The Recording Academy will honor artists from a wide variety of genres next spring when it hands out Lifetime Achievement Grammys at a special ceremony. It will recognize Black Sabbath, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, jazz singer Billy Eckstine, Donny Hathaway, Julio Iglesias, Sam and Dave and Dionne Warwick, according to Variety, in Los Angeles on May 11th.
Other honorees include producer Lou Adler, artists and songwriters Ashford and Simpson and songwriter Johnny Mandel, who will all receive Trustees Awards. The late Saul Walker, who innovated microphone preamps and other recording technologies, will be recognized with the Technical Grammy Award.
The Lifetime Achievement recipients are an interesting group of performers since many of them have scaled back their activity in recent years. Black Sabbath held their final tour, The End, last year, though each of the four founding members are working on their own projects; Ozzy Osbourne is out on his own No More Tours 2 Tour, his last big outing. George Clinton is retiring from the road. And both Billy Eckstine and Donny Hathaway are deceased. Of the duos, only Sam and Dave’s Sam Moore and Ashford and Simpson’s Valerie Simpson are still alive.
On the brighter side, Julio Iglesias and Dionne Warwick still occasionally perform, and Lou Adler is still producing — he worked on Fox’s live broadcast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again in 2016. Mandel, who is 93 and has worked with Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Count Basie, among others, arranged Tony Bennett’s The Art of Romance album in 2004 and Streisand’s Love Is the Answer in 2009.