This spring, we announced our annual Connecticut Music Awards/Grand Band Slam readers’ poll by inviting you all to vote for your favorite albums, songs, bands and DJs. About 90,000 votes were cast. That’s gotta be some kind of record.
We tallied the results. We handed out awards at the annual Connecticut Music Awards ceremony on Wednesday, June 17. We even honored some of the folks we lost.
You jumped for joy or held back tears. And finally, here they are, ready to meet their public: Your picks for the best overall, new, blues, country, DJ, gospel, hip-hop, folk, indie rock, jam-band, jazz, metal, punk, r&b, reggae, rock, singer-songwriter and tribute acts in Connecticut in 2015.
Oh, and while we’re at it, you can also check out many of the winners and nominees — 25 performers, playing Thursday, Friday and Saturday, June 18 to 20, at seven different venues as part of our Grand Band Slam shows happening in Wallingford, New Haven, Hartford and Bridgeport. Schedule here.
Album of the Year
Sarah LeMieux Quintet: “Moments Musicaux”
“Moments Musicaux,” New Haven-based singer/guitarist Sarah LeMieux’s second album, gathers nine examples of what she calls “chamber jazz” — intimate, eclectic art songs, arranged for a hybrid quintet of classical and jazz instruments and dusted with nimble improvisation — without losing touch of her blues roots.
Song of the Year
Canyon: “Slow”
Westport musician Canyon Fredrickson’s minor-key lament “Slow” wrings mileage out of a simple juxtaposition: “I’m gonna kiss you slow,” she sings in the first verse, “I’m gonna take my … time,” the last word eliding into the next phrase. But that’s not the correct order: “I’m gonna take my time / I’m gonna kiss you slow,” she continues. It’s a moving, elegant device.
Best Blues
The Balkun Brothers
West Hartford brothers Steve (guitars, vocals) and Nick (drums, vocals) Balkun play fuzzed-out, psychedelic blues-funk that owes as much to Mountain and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as the Delta masters. But don’t discredit their bonafides: They’ve won numerous NE blues competitions in recent years and have practically owned this category since the birth of the CTMAs.
Best Overall Band
Balkun Brothers
You’ll never be successful as a band without dogged determination. Brothers Steve and Nick Balkun play 200 gigs a year, turning in two- and three-hour sets of dirty, jam-heavy blues-rock, funk and metal. And although they just released an excellent new album, “Redrova,” they’re already at work on a follow-up with blues legend Popa Chubby at the helm.
Best Country/Americana
Forgotten By Friday
Stratford’s Forgotten by Friday — vocalist Maria Soaft, bassist Dominick Mauro, guitarists Joe Ayala and Mike Forgette, drummer Mike G. and multi-instrumentalist Lawrence Wenthen — threads the needle between “Let It Bleed”-era Stones, Charlie Daniels and Zac Brown. “Whiskey & Song,” a recent release, dishes out modern country-rock that’s wonderfully unpolished.
Best Gospel
University of Hartford Gospel Choir
Over the last two decades, the 40-member University of Hartford Gospel Choir has become an area favorite at college functions and churches, while offering substantive, on-campus concerts in December and April of each year. Its last recording — a soundtrack for the NYU student film “Tobacco Burn” — came out in 2013, and a follow-up is in the works.
Best New Band
Broca’s Area
Newness is a virtue, an edge, a novelty that brings people out to the bars (or not), but once you’ve grabbed them, it’s up to you to keep their attention. Hartford-area quintet Broca’s Area — singer Mary Corso, rapper Ghazi Omair, bassist Leo Catricala, keyboardist Zach Heyde and drummer Stephen Cusano — have done just that, packing shows across the state and with “Clarity,” an expertly crafted debut EP. You’ll hear more from them.
Best R&B/Soul/Funk
Broca’s Area
Soul, jazz, hip-hop and proggy alt-rock collide on “Clarity,” the debut EP by Hartford collective Broca’s Area. Mary Corso sings and Ghazi Omair rhymes, over odd-meter vamps, oblique chord progressions and danceable grooves — laid down by drummer Stephen Cusano, bassist Leo Catricala and keyboardist Zach Heyde — that ultimately prove worthy of stretching out in the clubs.
Best Folk/Traditional
Heather Fay
Folk music deals in honesty and resilience, and New Haven singer-songwriter Heather Fay taps into both. “I could spend my days waiting for the tide to turn,” she sings on “Scrape Knee’d Girl,” from her album “Cherish the Broken,” over acoustic-guitar arpeggios and languid fiddle lines, “but looking in my bloodline, praying just seems like a waste of time.” You get the sense she’ll figure it out.
Best Singer/Songwriter
Daphne Lee Martin
Depending on how you first discovered her, you might think of Daphne Lee Martin as a country singer, a folk singer, a ’70s-style female singer-songwriter, the powerhouse frontwoman of a rock band, an indie pop stylist, or (insert genre here). Truth is, she can do it all. Daphne Lee Martin’s fourth solo album, “Fall On Your Sword,” is in the works, if Martin can stop touring long enough.
James Velvet Memorial Award
Rick Allison
The Connecticut music scene lost one of its biggest boosters, and greatest talents, this year. James Velvet — singer/songwriter, band leader (of the Mocking Birds, Ivory Bills, Lonesome Sparrows et al.) and co-host of over 1,400 episodes of WPLR’s “Local Bands Show” — died on April 17. In his honor, the Connecticut Music Awards are adding a new award to the roster. The inaugural James Velvet Memorial Award is going to James’ close friend and longtime Local Bands co-host Rick Allison, the veteran DJ and radio announcer who also does a 10 a.m. weekday show on locals-friendly Cygnus Radio. Congratulations, Rick. As James would say: “See you around town.”
Best Jazz
Sarah LeMieux Quintet
Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sarah LeMieux, violist Gretchen Frazier, clarinetist/flautist Julie Levene, drummer Brendan LeMieux and upright bassist Alex Millan call their sound “chamber jazz … part Debussy, part Ella Fitzgerald, part Klezmer.” The combo formed in the spring of 2014. Their first album, “Moments Musicaux,” was recorded two months later, and they’re hoping to hop into a studio again this summer.
Best Metal
Vengeance
“Original fist-pumping classic heavy metal” band Vengeance — from that heaviest of Connecticut cities, Oxford — features the soaring vocals of Debbie Seymour, the seismic guitar of Duncan MacIntyre and the double-shock rhythm section of Kurt and Kevin Schock. The band just celebrated a decade of Vengeance with a 19-song compilation album, “10 Years.”
Best Reggae
Mystic Bowie
Mystic Bowie, the reggae/ska/world fusionist, may be best known for his 17 years fronting Tom Tom Club. He plays hundreds of dates a year with his own band, featuring Marvin Burke on drums, Cosmo Brown on guitar, Benton Reid on keys and Hoover on bass. The next album will be “Talking Dreads,” Jamaican-style covers of Talking Heads songs.
Best Jamband
Max Creek
After 43 years, you’d think some fossilization would have crept into Max Creek’s music. Not the case: guitarist Scott Murawski, keyboardist Mark Mercier and bassist John Rider, who’ve played together since the mid-’70s, along with percussionists Bill Carbone and Jamemurrell Stanley, are currently making some of the best improvisational music of their careers.
Best Rock
1974
Newington’s prog-savvy 1974 (guitarists Mike Forgette and Adam Clymer, drummer Tim Moore, bassist Gary Dionne and keyboardist Parker Hu) are busy creating “1974 and the Echoes of War,” a follow-up to their 2013 epic, “1974 and the Death of the Herald.” Lately, they’ve been listening to a lot of Yes and Tull, but when you ask which albums changed their lives, you hear about the Decemberists and “Sgt. Pepper,” not just “Close to the Edge.”
Best Tribute Band
Earth
This seasoned Black Sabbath tribute act from New Haven features the iconic local metal drummer Opus, guitarist Bill Russel, bassist Erick Von Heller and vocalist Ron Vanacore doing the Ozzy growl. Formed 15 years ago and seen several times a year at Toad’s Place and other clubs, Earth is currently working on “a kick-ass 20 minute Sabbath medley.”
Best Hip-Hop
Political Animals
Vocalist Sotorios, drummer Trent, DJ N.E.B. and bassist Jenny are some well-traveled animals, with summer festival gigs coming up in Maine, Ohio and Massachusetts. They liken themselves to “The Roots meets KRS-One meets NAS.” A video for their song “Who Want What” will be released in July, and a full new album will follow in the fall.
Best DJ
DJ N.E.B.
N.E.B. stands for Never Ending Beats. DJ N.E.B. spins the tables for this year’s Best Hip-Hop winners, Political Animals. He also has a solo career separate from the band, which has yielded an instrumental album and the singles/videos “On My Own” and “Nugh Jackman.”
Best Indie Rock
Violent Mae
The combustible blend of singer Becky Kessler and multi-instrumentalist/producer Floyd Kellogg has earned the duo acclaim and awards ever since the plan for Kellogg to produce Kessler’s solo record morphed into a full-fledged collaboration. Violent Mae’s second album is coming in the fall.
Best Punk
Straight to VHS
Jon Young, Jay Silva and Tim Donel have mastered the old-school garage/punk trio format. The New London-based band describes its sound as “the ever-so-slight burn that you get from drinking a Coca-Cola on a warm August morning.” The raging “Weekend Weekend Weekend” is now 2 years old; a new EP’s expected this year.
