"Nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Hey man, paint 'Starry Night' again.' He painted it and that was it."
- Joni Mitchell retort to a Universal Amphitheater audience on the difference between the performing and visual arts.
Herbie Hancock, whose interpretations of Mitchell's work are up for album of the year, won't get a chance to display those works as he has been saddled with performing George Gershwin on the Grammy telecast. Perhaps that's the price to pay when you make an album that is completely down-tempo and introspective.
Or maybe it is television's way of saying jazz has no place on a network broadcast and the closest we can come is yet another Gershwin "Rhapsody in Blue" performance that will put a piano master, Hancock, and a classical  speed demon, Lang Lang, in a pairing that has "exclusivity" as its promotional tagline. (It will be nice, though, to see our old friend John Mauceri conducting behind them.)
Yet there's an unfortunate paradox here: Hancock is the one name musician in jazz attempting to keep the music moving forward and here he is to returning to work, written eight decades ago, that won him a Grammy nine years ago.  At a time when the Grammys have the opportunity to celebrate an artist, they instead put a genre of music in a cage, ensuring that it's safe for public viewing by looking at a style's history and not using that history as a prism for the future.
Safe performances will also be coming from duets of Fergie and John Legend and Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban. John Fogerty, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis will pay tribute to rock's history and I'm guessing, make that hoping, they won't be forced to play an Elvis tune.