 3000’s New Blue Sun would get nominated in New Age and swamp the category, it is Indians instead who dominate it, with South Asians appearing in 4 out of 6 nominations.

Among them is Anoushka Shankar, the immensely talented and musically wide-ranging Indian-American sitarist. Despite being raised in a strict classical tradition by her father, Ravi Shankar, she has, like her father, always been exploratory in her approach. Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn, is the second EP exploring a sound that is more ambient than anything she’s done before, especially the track “Offering,” a pure electronic drone piece with sitar accents. Co-composed with British film composer and producer Peter Raeburn, the album is meditative, but not somnambulant, with tracks ranging from more traditional raga modes to more exotic extrapolations. This should probably have been in the Global Music category, but I am happy to welcome it in New Age and Ambient.

Also coming in on the South Asian side is Ricky Kej. He is a prolific composer who has won three Grammys, two for the album, Divine Tides, his collaboration with Stewart Copeland. He won in the New Age category as well as the Immersive Audio category. So it’s no surprise that his latest album, a lushly layered, Indian-motif-drenched recording, Break of Dawn, is here. Like Shankar’s EP, Kej’s album could easily be in the Global Music category, but I am sure that the deep melodicism and electronic arrangements kept him out of there. But he, like Anoushka, is welcome in the New Age Category.

Ricky Kej’s other New Age Grammy was in 2015 for the album Winds of Samsara, a collaboration with South African flute player, Wouter Kellerman. Kellerman has his own entry this year, Triveni. While Kellerman is not Indian, one of his collaborators is: Indian-American singer Chandrika Tandon. Rounding out the trio is Japanese cellist Éru Matsumoto. Triveni is Sanskrit word for “where three rivers meet” and they converge on a sound that is an acoustic world fusion chamber music. Indian, African and western motifs weave in and out in gently undulating songs. Kellerman is a phenomenal flute player on multiple variations of the instrument. Again, it probably should be in Global music, but Kellerman has won in New Age before, so why not.

The final South Asian artist is Indian singer Radhika Vekaria, although her bio claims Indian, East African, and British roots. You may not have heard of her. I hadn’t, but she claims to have worked with Prince, Eddie Palmieri, Arman Van Buuren and more. Her album, Warriors of Light, falls into the chant part of the category on a nicely produced album that moves from more traditional straight chant performances like “Hanuman Chalisa”, sung a cappella against a tamboura drone and some very faint ambient flute touches, and “Liberate”, a middle of the road pop song. It’s not a bad album, but it doesn’t rise to the height of a Grammy nomination, and again, why isn’t this in global music?

Heading to East Asia, the late composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto has an album called Opus in the mix. It’s the soundtrack to the film, Opus, consisting of live recordings of Sakamoto recorded at NHK Studios in Tokyo. It is pure solo piano that an ailing Sakamoto recorded, just months prior to his death from cancer, which he knew was coming. It’s his last performance. He assays music from across his career, including tunes by Yellow Magic Orchestra and the ubiquitous “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” These are performed with intimate austerity, almost all played as slowly and simply as they have ever been. It’s as if Sakamoto were pondering every note he’s made in his life. As someone who has sat six feet from Ryuichi while he was playing two Echoes Concerts, it is the barest I’ve ever heard him. It is a fragile, yet emotionally pitch-perfect album, but its stark severity makes it hard to listen to straight through. Opus is far from New Age and certainly not ambient or chant. This should have been in a classical category because Sakamoto was making 20th & 21st century classical music.

That brings us to the WTF section of the show. How Chris Redding got beyond the Grammy Selection Committee, let alone the nominating committee is a mystery wrapped up in manipulation. Yeah, I’m calling out these committees who have missed the boat on too many occasions. Redding’s PR calls his music “ambient chant”, but Visions of Sound is pure R&B/Hip-Hop dressed in chopped-up rhythms and rhymes. It has zero reason being here and it isn’t very good even at that. Redding claims to be an award-winning musician and producer but I could not find a single award attributed to him. He could’ve won something for his good work in neurodiversity, but I didn’t see that either. His main calling card seems to be a panoply of neurological disorders including his own ADHD, Dyslexia, Synesthesia and his son’s Autism. But I have to tell you, that’s not so special. Half the artists I interview, especially Gen-Xers and Millennials, claim to have at least one of the first three ailments.

But here’s the capper. The album, Visions of Sounds Deluxe  is not even eligible to be entered. Redding’s album Visions of Sound, came out in early 2023 and was submitted for the Grammys at that time.  The album Visions of Sound Deluxe is the EXACT SAME ALBUM, but with 35-second intro added. That clearly violates Academy Rules that only New Recordings may be submitted in the non-historical categories.

If Chris Redding wins this award, The Grammys and the NAAC Committees and the Recording Academy have a lot to answer for.

As I mentioned earlier, many thought that André 3000’s ambient new age improvisational album, New Blue Sun, would overrun the category due to his popularity and reputation with the hip-hop group Outkast. And indeed, the album, which was dominated by his many flutes, was more purely new age and ambient than anything nominated this year. But instead of the NAAC category, New Blue Sun is in the Jazz category with Robert Glasper, Meshell Ndegeocello, Arooj Aftab and Keyon Harrold. To top that off, New Blue Sun is strangely nominated for album of the year alongside records by Beyoncé, Billie Eilish. Charlie XCX, Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan and Jacob Collier.

Given that, it would have been so good for it to be in the NAAC category, drawing attention to other music there. It’s not a great album. It’s half-baked. The improvisations are unfocused and not very intuitive, and the overall effect is muddy and vague. But unlike any of the other artists nominated, it would’ve brought more widespread attention to the category and maybe, the best music it represents.

This week there are weightier things to consider than the Grammys, in any category, where a bad winner won’t have nearly the consequences of the election. If the winner is a bad record, it will be forgotten, like Yusef Lateef’s Little Symphony (1988), Jack DeJohnette’s Peace Time (2009), Omar Akram’s Echoes of Love (2013), Laura Sullivan’s Love’s River (2014), and Carla Patuto’s So She Howls (2023). (The latter not a bad record, just in the wrong category.) Whereas other wins in the real world have much more lasting consequences.

The New Age, Ambient and Chant category remains a mess and the various Electronic Music categories and Contemporary Instrumental category, where a lot of this music could go, shut it out in favor of what are essentially pop and jazz records respectively.

So the Grammys are mess all over, and the NAAC is the messiest of them all. but they are what we have.