With a total of nine nominations—including Artist of the Year, Song of the Year and Male Vocalist of the Year—Marvin Sapp leads the field of nominees for the 24th Annual Stellar Awards, the industry’s most prestigious televised awards shows.
 
Despite some pretty stiff competition from the likes of Kirk Franklin, Dorinda Clark-Cole and Deitrick Haddon, each tied with five nods for their respective releases, and Israel & New Breed, CeCe Winans, Beverly Crawford and Ricky Dillard—all of whom snagged four nominations each—Sapp is expected to run the tables at the January 17, 2009 taping of the show with his near-platinum release, Thirsty, featuring the smash single, “Never Would Have Made It.”
 
Trailing close behind with eight nominations is Jonathan Nelson, a first-time nominee whose debut, Right Now Praise, has taken him to the head of the class.
 
Other multiple nominees include Myron Butler, Marvin Winans, Bishop Paul S. Morton, the Chicago Mass Choir and John Tillery, another first-time nominee with an impressive showing.
 
The show, which will be seen Sunday, March 1 on Gospel Music Channel, will be taped in January at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, hosted by Yolanda Adams and Sinbad. Special honors go to Daryl Coley (The James Cleveland Lifetime Achievement Award); the Rance Allen Group (the Ambassador Dr. Bobby Jones Award) and Vickie Winans (Most Notable Achievement).
 
Carr Gets Back to His Roots

After a four-year hiatus from recording, Kurt Carr returns to his roots with his seventh album, Just the Beginning, which released October 28.
 
“It’s great to be back,” says the GRAMMY-nominated singer, though he doesn’t feel that he’s been gone given the high volume of work done for others like Ami Rushes, Bishop Paul Morton and Tramaine Hawkins, that has kept him on the charts, even if behind the scenes.
 
And while many would say the pressure is on to perform in such a tight market brimming with a rash of new releases—including Mary Mary, Kierra “Kiki” Sheard, and Hezekiah Walker—and the phenomenal staying power of Marvin Sapp’s Thirsty, the artist known as a perfectionist no longer lets such concerns get the better of him.
 
Says Carr: “After ‘Every Mountain,’ I heard announcers say, ‘Oh you’ll never top that.’ I ran into Andraé Crouch and I asked him about that, and he told me ‘Your success has nothing to do with you: it’s God, so the pressure’s not on you in that sense...’ The thing I have in my favor is that my music is for the saints of God. There’s always going to be a church. There’s always going to be a choir.”
 
In that sense, Carr has always played to his strength with his trademark brand of Sunday-morning gospel in his first-ever double CD, and though it wasn’t planned that way, the first single provides a word for what the nation is going through.