The Grammy Awards ceremony will have added poignancy for two of the nominated acts.
Country music husband-and-wife duo Joey and Rory Feek, who are nominated for best country duo/group performance for If I Needed You have continued to release new music, even after they revealed that Joey is dying from cervical cancer.
Rory Feek has been documenting his wife’s struggle in an online blog and wrote in the autumn that they had decided to end treatment after the cancer spread. In the latest post, published last week, he said that her pain was increasing daily.
The duo's latest album, Hymns That Are Important to Us, was released on Friday. It includes the song When I'm Gone, which they recorded after one of Joey's first surgeries.
The Grammys will also be a bittersweet experience for saxophonist Jimmy Greene. He has two nominations for an album that was inspired by his daughter, Ana Márquez-Greene, who was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. His first-ever Grammy nominations are for Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals for the song When I Come Home, and Best Jazz Instrumental Album for Beautiful Life, which he created in honour of his daughter. It features her vocals.
“It’s amazing, but to be honest with you, I wish the album never had to be made,” Greene says. “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 it not long after his 6-year-old daughter was gunned down with 19 other first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“It was incredibly painful at the time the songs were written,” he says. “It was a few months after she was killed.
“I was at my workstation where I compose, and my face was 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 included home-video recordings of her voice with his own composition on Saludos/Come Thou Almighty King, the opening track of his album.
“It was important for me also to have people hear her own voice,” he says. “She loved to sing and she had a beautiful singing voice.”
Greene made the album – which also features his 11-year-old son Isaiah – with the assistance 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,” he says. “They gave me complete ownership of the masters they paid for. It’s an amazing gift they gave.”
A portion of the proceeds from Beautiful Life will benefit two organisations: The Artists Collective, with which Greene studied and taught, and The Ana Grace Project, founded by his wife Nelba Márquez-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.
Greene has appeared as a sideman on about 75 albums and is a professor at Western Connecticut State University, where he co-ordinates the jazz studies programme. 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.
