Henry Diltz: Last News

The Recording Academy announced its 2023 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipients today, with Bobby McFerrin, Nirvana, Ma Rainey, Nile Rodgers, Slick Rick “The Ruler,” The Supremes, and Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson of Heart making the cut.

Roy Trakin There’s a famous photograph by Henry Diltz of Joni Mitchell playing guitar in Mama Cass Elliot’s Laurel Canyon backyard, with David Crosby holding up a joint in back and Eric Clapton sitting cross-legged watching transfixed. There, in the foreground, is Cass’ nine-month-old daughter Owen, teething on a film canister. “I often wonder what I was thinking,” says the now-55-year-old mother of two kids in their 20s, who lives in Encino with her husband of 31 years. “Clearly, I was thinking about that film canister. It was all pretty surreal, pretty cool.” Owen Elliot-Kugell, the only child of Mama Cass of the Mamas & the Papas, the seminal co-ed group that came to define the sound of 1960s hippie culture, has for years spearheaded the campaign to get her mother a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The ceremony will finally take place on Monday, Oct. 3 on a stretch of Hollywood Blvd. between Sycamore and LaBrea alongside the stars of Sidney Poitier and Tyne Daly, with the likes of bandmate Michelle Phillips and good friend John Sebastian on hand to mark the occasion.

Chris Willman Music WriterThe return of the Jazz Foundation of America’s annual benefit at Herb Alpert’s Vibrato club saw lifetime achievement awards being presented to four musical legends whose careers date to the ’60s or before, Randy Newman, Smokey Robinson, jazz fusion figure Bennie Maupin and producer Lou Adler. Homage was paid at the intimate nightspot in Bel Air by singers and actors including Jackson Browne, Merry Clayton, Herbie Hancock, Jeffrey Wright and Danny Glover.Drummer Steve Jordan — currently between Rolling Stones pickup gigs — led a house band out of the fantasies of anyone who scanned liner notes during the last 60 years, joined by Stones backup singers Lisa Fischer and Bernard Fowler among the serenaders, and jazz players Tom Scott, Billy Childs and Davell Crawford also taking the lead on tribute numbers during a two-and-a-half hour dream jam.