Grammys 2026: An Industry Disruptor Threw a Great Industry Party

This time last year in Los Angeles, the city was still beset by PTSD from the 2025 winter wildfires, and the mood around the Grammys was naturally somewhat somber and restrained. This year, however, the vibes were back up in full effect. Clive Davis’s long-running Saturday gala kicked off with a message from Barack Obama and a tribute to Ozzy Osborne by MGK and Jelly Roll, which is an insane sentence to be able to type. But it seemed like the entire music industry was outside during Grammy weekend—the Most Delightfully Random Sighting award goes to onetime Bad Boy rapper Shyne, who turned up to a DJ set from beloved breakout Nigerian artist Odeal at Opulence, music executive Lenny S’s annual post-show party.

After a pretty solid telecast featuring mostly respectable wins, there was a lot to discuss: Bad Bunny’s historic Album of the Year win. Kendrick Lamar becoming the new title holder for rapper with the most wins. Lauryn Hill leading an emotional D’Angelo tribute. Cher. But later that night, all Larry Jackson wanted to talk about was Paul Revere Williams.

Jackson—the music executive, innovator, and industry disruptor—was at an afterparty for his company Gamma in the famed Polo Lounge in the back of the Beverly Hills Hotel, watching celebrities from Justin Bieber to Jamie Foxx pass through the restaurant’s doors. Later in the night, Bieber would be front and center as ace-card DJ Chase B turned a typically exemplary set into a jam session with the elusive Lauryn Hill. The party marked the first time the historic, 100-year-old Los Angeles venue has ever hosted an event of this magnitude and flash, and Jackson (who admitted that he got a haircut during the Grammy broadcast itself) was thinking more about legacy, barriers, and ancestry than who won what.

“That handwriting [on the hotel’s iconic facade], this room, the fountain room downstairs, the bungalows—it was all conceived by a Black man,” Jackson said, looking around in wonder from a booth as the legend Jimmy Jam dined on small bites behind us. “Paul Revere Williams, he was one of the best architects—not Black architects, one of the best architects of the twentieth century, next to John Woolf, A. Quincy Jones, Wallace Neff, John Lautner.”

The irony, of course, is that as an architect working during segregation, Williams was not allowed in the very spaces that he was designing. “A lot of people don’t know this, but he’s my hero, so tonight…this is for Paul Revere Williams,” Jackson said. “We all have our barriers in [our respective] generations to break down. He broke [his] down so this could happen.”