Aug 26, 2025 1:53 PM
Blindfold Test: Buster Williams
Buster Williams, who at the age of 83 has been on the scene for 65 years, had never done a Blindfold Test. The first…
Sullivan Fortner (left), Tyler Bullock and Esteban Castro, honorees of the inaugural Gilmore Larry J. Bell Jazz Artist Awards.
(Photo: Melanie Mor)Midway through a trio tour last March en route to Atlanta for a concert in Spivey Hall, pianist Sullivan Fortner took a phone a call from his agent and close friend, Chris Mies, who informed him of a 3 p.m. appointment at his hotel. “Chris told me to get dressed and go past the lobby into a banquet room, and I’d see some stuff that’s interesting,” Fortner told DownBeat. “When I asked why, Chris said, ‘I can’t tell you.’”
To Fortner’s surprise, the room was filled with a cohort of friends and professional acquaintances. As he greeted them, a stranger grabbed his hand and introduced himself as Larry Bell from the Gilmore Keyboard Foundation, which has sponsored the internationally prestigious Gilmore Piano Award for classical pianists, which carries a $300,000 prize, since 1993. “I thought I was going to have to write something,” said Fortner, who’d played several concerts at the Gilmore’s annual piano festival after winning the American Pianists Association’s Cole Porter Fellowship in 2015, and follows past classical winners Igor Levitt and Yu Wang. “Then Larry Bell said, ‘I’m happy to report that we started the jazz equivalent to the Gilmore Piano Award, and you were selected as the inaugural recipient of the Larry J. Bell Gilmore Award for Jazz.’”
Fortner had been sworn to secrecy until Oct. 8, when the Gilmore held a ceremony at the Jerome L. Greene Space in Manhattan to officially announce his victory, and the attendant $300,000 gift — $50,000 in cash; the remaining $250,000 designated to support artistic projects over the next four years. It is the largest single gift ever dedicated solely to a jazz artist. Also mentioned were the winners of the ancillary Larry J. Bell Young Jazz Artist Award, Tyler Bullock and Esteban Castro, who each received a $25,000 stipend.
There followed a public acknowledgment of the five members of the heretofore anonymous Artistic Advisory Committee, who had traveled widely over a two-year span, surreptitiously, and often pseudonymously, to attend multiple shows at which they scrutinized, evaluated and debated internally on the merits of Fortner and the other finals candidates who emerged from a 42-person nominating committee that included top-of-the-pyramid pianists Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes, Aaron Diehl, Helen Sung and Aaron Goldberg, as well as various eminent presenters, managers and journalists.
“Some people on the selection committee were at concerts I’d done in Europe and Japan,” Fortner said. “If I’d known, it would make me a little nervous. I didn’t even know that they were part of the committee until they announced it last night.”
In a phone conversation the day after the event, Larry Bell compared the Gilmore’s process “to competitions that have judges in a room, where unsavory things can happen. For this, the artists don’t know that they’re involved. They’re not trying to impress anybody. They’re just doing what they do. Rather than sitting in a room and listening one time, we’re checking out they are over a long period of time. Will they go on to have a recording career? Will they be a voice for the music and continue to perform and move it forward? Are they writing compositions? Are they a good communicator? I think Mr. Fortner is excellent at all of that, and in his compositions, in his breadth.”
The founder of Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan, The Gilmore’s base of operations and home of the Gilmore’s piano festival, Larry Bell has favored jazz since childhood. “I went with my mother to hear Art Hodes play at the 1981 Chicago Jazz Festival, because he lived in my hometown, Park Forest, Illinois,” he recalled. “We went backstage to see him, and he autographed some records for me. I grew up playing percussion, and I got into the flute — I’d play along to Herbie Mann and Bud Shank. I used to do a Sunday night jazz show on pubic radio. I tried being a booking agent for bands, and I played a little bit. I actually got accepted to the music school at Western Michigan University, but I never matriculated. Beer wound up being my calling instead of music.”
At the end of 2021, Bell sold the craft brewing company he’d founded with $200 in 1983, and “had what they call a liquidity event.” He was advised to think about giving away money for tax purposes. On February 17, 2022, the Gilmore announced Bell’s $8.8 million donation for his namesake award.
“I’d been on the Gilmore board for a while,” Bell said. “Jazz has always needed extra help, and as I see it, with jazz entering its second century, an award of this scale can bring more attention to the genre. Also, we know that jazz brings a more diverse crowd to our concerts and can perhaps expand for those people their knowledge base of all music, whether jazz or classical. We negotiated an agreed-upon number of $8 million to make it happen, since we need money not just for the award, but also for Jazz Director, for travel, for the committee and setting up a website for them, as well as other costs. At the beginning of 2022, the stock market had its worst period in 50 years, and the Gilmore’s rules mandated that we needed to get some money from the fund, as it had fallen below where the rule allows disbursements, so I put in an extra $800,000.”
In June 2022, the Gilmore announced that veteran producer Seth Abramson would come on board in September as Director of Jazz Awards, a position created to oversee the nomination and selection process. He spent the next six months putting together the nominating and artistic advisory committees. “The idea was to mirror the classical award with respect to having a larger public-facing nominating committee of professionals across the industry of international scope, and then the anonymous five-person Artistic Advisory Committee that would select the winner, whose members would have to be discreet throughout,” Abramson told DownBeat. “I was worried about keeping the work of both committees secret, because although we want transparency in the larger committee, which gives legitimacy to our work, the identities of the pianists under consideration should never be shared.”
Abramson chaired the committee (Joan A. Cararach, Artistic Director of Barcelona Jazz Festival; Vivian Chiu, Director of Cultural Partnerships and Artist Services at Steinway & Sons; Christopher Roberts, former President of the Classics and Jazz Division of Universal Music Group; Mark Ruffin, Program Director and On-Air Host for Real Jazz at Sirius XM Satellite Radio; and Wayne Winborne, Executive Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark) through a series of in-person and virtual meetings and debates as they went through the process of whittling down the finalists from a dozen to five.
“The idea was to put together a group of people with different backgrounds and ideas, and it worked very well,” Cararach said. “I learned a lot from my fellow colleagues, and I am very proud and happy to have been part of this process. I think we did a good job, because we really discussed in depth all the other piano players, although I think that Sullivan was an easy choice. I believe the decision was unanimous. It was also unanimous for Tyler Bullock and Esteban Castro, who I wasn’t very familiar with. I saw Tyler Bullock in New York in August, when I came with my family as a tourist in New York for the first time in 30 years.
“Everyone was really good at being secret. Nobody made a leak. Nobody made a mistake. It was kind of a joke, because I saw Sullivan many times during the process, and of course, I couldn’t tell him anything. After he was told, we had dinner in Barcelona to celebrate. But I couldn’t tell anyone about it until October. At the reception before the program, people were surprised to see me, because I don’t travel so much to New York now. “‘What are you doing here?’ ‘You will see, you will see.’ When the committee was announced and we stood up, everyone knew.”
Abramson would neither confirm nor deny that Fortner, a long-time mentee of Fred Hersch who Brad Mehldau praised on social media during the process for “quietly revolutionizing jazz piano playing — actually piano playing period,” led the pack from beginning to end. “I can say that Sullivan was always in the running,” Abramson said.
He recalled encountering pianist Zaccai Curtis at Fortner’s Atlanta concert after encountering the Gilmore cohort. “Zaccai asked what I was doing there. I told him I had work to do in Atlanta, saw that the concert was happening, and wanted to come out. Before the selection, I went to see Sullivan play a solo concert at SFJAZZ, and then had lunch with him the next day. He’s brilliant, amazing, and he can do anything. Without him knowing it, I was feeling him out, trying to find out: Where does he want to go with his career? What’s a dream project? — dig a little bit and understand how will this help him if he gets this award.”
Fortner, whose mother was a choir director, mentioned his dream of a project featuring his family. “I come from a family of singers,” he told DownBeat. “So the dream would be, within the next year or so, to stick put 50 or 60 people in my family in the studio and recording us singing original compositions or arrangements that I or other people of my family put together of primarily religious texts, mostly drawn from Scripture, maybe some things from the Apocrypha, maybe some of the texts that were left out of the Bible, but could very well have been part of the canon.”
At Greene Space, after the award announcement, Fortner played a 20-minute solo concert: Jelly Roll Morton’s “Grandpa’s Spells,” an impressionistic original titled “Sticks and Ladders,” the iconic bolero “Tres Palabras.” After an illuminating 15-minute interview with Ruffin, he returned to the piano for a kaleidoscopic, definitive investigation of “’Round Midnight.” Then he joined Castro and Bullock for a well-organized romp through Duke Ellington’s “Take The Coltrane.” His playing embodied Mehldau’s effusions in the aforementioned social media post: “Sullivan is deep on all levels — touch, counterpoint, utter relaxation, swing, transparency of ideas, no matter how dense the texture. He takes you through the whole emotional spectrum, unabashed joy included. It’s completely rooted and completely original all at once.”
“They told me to pretend it was just a concert, and not overthink it or put too much pressure on myself,” Fortner said. “So I picked songs that have been, for the most part, mainstays of my more recent solo performances. There was a good contrast between the songs, which is what I try to do.”
Speaking of contrast, Fortner was preparing to fly to Chicago the next day for a concert with “Sullivan Fortner and his Galactic Friends” (trombonists Craig Harris and Frank Lacy, trumpeter Marquis Hill, multi-saxophonist Scott Robinson, bassist Alex Blake and drummer Kendrick Scott), a project he organized last year for a 110th birthday celebration for Sun Ra. “I have a two-Moog set, a Rhodes, a Hammond organ and piano, and a little face shield and a ski mask that I wear for half the show,” he said. Then he’d fly to Barcelona for a concert at Cararach’s Barcelona Jazz Festival to launch a three-week European sojourn with his trio and another fortnight in duo with Cécile McLorin Salvant, his partner in music and in life.
“I told my parents and Cécile, but my parents didn’t know the exact details, or how grand the award is,” Fortner said. “$300,000 is a lot of money for a musician to do all kinds of things with. For the Gilmore Foundation to have this sets a certain standard and tone, because then it raises the bar for piano players to pursue excellence, and pursue it at the highest level they can.” DB
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