Jeff was the winner of the Anthony Burger Award for Instrumentalist of the
Post by David Bruce MurrayPost by G***@wmconnect.comBennett won in '93 and has won every year since.
Thanks...I knew that even after they stopped calling it the Anthony Burger
Award and Anthony was actually nominated a time or two, Roger continued to
win it. I just wasn't sure of exactly how many years Roger had won it in a
row.
The Singing News should have made Bennett ineligible after 2002 and called
it the Roger Bennett Award for the same period of years it was called the
Anthony Burger award. That would have been fair.
In one sense, not naming it after Roger slighted Roger...as if his ten
wins in a row weren't important enough to get the award named after him,
but Anthony's ten wins were.
In another sense, it was unfair to Anthony not to name the award after
Roger after 2002, because now Roger has 14 wins over Anthony's 10 and is
sort of the de facto "all time favorite" pianist...but you have to wonder
how many more times Anthony would have won the award if it had never been
named in his honor in the first place.
Bottom line, the award wasn't handled consistently after Roger's tenth
win, and both men are somewhat slighted due to the
inconsistency...depending on your point of view.
Of course, by now, I suspect there have been other categories where one
person won for ten years in a row...I think ten years in a row is
enough...I'd like to have seen the practice of naming the award after a
ten-year winner continued with every category. They could use a rule like,
"Win an award for ten years in a row and the award will be named after you
for five."
That would be both fair and consistent, while keeping the awards from
being so much the same from one year to the next.
--
David Bruce Murray is still "Making hay while the sun shines"
CD Reviews/BLOG: www.musicscribe.com/blog.html
"He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that
dare not is a slave."---Andrew Carnegie