I’ve been writing about jazz (and some other music) on this blog now for … a while! The first real post in the series (Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley) happened in January 2022, so almost three years now. And we’ve written about some really great stuff—Trane, Bill Evans, Cécile McLorin Salvant, CTI.
What I’ve found most interesting about writing these columns is that, the more I stretch outside my comfort zone, the more interesting things get… and when I return to my comfort zone, things are richer for the detour.
So the upcoming columns. I’ve been thinking about the narrative we’ve heard so far… how traditional jazz went avant garde, splintered into rock-influenced fusion and funk-influenced jazz-pop, and returned to something like a traditionalist stance… all within the scope of about 20 years, from 1964 to the end of the 1970s.
But what happened then? Jazz is still around, but the journey it went on in the 1980s was very different. And along the way it had some flirtations with some very different kinds of music.
So we’re going to start next week exploring some of the kinds of music that touched jazz in the 1980s—but we’ll explore them on their own terms, not just as jazz adjacencies. And we’re going to visit what happened to some of the artists we’ve been following as well as how other kinds of music were changed by jazz. And we’re going to do it all through the lens of one of the most successful popular artists of the 1980s.
Hope that’s whetted your appetite, and will see you next week!
We’ve come across Duke Pearson twice before in this series, both times in Blue Note recordings by the great McCoy Tyner, where he was the producer on Tyner’s Extensions and Expansions. Pearson had been with Blue Note artists since the early 1960s, when he joined the Donald Byrd-Pepper Adams Quintet. In 1963, Pearson made his mark in two important ways: first, he was the arranger for four of the five tracks on Byrd’s A New Perspective, including “Cristo Redentor,” which became a hit.
Second, he became the chief A&R (artists & repertoire) man for Blue Note following the death of Ike Quebec. In this role he is credited with shaping the sound of Blue Note during the bulk of the 1960s. He also recorded seven albums between 1964 and 1969 on Blue Note, beginning with the auspiciously titled Wahoo! and ending with Merry Ole Soul, which as is traditional for Christmas albums finished recording in August of 1969 (and as is traditional for 1960s Blue Note albums was recorded at Van Gelder Studios). He was joined for the sessions by Bob Cranshaw (from Sonny Rollins’ band) on bass, Mickey Roker on drums, and Airto Moreira on percussion.
We’ve heard the opening track “Sleigh Ride” in this blog before; it kicked off my 2022 Christmas jazz hour on my Exfiltration Radio series, “Riding in a Wonderland.” At the time, I wrote, “This uber-cool take on “Sleigh Ride” is viewed through the prism of spiritual jazz, with a drone in the bass and drums that’ll knock your socks off.” Well, that’s true, but there are some really spectacular fine details in the arrangement as well that are worth expanding upon. The open chords in Pearson’s introduction, the pervasive swing, and the genius switch from piano to celeste for that opening melody: all perfection. And listen to what the bass is doing in that opening! That syncopated drone on that fifth of the scale, in octaves, remains the steady pulse throughout the entire intro, first verse, first solo, all the way into the bridge where suddenly the arrangement snaps into a more conventional bebop pattern, but only for sixteen bars! And the stride-influenced piano rumble that Pearson adopts on the second bar (“there’s a birthday party at the home of Farmer Gray…”)!
Pearson takes “The Little Drummer Boy” at breakneck speed, but still gives Mickey Roker plenty of time to make his mark in a way that the prior song didn’t really permit. Here the drummer gives a massive marching-band style introduction across the entire drum kit as the bass and the lower chords of the piano keep the drone going. When the full melody arrives, Cranshaw gets to cut loose a little, boogeying up and down the octave but still returning to that ground—and at the end of each verse, Roker returns to cut loose, here with a splashy cymbal, there with a roll.
Pearson plays Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” more straight, though there’s still more than a touch of the blues about his playing. Only the entrance of the celeste at the end signals Pearson’s imaginative rearrangements. The next track, “Jingle Bells,” is more freely adapted, with Airto’s Latin percussion (doubled by Roker on the wood blocks) signaling the brisk samba tempo. Cranshaw gets to join in the reindeer games with a wandering bass line throughout.
The duo of Roker and Airto get “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” going at something like a breakneck speed, as though a samba party were happening at 78 RPM instead of 45. Pearson follows suit, gleefully improvising atop Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s Christmas classic, and Cranshaw follows, briskly ripping through two choruses and a bridge. Santa has never samba’d so hard.
Pearson turns serious on one of the few non-secular songs on the album. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is an African-American spiritual that was first collected inReligious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations, compiled by Thomas P. Fenner, the first director of music at what is now Hampton University. Pearson brings church to the performance, with inflections of gospel and blues in its depths.
We’re back with the martial marching beat of “Little Drummer Boy” for “Wassail Song,” otherwise known as “Here We Come A-Wassailing.” Pearson and Cranshaw have an extended improvisation on the theme in the lower octaves before the main tune returns and the procession moves away. But “Silent Night” is back in the sound world of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and gospel, as though Franz Gruber were a southern pastor.
“O Little Town of Bethlehem” is played as straight as it gets: a piano solo, with no blues around the edges. This might have been Pearson playing in church. It brings a quiet note to end a set that has gone in every other possible direction already.
Pearson’s collection was the only Christmas album released on Blue Note Records during the 1960s, and is lesser known compared to some of the great jazz Christmas classics like Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. But it’s a great collection that spans a variety of styles and is well worth adding to your Christmas playlist.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Here’s the playlist of Christmas jazz from 2022 that opens with Pearson’s rendition of “Sleigh Ride.” It might be time to make another one of these…
I’ve featured the Boston Camerata in this series before (and even before this series was a thing). The early music ensemble, directed for many years by Joel Cohen, was responsible for introducing me to the sound of Middle English, Renaissance and Sacred Harp music, and a great many other things. And before I started collecting old records, I thought they had recorded three Christmas records for Nonesuch: Sing We Noel first, then A Renaissance Christmas, and finally A Medieval Christmas, which I thought had been released in 1991 when it came out on CD.
That difference is significant. Thanks in part to Cohen, as well as to British early music artists like Paul Hillier and David Munrow, the standards for early music performance were rising rapidly, and certain scarcities like authentic period instruments and unusual voice parts (like countertenors) were starting to be more widely available. Indeed, the scarcity of early instruments was, um, instrumental in the founding of the Camerata; it began as a group dedicated to demonstrating the rare antique instruments in Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, and this album was recorded at the MFA.
But during this transitional period, Cohen still had to work with the forces he could find, including some interesting vocalists. Charles Rhodes, the countertenor who is featured prominently on the Franco-Provençal setting of the prophecy of the Angel Gabriel, “Oiet, virgines,” is probably the most notorious example; he has an expressive voice, but his vocal production is a little uneven and he strays a little toward the pinched and strained side of the high tenor sound. But it’s still mesmerizing, and that’s due at least in part to the program and the instrumentalists.
Cohen can be reliably counted on to deliver the most incredibly obscure music, whether a cantillation of the Torah or a 10th century Spanish plainchant, and then to weave them together seamlessly into a single performance. When the conductus “Adest sponsus”enters, it’s with great vigor that the percussion and the shawms set the tempo, as if for a procession; the album closing conductus “Orientus partibus” is actually performed as a recessional, which contributes greatly to the mood if not to the audibility.
There is also some fairly spectacular programming of related tunes together, with the familiar macaronic carol “In dulci jubilo” paired with its plainchant antecedent, “Congaugent hodie,” as well as readings in Middle English courtesy of Nicholas Linfield (who also did the readings on Sing We Noel).
The album as a whole can be taken as many things: a scholarly illustration of medieval musical practices (especially if you read Cohen’s comprehensive liner notes while listening), a window into alternate musical Christmas traditions, or just something to put on and meditatively listen. Or all of the above, which is what I plan to do this week. Next time, we’ll get to something a little funkier.
For about 100,000 people every year in my adopted home town of Boston, the Holiday Pops are a major attraction and marker of the holiday season. The modern institution as we know it today—a series of December concerts with repertoire both classical and popular, garnished by a certain man in a big red coat—has existed since 1973. But the Boston Pops has been programming holiday fare for much longer. Its iconic “Sleigh Ride,” Leroy Anderson’s feature for whinnying trumpet, sleigh bells and slapstick, was written in 1948 (based on an idea the composer got in a 1946 heat wave) and premiered in a concert in May of that year. And the Pops has long had a deep bench of holiday arrangements as well. As far as I can tell, the Pops Christmas story starts in earnest with today’s album, 1959’s A Pops Christmas Party.
The album is a combination of arrangements, medleys, and works written especially for the orchestra, along with light classical pieces that carry the flavor of the season—in other words, a typical Pops album. And the hands of three of the Pops’ great arrangers and composers—Anderson, Jack Mason, and Richard Hayman—are all over it.
“A Christmas Festival” kicks us off in fine Pops style. Most Holiday Pops concerts start with a fanfare, frequently a medley of familiar Christmas carols, and this Leroy Anderson arrangement is the grandaddy of them all. Fiedler takes the opening in a stately tempo and then gradually accelerates up to something more like a slow modern Pops tempo. The genius of Anderson shows in the moving eighth note accompaniment to “Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly,” which manages to be both traditional and ultramodern at once, and there are touches of this throughout—the passing trumpet notes at the end of “Deck,” the moving eighth note pizzicati and winds that mark the edges of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and so on throughout. I think my favorite moment, though, is the few notes played on the tubular bells in the midst of “Silent Night”—just before the winds provide the rapid-fire accompaniment that signals the beginning of “Jingle Bells” and the approaching finale. The syncopation in the brass that begins the second verse ends by morphing into what feels for all the world like a can-can on “O Come, All Ye Faithful” before it turns into a massive orchestral finale, with all hands on deck. Here Fiedler takes the tempo at something approaching breakneck speed as the organ roars the final notes.
The record’s performance of “White Christmas” is as sedate and mystical as I’ve ever heard it. Though the celeste is not quite in unison with the pizzicato strings on the two out of tempo notes, still the strings play in gorgeous muted harmony under the concertmaster’s solo. (Aside: it was often a custom before I joined the TFC that the musicians would toss pennies at Pops concertmaster Tamara Smirnova’s feet after she completed the solo, signaling their approval.) This version, the original arrangement by composer Jack Mason, lacks the choral coda and key change that has been the Pops’ practice since I joined.
By contrast, the Pops’ “Sleigh Ride” hasn’t changed a note since its inception, save perhaps for the arrival of Sparkle the Magical Christmas Unicorn in recent years. It remains a perfect bit of musical scene painting, with literal slapstick to play the role of the cracking whip. Mason’s arrangement of “Winter Wonderland,” which follows, has since disappeared, victim of its midcentury ballroom dancing aesthetic. But they’ve brought back Léon Jessel’s “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” courtesy of a brilliant bit of animation that illustrates the journey and travails of the titular toy. (It doesn’t seem to be online, but there’s a short preview on Facebook.)
In a reversal of current Pops practice, the classical works are saved for the opening of the second half of the album. The “Dream Pantomime” from Engelbert Humperdinck’s light opera Hansel and Gretel seems to have fallen by the wayside as a holiday piece, but it’s lovely here, with delicate work from the strings throughout as the angels come to surround and protect the lost children as they sleep.
Mozart’s “Sleigh Ride,” from his German Dances, is also an unlikely Christmas work, but is at least more commonly played—if not overly familiar from high school orchestra concerts. The Pops play it straight here, with the emergence of the sleigh bells seeming to signal the sleigh breaking into the open after passing through the dense orchestration. The “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite of course remains a beloved holiday classic to this day, appearing mostly recently on the Pops’ program in its Duke Ellington re-arrangement (“Sugar Rum Cherry”) in 2021 (during which time I created the cocktails Sugar Rum Cherry Nos. 1 and 2).
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is the sole arrangement by veteran Pops hand Richard Hayman to appear on the album, and is another one that lingers in the Pops repertoire to this day. This 1959 recording, appearing just ten years after the introduction of the Johnny Marks song by Gene Autry, sounds just as brilliant as modern performances do. Hayman loved to shoehorn little details into every corner of an arrangement, like the extra whip cracks that appear around the edges and the bassoon counterpoint to the tune in the last chorus, and they’re crystal clear here.
“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” might be the most enduring of the Mason arrangements in the Pops repertoire, or at least the part that appears here. The 1934 Coots/Gillespie tune receives every trick in the arranger’s book, including the pizzicato countermelody (which the TFC always “bum bum bum”s along to during modern performances, the big band swing at the conclusion of the arrangement, and the omnipresent sleigh bells in the hands of what must surely be a tired percussionist.
The success of Pops Christmas Party and its sequels played a role in establishing the Boston Pops in the format they still follow today: a spring of light classics and popular music, a December full of holiday cheer. It’s a tradition that I became a part of when I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in 2005, and it’s still fun to hear “A Christmas Festival,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and sing the vocal version of Mason’s “White Christmas” year after year. Next time we’ll check in with another holiday tradition, albeit this time one that’s more unique to my family.
There never seems to be enough time in the holiday calendar to write about all the Christmas music that there is. That’s partly because I like a wide variety of the stuff, of course, and partly because there is, in fact, an awful lot of it. Some Christmas albums are stone classics, and some … aren’t but are still pretty good.
Such is the case with today’s album, recorded in October 1964 and released just in time for that year’s holiday season. The title, a reference to the Lewis trio’s 1961 classic Sound of Christmas, screams “not putting in a lot of effort.” But this isn’t a run of the mill band going through the motions; this is the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and in fact the same trio that we heard on the 1961 recording, with Eldee Young on bass and Issac “Red” Holt on drums (with a little assist from Cleveland Eaton and Steve McCall on some of the tracks). The only difference is that Riley Hampton’s string arrangements don’t return; in their place are charts by bandleader King Fleming and saxophonist Will Jackson. The end product isn’t a stone classic, but it still has some great moments and is a good way to ease into the holiday.
“Snowbound,” a song by bandleader Russell Faith with Clarence Kehner made famous by Sarah Vaughan, starts us off in a contemplative mood. Ramsey Lewis performs the tune with subtle accompaniment by the string orchestra, then improvises while the orchestra takes the theme. The effect is meditative and evocative; one can imagine Lewis staring out a window into the falling snow… at least until the trombone solo crests at the peak of the bridge. (Fun fact: Trombonist John Avant went on to play in the Sun Ra Arkestra.)
From the slightly obscure mid-20th-century pop vein, we drop right into full holiday mode with “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” The arrangement takes us through day three with the strings, sleigh bells, and celeste only, before Lewis’s piano enters with the rest of the trio, playing a bluesy chorus. If you’ve sat through (or, ahem, sung) a few too many rounds of 12 Days, this arrangement is a pretty good way to allow you to reimagine it, albeit by discarding the structure and tune of the song pretty completely after the first minute.
The Lewis original “Egg Nog,” played just by the trio, is a full-throated twelve bar blues in which the band demonstrates their completely soulful mastery. Stride piano styles? Check, in the bridge. In-the-pocket drumming? Check. Deeply swung bass rhythms? Check. Only the celeste, played by Lewis on the intro and outro, takes this into Christmas music territory. It’s a good opportunity to whip up a batch of Charles Mingus’s eggnog recipe and sit by the Christmas tree.
What is there to say about “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that hasn’t already been said? Well, as I was reminded watching the classic 1964 Christmas special last night, maybe it’s worthwhile remembering that the beloved Christmas mascot first found life in a poem published by Montgomery Ward in 1939, written by Robert L. May, a copywriter who was deeply in debt due to his cost of his dying wife’s medical treatments for cancer. The poem became a book due to May’s persistence, who convinced reluctant book publishers (who figured there wasn’t a market for a poem that already had six million copies in print thanks to Montgomery Ward) to take a chance on the children’s book market. At the beginning of the baby boom, this was a good bet; the book sold like hotcakes, and May was subsequently able to convince his sister’s husband, Johnny Marks, to write a song about the red-nosed reindeer. In the initial recording, performed by an initially reluctant Gene Autry, Rudolph completed his ascension to the highest stages of the secular American Christmas pantheon. —Okay, so maybe there was a little to say about the song after all. In this case, Lewis’s trio and the orchestra swing the song hard, driven by Red Holt’s monstrous syncopated drumming. (I listened to this song five times as I wrote this and am convinced I’ll be feeling that anticipatory downbeat in my dreams tonight.)
The trio seems to take the heavy swing of “Rudolph” as a challenge to see if they can swing “Jingle Bells” even harder. This is a showpiece for Eldee Young, who solos the entire song with what must have been a finger-bleeding pizzicato, accompanied by some pretty first class scat singing, taking us out of the first half. And it’s Young’s bass that takes us into his composition “Plum Puddin’” to open the second side. Lewis and the trio take us on a quick ride through what’s essentially a jam, with Lewis executing filigreed runs that veer into blue notes and back out again as Young and Holt lock into a tight rhythm that never lets up throughout.
“Snowfall,” a 1941 hit by Claude Thornhill and his orchestra, recaptures some of the mood of the album opener, but this time the strings are in control with less input from Lewis, until he starts jamming bits of what sound like a countermelody of his own “Sound of Christmas” at the end. Lewis’s trio arrangement of “We Three Kings” is more adventurous, driven both by Lewis’s bluesy piano and Holt’s heavily syncopated snare work. At the back of it all, Eldee Young’s bass weaves in and out with a descending line that echoes the magi’s journey all the way to the fleeting appearance of major-key tonality in the chorus, punctuated by huge drumrolls from Holt. Lewis closes it out in a minor mode with a trill on the minor third.
Lewis slides into Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” with an eight-bar major key intro that suspends us on the fifth until he finally brings us down to the melody. It’s the sort of trick that “My Favorite Things”-era John Coltrane would have soaked in for half an hour or more; here it’s just another tool in Lewis’s belt. The rest of the performance is pretty standard for the trio, “just” outstanding bluesy swinging.
“Little Drummer Boy” must surely be the weirdest example of the interconnectedness of the 20th century; how many Christmas songs have an indirect connection to the Nazi takeover of Austria? It was the Trapp Family Singers (of “Sound of Music” fame) who first performed Katherine Davis’s “Carol of the Drum,” before Harry Simeone took it and rearranged it into the form we know today. Lewis does a little rearranging of his own, with the strings playing a repeated drone on the downbeat before Lewis takes an extended bluesy jam out of the end of the first verse, and stays in that vein until he glissandos right into a key change. The arrangement has him continue to jam his way through the end, until he picks up the melody once more as a tag at the end.
More Sounds of Christmas provides sufficient evidence that the persistence of the Ramsey Lewis Trio—ten years, twenty-something albums, a top ten hit—had as much to do with Young and Holt as it did with Lewis. We’ll listen to more of their recordings another time. but this week I recommend you spin this platter of bluesy holiday cheer as you’re dragging those ornaments out of storage. Next time we’ll flip over to something a little more traditional.
