Album of the Week, December 27, 2025
A Christmas what? Well, the Welsh word cwtch means a hug, but also a hidey-hole—it’s something close and intimate with implications of protection as well as comfort. It’s a perfect name for this modern Christmas jazz album, which combines covers of Christmas songs with some Christmas-adjacent jazz material—Vince Guaraldi but also Bill Evans—in a dreamy harp reverie.
Yes, harp. Amanda Whiting came across my radar with her albums for Jazzman Records; if you’ve read my music reviews, you know that a cover of Freddie Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower” is always going to get my attention, and her first Jazzman EP starts there. Before beginning her jazz career in 2013 with her earliest solo release, the Welsh musician had trained as a classical harpist, and her attention to performance and composition stands out in this set of Christmas and Christmas-adjacent tunes.
The album starts and ends with solo harp renditions of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” but fairly quickly settles into a fireside mood with “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Amanda’s arrangement settles into a minor mood, riding diminished chords to strike a Guaraldi-like mood accompanied by cellist Lucia Capellaro, a meditative bass line from Aidan Thorne, and brushed cymbals courtesy of drummer Mark O’Connor.
The mood continues with a pair of Guaraldi covers, with “Christmas is Coming” striking a brisker note with the trio and “Christmas Time is Here” a more meditative counterpart. “Christmas is Coming” gets a proper harp solo that does more than just echo the improvisations that Guaraldi performed on the original, as Whiting’s harp seems to float up to a suspended ninth and stay there for an extended time, rocking back and forth across chordal boundaries and settling into an extended groove. Meanwhile, “Christmas Time is Here” gets more of a late night chat feeling with the dialog between the harp and Thorne’s bass—also a feature of Guaraldi’s original performance with bassist Monty Budwig.
Whiting picks up other threads of Christmas harp-lore, providing a meditative trio “Sugar Plum” à la Tchaikovsky. (It’s worth noting, for those budding harpists out there, that this and other tracks are based on harp arrangements that Whiting has published and that featured in her harp classes at Trinity College London.) Her arrangement doesn’t swing as hard as Ellington, but it definitely still swings and pulses with Thorne’s high bass solo and the rolling rhythms that O’Connor sets up.
Guaraldi’s “Happiness Theme” predates the Christmas special; it was one of the first Peanuts tunes that he wrote, alongside “Linus and Lucy,” “Oh, Good Grief” and “Pebble Beach,” all of which made repeated appearances as character themes and motifs throughout the animated specials. I have always had a soft spot for this wistfully beautiful tune, which here gets an atmospheric workout that evokes “Christmas Time is Here” and the notes of sleet against the windowpane.
“Little Elfy” is a brief original, a romp through snow drifts with someone who’s as likely to pelt you with a snowball as to bring you a present; it’s a good feature for the harp and an imaginative landscape to close out side 1. With “Skating” we return to Guaraldi once more, with the arpeggiated runs that gave even the pianist trouble seemingly unrolling without a ruffled hair from Whiting’s fingers.
Whiting released the next track, a cover of Bill Evans’ “Peace Piece,” as a single—never an unwelcome request. Here the meditative opening notes, so familiar from Evans and Miles Davis’ recasting of them for “Flamenco Sketches,” seem to spin an aleatory reverie as though they are spreading ripples in an open pond. The pond seems to freeze and crack in the air as Whiting digs deeper into the simple alternating chords. This one could have gone on forever for me.
The second half has a run of more ordinary Christmas carols that drift into reveries. The harp solo in “Deck the Halls” seems to take a side step toward a brown study for a while, while “The Christmas Song” pulls one inside just with the strength of the Mel Tormé/Robert Wells melody. “O Christmas Tree” bridges the ordinary and the Guaraldian worlds with its evocation of the pianist’s cover version, the bass and drums providing welcome rhythmic structure. And “We Three Kings” gives us a McCoy Tyner inflected take on the old carol, with plenty of low end to back it up. At the end we drift away with Santa Claus once more.
The thing about jazz harp albums is that the good ones contain unfathomable depths. You can think you’ve just put on a record to de-stress you and accompany that second glass of eggnog, when suddenly you find yourself contemplating the interplay between bass, harp and drums as a clue to the rhythmic foundations of the universe. Or maybe that’s just the eggnog! Next week we’ll pick up a new series on a notorious musician who would be sure to tell you that it’s both his music and his eggnog talking.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
The album is also streamable from Bandcamp:
BONUS: Amanda did a live charity concert earlier this month featuring much of the music on this album and from her other works; you can watch that here: