Honors set for Montreal

The Montreal International Jazz Festival  has announced the award winners that it will honor this summer for their exceptional contributions to music. The awards will be presented during the 33^rd edition of the festival, which runs June 28 to July 8.

• Singer Liza Minnelli will receive the 2012 Ella Fitzgerald Award, which recognizes the versatility, improvisational originality and quality of repertoire of a singer renowned on the international scene.
• James Taylor will receive the Montreal Jazz Festival Spirit Award, which celebrates a popular artist’s extraordinary contribution to the musical world. With a career stretching over 40 years, the singer-songwriter has sold 50 million albums and won five Grammy Awards. 
• Bassist-bandleader Ron Carter will receive the 2012 Miles Davis Award, which honors a great international jazz musician for the entire body of his or her work and for that musician’s influence in regenerating the jazz idiom.
• Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician Emir Kusturica will be the ninth recipient of the Antonio Carlos Jobim Award, which honors artists distinguished in the field of world music.
• Vibes player Peter Appleyard will receive the Oscar Peterson Award, created on the 10th anniversary of the Festival in 1989 to salute a Canadian musician who has made outstanding contributions to jazz in this country and for the quality of his art.
• Record producer and archivist Michael Cuscuna will collect the Bruce Lundvall Award, given annually to a non-musician who has left a mark on the world of jazz  through the media, the concert or record industries. He is best known for presenting box sets of jazz masterpieces  that he has unearthed from the Blue Note, Columbia, Atlantic and Impulse! recording vaults.