[xtypo_dropcap]A[/xtypo_dropcap]nd the winner is... Karkwa! Who?
This year’s Polaris Prize winner is a relatively unheard of band from Montreal whose album “Les Chemins de verre” managed to win Canada’s premier independent music prize. Karkwa is the first Francophone group to win in the award’s five-year history.
No stranger to controversy, the Polaris Prize has made a name for itself by nominating and awarding under-the-radar musicians. The nominees are chosen exclusively on their artistic merits independent of album sales or popularity. No media machines and advertising budgets determine the nominees here.
“Anything that gets people engaged in full length albums and really studying the quality of the music out there we think is a good thing,” says Steve Jordan, executive director of the Polaris Prize. “[We want to] get people talking about what’s most important and that’s the music.”
The award acknowledges what many music fans have known for a long time—there is a ton of great music deserving of recognition out there that just doesn’t make it to the radio or through the mainstream hit-producing machine of the major record labels.
This year’s Polaris Prize winner is a relatively unheard of band from Montreal whose album “Les Chemins de verre” managed to win Canada’s premier independent music prize. Karkwa is the first Francophone group to win in the award’s five-year history.
No stranger to controversy, the Polaris Prize has made a name for itself by nominating and awarding under-the-radar musicians. The nominees are chosen exclusively on their artistic merits independent of album sales or popularity. No media machines and advertising budgets determine the nominees here.
“Anything that gets people engaged in full length albums and really studying the quality of the music out there we think is a good thing,” says Steve Jordan, executive director of the Polaris Prize. “[We want to] get people talking about what’s most important and that’s the music.”
The award acknowledges what many music fans have known for a long time—there is a ton of great music deserving of recognition out there that just doesn’t make it to the radio or through the mainstream hit-producing machine of the major record labels.
The Polaris Prize is where you find seminal Canadian bands like “Tegan and Sara” and “Broken Social Scene” nominated alongside the unknown, independent artists across the country. More often than not, mainstream acts have been left out of the winner’s circle, a case in point being Karkwa.
“There is a perception that our jury wilfully selects obscurity over popularity and that is not true,” says Jordan. “The popular records are very seriously considered, but we do appreciate those more popular nominees letting our more popular winners ride in their wake.”
The Polaris jury is comprised of 200 music experts and critics from across Canada who choose the nominees based on their own individual criteria for best album. An initial 40-title list is narrowed down to a 10-title shortlist, from which a winner is chosen by an 11-person grand jury. A $20,000 purse and nationwide name recognition is the grand prize
This year’s award ceremony, held at Toronto’s Masonic Temple, featured performances by the ten shortlisted artists: Broken Social Scene, The Besnard Lakes, Tegan and Sara, Shad, Caribou, Owen Pallett, Dan Mangan, Radio Radio, The Sadies, and winner Karkwa.
This type of award is not exclusively Canadian, (it is modeled after Britain’s Mercury Music Prize), but there is something about its growing popularity that is indicative of Canada’s attitude toward the arts.
“We [Canadians] are a passionate bunch about our art, anything from film to fiction, creative writing and dance,” Jordan says. “We did think there would be a predisposition for Canadians to embrace something like this.”
Each year the award evokes controversy, partly because the Canadians in this particular audience are highly opinionated when it comes to music and who should be deserving of the award.
What does the future hold for the Polaris Prize? Exporting Canadian talent to the world is Jordan’s vision.
“We already have some inroads in the media coverage that we get, specifically in the U.S. and the U.K. We’d like to harness some of the energy we have here and some of the energy we have over there and really turn it into a good export tool for the artists on our list.”
