Grammys pay off for artists onstage

Of all the Academy Awards contenders this season, the surest sure thing heading into preOscars week is Justin Hurwitz, the 31-year-old composer of “La La Land.”

He and lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have been nominated for two of the original score’s songs, “City of Stars” (likely to win, not my favorite) and “Audition,” also known as “The Fools Who Dream.” Hurwitz is also up for best original score. He’s extraordinarily likely to win that one, along with sharing the best song Oscar. So I’m guessing Feb. 26 will be a big night for both Hurwitz and his old Harvard roommate, “La La Land” writer-director Damien Chazelle.

Chazelle and Hurwitz dragged their unfashionable passion project, a jazz-based musical romance without a traditional happy ending, all around Hollywood, for years. Then Chazelle made a short, trial-sized version of “Whiplash,” a musicsoaked melodrama about a young jazz drummer and his Svengali of a mentor, to prove he could make a movie (even though he’d already done so; more on that in a few paragraphs). After the short version, Chazelle made the feature-length “Whiplash,” cheaply and efficiently and well; J.K. Simmons snagged an Oscar his supporting performance. And then Lionsgate put the $30 million up for “La La Land,” which has sold nearly $300 million in tickets worldwide.

Not everybody loves it. Some, in fact, hate it, and some wouldn’t like it even if it they liked it, because they come from a place of skepticism/disdain/bile regarding movie musicals. Whatever. It’s a free country, more or less. Hurwitz told me on the phone the other day that few things in life for a composer, arranger and orchestrator are more wish-fulfilling than walking on the Sony Pictures recording studio, where the old MGM musicals were made, and hearing your work played by a 95-piece orchestra.

“After dreaming about it and talking about it with Damien for years,” Hurwitz said, “that was really something.”

The shrewdly considered influences on Hurwitz’s “La La Land” score include Michel Legrand’s music for the Jacques Demy musicals “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.” By way of example: Hurwitz told me his original orchestration for the “La La Land” traffic-jam intro, “Another Day of Sun,” went for the throat and the strings and the bombast more conventionally. Upon further review, Hurwitz took a cue from the way Legrand’s Demy musicals let the jazz rhythm section interact with the full orchestra. The results are subtler and intoxicating, and when Angela Parrish (the unseen vocalist; the dancer in yellow, Reshma Gajjar, lipsynchs the words) performs the first few lines about leaving Santa Fe to chase her showbiz dreams, it’s as if we’re eavesdropping on a private thought, rather than getting clobbered with virtuosity.

Hurwitz’s feature film debut was just as unusual as the “La La Land” phenomenon. For Chazelle’s Harvard graduate thesis project, he and Hurwitz decided to make a 16-millimeter black-and-white cinema verite jazz musical released in 2009 called “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” music by Hurwitz, lyrics by Chazelle. (The soundtrack, thanks to the success of “La La Land,” is finally available, due out March 17.)

Chazelle’s idea with “Guy and Madeline,” according to Hurwitz, was to contrast the hand-held, black-and-white aesthetic with a lush, extravagant orchestral sound. A significant percentage of the minuscule production budget financed a trip for Hurwitz to Bratislava, Slovakia, where the local symphony had been hired for a single, four-hour “Guy and Madeline” recording session. Featuring 85 musicians. For a composer’s first film. A student film.

At the moment, Hurwitz is back on his other career track: comedy. He’s a writer-producer on the ninth season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” When he was mixing the “La La Land” score, he told me, he didn’t have the next musical assignment lined up yet, and he was more than happy to join “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” (His earlier writing credits include a “Simpsons” episode and several episodes of “The League.”) Chazelle’s next film, already announced, is a Neil Armstrong biopic starring Ryan Gosling, his “La La Land” headliner, and that project may well bring composer Hurwitz back into the fold. As for “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Hurwitz told me Larry David has been a comedy god to him since Hurwitz was in high school in Glendale, Wis., north of Milwaukee.

And now, thanks to Hurwitz’s “La La Land” score, the world is newly peppered with young fans of movie musicals who are just now learning about all the musicals before it.

Who benefited most from this year’s Grammy Awards telecast?

That depends on which yardstick you use, but as usual the artists who scored performance slots generally experienced bigger immediate sales gains over actual award winners. The lucky few who won and performed during the telecast were rewarded handsomely.

English pop star Ed Sheeran’s total song sales jumped more than 37,000 units, or 166 percent, after his appearance, leading the pack of musicians whose sales experienced the greatest increases, according to BuzzAngle’s post-Grammy sales report. Sheeran sold a total of 59,000 songs Feb. 12.

The sales monitoring service compared average daily sales from the six days just before the Grammys with sales numbers posted on the day of the show.

Close behind Sheeran was Bruno Mars, who was featured in the show’s tribute to Prince. His appearance spurred more than 36,000 song sales in the aftermath of the ceremony, an uptick of 294 percent over those of the days leading up to the ceremony. He sold a total of 49,000 songs on the day of the show.

Country singer-songwriter Keith Urban got a bump of 18,000 song sales, up 331 percent, followed by country newcomer Maren Morris’ 17,984 song sales (up 815 percent) and the Weeknd at 15,431 (up 117 percent).

New artist Grammy winner Chance the Rapper also presumably generated considerably increased interest in his music, but he didn’t figure into BuzzAngle’s sales figures. His debut album, “Coloring Book,” is available only as a free stream.

Grammys boost

As for individual album sales increases, Grammy triple crown winner Adele, who took home the album, record and song awards, reaped immediate gains.

BuzzAngle reported that sales of her already-megaselling album “25” jumped 232 percent to 2,825 copies on Grammy Sunday. It now has sold almost 10.2 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen Music, a competing industry service. Beyonce’s “Lemonade” did even better on Grammy night, increasing 297 percent with 3,272 copies sold that day. Total equivalent sales for “Lemonade” now stand at 861,000 copies, Nielsen reports.

Nielsen Music’s postGrammy figures came in along similar lines to those from BuzzAngle, with a reported 150 percent sales increase for “25” and a 308 percent jump for Adele’s single, “Hello.”

Beyonce’s “Lemonade” scored a 267 percent increase and the “Formation” single bounced up 105 percent, based on Nielsen’s comparison to the daily averages for Friday and Saturday preceding the ceremony.

Percentage-wise, the most eye-popping increases went to artists who were comparatively low on music fans’ radar screens before the Grammy ceremony.

Veteran R&B-soul singer and songwriter William Bell posted a whopping 23,691 percent increase in sales of his blues classic “Born Under a Bad Sign,” according to BuzzAngle. He played the song at the Grammys with guitarist and singer Gary Clark Jr., and that staggering number reflected the fact that only seven copies of the song had sold the day before the Grammy Awards, jumping to just under 1,700 on the day of the show.

Likewise, Bell’s overall artist sales exploded by 5,805 percent to 1,741, and Clark’s similarly shot up 2,146 percent, to 3,180.

Americana singersongwriter Sturgill Simpson, who took home the country album Grammy for his “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” saw a 1,063 percent increase in total song sales, with 5,173 units. Sales for the song he performed, “All Around You,” jumped 10,760 percent, from 20 to 2,200 on Grammy Sunday, according to Nielsen’s figures.

Prince’s former cohorts in the Time scored BuzzAngle’s only other fourfigure percentage increase with sales of 1,687 units, representing a 1,871 percent bump over average daily sales going into the show.

Sheeran also topped BuzzAngle’s ranking of individual songs that logged the biggest sales on the day of the show, as the song he performed, “Shape of You,” sold 28,714 copies, up 164 percent.

Ranked by unit sales behind him among the top five sellers were Mars’ “That’s What I Like” (19,339 copies, up 527 percent), Urban’s “The Fighter” (14,824, up 1,180 percent), Lukas Graham’s “7 Years” (10,581, up 1,045 percent) and the Weeknd’s “I Feel It Coming” (10,093, up 213 percent).

Sales for music of the honorees in the telecast’s three tribute numbers — Prince, the Bee Gees and George Michael — all jumped, according to BuzzAngle: 338 percent for Prince, 553 percent for Michael and 640 percent for the Bee Gees.

Billboard even noted that fashion came into play.

Singer Joy Villa, who generated considerable attention with her dress emblazoned with the words “Make America Great Again” and “Trump,” sold 15,000 copies on Grammy Sunday and Monday, according to Nielsen, a dramatic increase from the “negligible amount” it had sold before her limelight moment walking the Staples Center red carpet.

TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE