The Grammy Awards — at least the ones they show on television — honor popular music. By limiting the nominations to bands that have “made it,” the Recording Academy is able to parade the ceremony as a high profile publicity tool. If they’re not broke from the Superbowl, all the biggest advertisers will throw money at the event. The Academy can take this perfect opportunity to tell us, “Don’t steal music.” And in a year like this one, those privileged few artists asked to perform at both the ‘bowl and the Grammys — I’m looking your way, JT — are making a serious power play.

Fortunately, not all of the attention goes to cross-marketed rappers/actors and soon-to-be divas. There are 105 awards presented by the Academy each year (not including lifetime achievement and other special awards), and only a few of those make it to television. The rest — awards for classical performance, rock instrumental, bluegrass and other relatively pure forms of music — may appear in a news story or on grammy.com, but never make it to the small screen.

Here, nestled between the awards for country and gospel, we find our precious jazz awards. Who received the Academy’s fickle praise this year?

Pat Metheny won “Best New Age Album” for One Quiet Night (New Age?). Chick Corea won “Best Jazz Instrumental Solo” for his work on the live Rendezvous in New York. Wayne Shorter won “Best Jazz Instrumental Album” for the acclaimed Alegría. Dianne Reeves — the only female jazzer of the bunch — won “Best Jazz Vocal Album” for A Little Moonlight.

The jazz Grammys are a different game than the pop awards. Popular success is of little concern, and the judges obviously have an ear for quality recordings. Apparently, they also have an ear for music that follows a very narrow definition of what jazz is.

One Quiet Night was beautiful, but hardly groundbreaking. And Metheny is such a Grammy veteran (this is his 16th award) that I have to wonder if they even listen to his recordings anymore before handing him the golden gramophone. Chick gave a truly hot performance on Rendezvous, but it was just another re-creation of his old material. Same with Wayne Shorter. He is certainly a talented sax man, and Alegría is a very bright album, but he’s playing acoustic jazz that sounds completely … normal (not to mention a lot like his work with Miles Davis). Again, Reeves is very good on A Little Moonlight, but she sticks to singing standards, and very staid arrangements, at that.

The problem is not that the Recording Academy is honoring bad musicians like they sometimes do with the pop awards, but that they are perpetuating a closed-ended and old-fashioned definition of jazz music by granting awards to a small group of veterans time and time again.

This issue of definition and inclusion plagues more than just the jazz awards — many worthwhile recipients of “jazz” awards probably fall into other categories. Last year, Norah Jones took home eight, but none were of the ‘jazz’ variety. Surely we can consider Ms. Jones a jazz artist, no?

Perhaps if the awards for “Best Album” and “Best Record” actually went to the best in those categories instead of those with the best combination of popularity and musicality, we would see a little more freedom with the jazz awards. If Norah Jones can cross over to win, why can’t Outkast and the Roots cross over to jazz for some accolades?

Even though the awards continue to reflect a horribly polarized sense of what jazz is and isn’t, a couple of artists were able to bring the jazz impulse before the nation with televised performances.

Most bizarre was Chick Corea’s guest appearance with the Foo Fighters. After struggling through an intro duet with Chick, guitarist Dave Grohl led the band through a standard rendition of “Times Like These.” Chick’s acoustic piano part, drawing heavily on classical influences, seemed out of place in both timbre and harmonic content. Most amusing were Chick’s faces during the bungled intro — he looked really annoyed with Grohl.

Robert Randolph and the Family Band also represented a modern jazz perspective during the show. Appearing for a brief spurt during the ceremony’s “special segment dedicated to funk,” Randolph and Co. were electrifying — a rare and refreshing choice from the Grammy planners.

John Zeratsky writes “Jazz Activist” every second Tuesday in the Badger Herald. Keep up with his other work at johnzeratsky.com.