Music Notes by Mark Jordan Gordon Elementary’s Kids ‘N’ Blues band Awards Watch Kudos to area performers as this week several of them find themselves up for recognition of their art. On Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the Memphis-based Blues Foundation is having its annual Blues Hall of Fame induction ceremony at George Washington University. Joining individual honorees Stevie Ray Vaughan, drummer/bandleader Johnny Otis, and Oxford photographer Dick Waterman on the induction roll is Mississippi Fred McDowell’s album Mississippi Delta Blues, Z.Z. Hill’s single “Down Home Blues,” and Sam Charter’s book Country Blues. Making the trip to Washington for the ceremony will be emcee Rufus Thomas as well as former Stax soul man Johnny Taylor and local favorites the North Mississippi All-Stars, both of whom will be performing. They will be joined by Kids ’N’ Blues, a six-piece group made up of students from Memphis’ Gordon Elementary. The band beat out other kid blues bands from around the country to win the honor of playing at the hall of fame ceremony as well as at a special Blues in the Schools event. Also on Tuesday, in Los Angeles, University of Memphis guitar professor Lily Afshar will be up for the Orville H. Gibson Guitar Award. Afshar is nominated for the best guitarist-female award for her recent CD A Jug of Wine and Thou. Besides honoring guitarists’ achievements in various genres, the Gibson Awards benefit the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Foundation, a group that helps autistic and severely handicapped children. Finally, Afshar will be staying over the next night to attend the Grammy Awards. Though she is not up for a Grammy, generally considered to be the music industry’s highest honor, several other Memphians are. N’Sync, featuring Bartlett native Justin Timberlake, are nominated for collaborations with Gloria Estefan and Alabama. In the gospel field, Memphis Christian band Big Tent Revival are nominated in the best rock gospel album category for Choose Life, Jackson’s Mississippi Mass Choir are honored in the gospel choir or chorus album category for Emmanuel (God With Us), and J.D. Sumner, a longtime back up singer for Elvis, is up for best Southern, country, or bluegrass gospel album with The Final Sessions. Former Beale Streeters Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King are featured in the best traditional blues album category for Memphis Monday Morning and Blues on the Bayou. Contemporary blues album nominations go to former Memphians Little Milton (Welcome to Little Milton) and Charlie Musselwhite (Continental Drifter) and to two frequent visitors to the Bluff City, Robert Cray (Take Your Shoes Off) and the late Luther Allison (Live in Chicago), both of whom featured the Memphis Horns on their records. A product of Stax studio, Wilson Pickett is nominated for best traditional R&B vocal performance on his album It’s Harder Now, and Rob Bowman, author of the definitive history on Stax, Soulsville U.S.A., gets the nod in the liner notes category for his work on The Last Soul Company, a boxed-set retrospective of Jackson, Mississippi’s Malaco label. The Grammys will be broadcast live on CBS, but local members of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, the group that presents the Grammys, are invited to a simulcast party at Elvis Presley’s Memphis starting at 6 p.m. New Stuff in the Bins One gets the impression from promotional material accompanying their debut release on Island/Def Jam that the members of Primer 55 don’t much like Memphis. There are references to racial tensions, how the lead singer would feel safer walking the streets of New York, and a reference to the “stale Memphis scene.” Depending on how you feel about their trendy mix of rap and metal, Primer 55 may be stale as well. Few outside the city’s tight-knit metal scene had heard of this group when word started circulating last spring that they were signing with a major label. Perhaps, that’s where their animosity toward the city comes from. Or maybe it’s all just attitude. There is certainly plenty of that on Introduction to the Mayhem. This slickly produced entry sets up Primer 55 to follow in the footsteps of Limp Bizkit and Korn. The album is a wall of loud, aggressive noise from start to finish, peppered with expletives and turntable scratches. The band wisely plays up the rap component on several tracks featuring guest artist DJ Chris Kilmore. When he’s not around, Primer 55 could be any number of acts that came before them. But if they are hardly original, at least they deliver the good professionally, with lots of energy, and, hell, attitude. Also new in record stores this week: Tracy Chapman Telling Stories (Elektra) The Cure Bloodflowers (Elektra) Gov’t Mule Life Before Insanity (Capricorn)