Tag: christmas

Amanda Whiting, A Christmas Cwtch

Gather your eggnog and sit by a warm fire. This latter-day classic has all the warmth of its namesake and an impeccable lineup of Christmas presents for the listener.

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:

A musical lookback over 22 years

Two years ago today, I was writing about the Virginia Women’s Chorus Candlelight Christmas album.

Three years ago today, I unleashed one of my most recent Christmas playlists, “Tinsel covered Christmas blues.” You can check out my Christmas playlists (three hours worth!) on SoundCloud today if you want to have some music to wrap presents by:

Fifteen years ago, I wrote about some Glee Club research (I was still putting the history together and hadn’t started writing Ten Thousand Voices). “The impracticability of carrying out successfully any college enterprise without the cordial support of all the students!” Indeed.

The Virginia University Magazine, Vol. XXXV, No. 3 (December 1891), p. 270.

Sixteen years ago, I posted a handful of pointers to some useful Excel statistical tricks, and some intriguing looking font games that alas don’t seem to be around any more. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Seventeen years ago, some useful networking tips and tricks and more links to a bunch of stuff including wishes for Larry Grogan at Funky16Corners. Larry no longer posts to that blog but is still doing radio shows for WFMU. Respect.

Twenty years ago, I had just finished my very first run of Holiday Pops with the Boston Pops and we were hosting my sister for Christmas.

Twenty-one years ago, I was apologizing for not blogging. I had missed three days. If only I knew… More or less the same message twenty-two years ago.

And twenty-two years ago, I was eulogizing Joe Strummer.

That I’m still writing on this blog all these years later still feels like something of a Christmas miracle to me, even if the frequency has diminished and the word count per post has gone way up. Hope you all have great holidays! There will be at least one more post between now and the end of the year.

Boston Camerata, A Renaissance Christmas (1986)

A childhood favorite Christmas record, filled with songs familiar and strange and featuring the voice of an old friend.

Album of the Week, December 20, 2025

I have written about several Boston Camerata Christmas records: Sing We Noel, A Medieval Christmas, even an early A Renaissance Christmas from 1974. And each time I do, my friend Frank Albinder, formerly director of the Washington Men’s Camerata and member of Chanticleer, and current director of the Virginia Glee Club, says, “I used to sing with them! I recorded a Christmas album with them!” And: Yes, Frank, you did! This week’s post is for you.

Frank’s sojourn in Boston as a music grad student came in handy when Joel Cohen was assembling the musical forces for the 1986 release A Renaissance Christmas (true to the group’s name, the album was a local Boston production, recorded in Trinity Church in Copley Square in December 1985). Vocally speaking, there are no carryovers from Sing We Noel, the Camerata’s prior Christmas album—but there’s an eight-year gap between those two recordings, and one presumes that a great many Camerata members were, like Frank, graduate students who were passing through Boston on their way. One notable exception to the rule is soprano Anne Azéma, who began her recording career with the Boston Camerata with 1984’s La Primavera and is still with the Camerata today as its artistic director. (Along the way she married Joel Cohen.)

It is Azéma’s voice that leads off the album, with the 15th century English carol “Nowell: Dieus vous garde.” (Yes, English: Richard Smert wrote the carol in a mixture of English and Norman, as was appropriate for the court at the time.) The quartet of voices plus viol sings one of my favorite non-traditional Christmas carols, an early invocation of Father Christmas, with purity and compelling melodic line. The reverie is followed by “Gaudete, gaudete”, sung with vigor by the ensemble; this is one of the carols from the album that can be widely heard on other recordings, but the performance here blends expertise with vigor in a hallmark of these Camerata recordings.

Following a recitation in broad Middle English (here the narrator is tenor Edmund Brownless) that gave my family the in-joke “Hail, Mary, full of fescue,” we get the Kyrie from Guilliame Dufay’s “Ecce ancilla Domini” Mass, with Brownless, countertenor Kenneth Fitch, and bass Albinder providing the solos. Fitch’s voice is delightfully balanced and resonant, lacking some of the eccentricities of the countertenors on the 1970s Camerata recordings, and the overall impression is magnetic, particularly, when the ensemble cuts out at the end leaving the trio to provide the final “Kyrie.” We make our first stop in Spain with “E la don don,” performed with sparkling briskness, and then return to France with two instrumental settings of “Une jeune fillette.”

“Une jeune fillette” (in alteration with “Joseph est bien marìe”) leads us into the next set, with the women’s voices led by Azéma singing the latter carol with interludes of the former in a beguiling arrangement. A brief instrumental bridge of “Joseph, lieber Joseph mein” leads to the highlight of the first half, a performance of Joseph Galliculus’s “Magnificat quinti toni.” Sung bits of chant alternate with hypnotically fugueing renditions of familiar Christmas tunes in an astonishing reverie.

The second half is much more carol-focused, with Frank’s unaccompanied solo on “Esprits divins” leading off, followed by a reading and the original harmonization of “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen,” with lute and voice. An appropriately swaggering “Riu, riu chiu” follows, unaccompanied save for antiphonal handclaps until the final choruses.

Cohen constructs a mini-Praetorius set (Michael and Hieronymous) around the visit of the Magi. Michael Praetorius contributes the more familiar “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern,” followed by a reading and the Hieronymous P. setting of “O vos omnes,” mourning Herod’s crime against the firstborn.

The set that follows celebrates the shepherds at the cradle, and is in some ways the most adventurous part of this adventurous record. Opening with a reading and a 16th century Italian dance played on the ocarina by Marilyn Boenau, the ensemble then plays a set of vigorous music from the French, Catalan and Provençal traditions. Nicholas Martin’s “Nouvelles, nouvelles” gives us a beautiful melody led by Azéma, while the Catalan “Tau garçó, la durundera” is all rhythm and close harmonies. Finally, the Provençal “Tura lura lura, lo gau canta” provides a high spirited and faintly comic call-and-response between Cohen and the men of the ensemble as they tell the story of a shepherd afraid to make the pilgrimage to Bethlehem.

Lastly, we get a trio of Renaissance masterworks, beginning with the final reading from Luke and the Tómas Luis de Victoria “O magnum mysterium.” The latter is far and away the most famous of the liturgical music on the record and is given a gorgeous reading by the Camerata. A pair of works by Michael Praetorius concludes the record, with Azéma trading phrases in call and response with soprano Roberta Anderson in “Singet und klinget, ihr Kinderlein” and the ensemble singing a Provençal text from 17th century Avignon to a dance melody by Praetorius in the final setting, “Bransle de Poictou/La bona novella.”

The Boston Camerata at this stage of their development was a remarkable ensemble, doing their own research and constructing programs that both instructed and enlivened the ear. A good many recordings have followed, even after Cohen’s retirement, and the ensemble itself carries on. (In fact, I’m taking the family to hear them perform some early American Christmas music tomorrow.) The individual musicians on this recording also had a variety of careers; viol and recorder player Jane Hershey recorded for many years with Hesperus, soprano Roberta Anderson with Boston Baroque, and both countertenor Ken Fitch and bass-baritone Albinder would go on to greater fame and fortune with Chanticleer.

Next week we’ll swerve back to something closer to jazz as we draw the mystery of the holiday to a close.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Samara Joy, A Joyful Holiday

A contemporary Christmas jazz classic from a young vocalist with an old soul.

Album of the Week, December 13, 2025

In my memory it was the middle of the pandemic (it actually turns out it was January 2022), and I was doomscrolling through TikTok. And I stopped in my tracks, because here was a TikTok user who was singing jazz. And she was good. A low alto, her phrasing reminded me of Ella, and she knew classic ballads. I just scrolled through her whole timeline, and with each video I grew more convinced that she was the real thing. She seemed impossibly talented, and impossibly young.

I was a little late to the bandwagon, because her first album, Samara Joy, had come out the previous summer, and Joy (then performing as Samara McLendon) had won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2019, when Christian McBride described her as a “once-in-a-generation talent.” But I got on the bandwagon before she got to the majors; she signed with Verve Records later in 2022 and released her second album, Linger Awhile, which won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album and won her a Best New Artist award (beating out Wet Leg, among others). And that winter she released this EP, featuring guest Sullivan Fortner (whom we’ve seen accompanying Cécile McLorin Salvant) on piano and Hammond organ, drummers Kenny Washington and Charles Haynes, bassists David Wong and Eric Wheeler, pianist Shedrick Mitchell, and Antonio McLendon.

“Warm in December” is a lesser-known composition by Bob Russell, better known for co-writing “Concerto for Cootie” with Duke Ellington as well as lyrics to dozens of tunes including his last hit “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” With Sullivan Fortner, Kenny Washington and David Wong backing Samara Joy on this performance, a strong argument is made that the song ought to enter the holiday repertoire. A gentle out-of-tempo introduction by Joy and Fortner is followed by a swinging verse with Washington and Wong in cheeky form. Samara Joy’s vocals are at once intimate, requiring the listener to lean in, and knowingly smiling in the way of the best of Ella’s performances. Sullivan Fortner again proves he is the best living accompanist of great jazz vocalists with his sensitive introduction and jubilant solo.

“Twinkle Twinkle Little Me,” co-written by Ron Miller and William O’Malley and originally performed by the Supremes in 1965 and Stevie Wonder in 1967, is here performed by Samara Joy and Sullivan Fortner as an aching ballad. Joy’s vocal control is marvelous, with a single high note underscoring the promise “If you give unselfishly/I’ll always shine for you.” It’s no wonder this performance won Joy and Fortner the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance.

“The Christmas Song” is as warm a performance of the Mel Tormé/Bob Wells classic as you’re likely to find. Joy’s vocal style here demonstrates several signatures of her style, including her quiet volume, careful use of glissando, masterful control of her low range, and phrasing behind the beat in the best possible way, to say nothing of her sense for the finely timed key change at the very end. It also offers an opportunity to hear the steady, forthright sensibility that young bassist David Wong brings to the session; nothing extraneous, just forward motion with his deeply resonant notes.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is the last of the numbers featuring Washington and Wong, here joined by Italian guitarist Pasquale Grasso, who collaborated with Joy on her first two albums. He proves every inch as sensitive an accompanist as Fortner, easily following her shift from a slow waltz time into a swinging double-time across the song’s bridge. On the last verse, as she sings “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow,” she imperceptibly crescendoes to her loudest forte of all the small-combo numbers, then finishes on a stunning barely-sung high note sustained with impossible clarity.

I am not the world’s biggest fan of “O Holy Night”; I find most performances overwrought and triumphalist in a way that feels inappropriate for the hushed miracle of Christmas Eve. In that regard, Joy’s choice to perform here with her father Antonio McLendon (who brings a gospel richness to their harmonies) and her gospel-singing legend grandfather (Goldwire McLendon co-founded the Philadelphia gospel group the Savettes) seems inspired. The outro, with its modal choir building slowly to a climax and a rare Samara Joy high note, might be my favorite part of this Christmas album. She finishes the EP with another collaboration with Antonio, “The Christmas Song (Live Duet),” with Charles Haynes, Eric Wheeler and Shedrick Mitchell backing, which is lovely for many reasons, including father and daughter shouting each other out during the applause at the song’s end.

Not everything on A Joyful Holiday is an instant Christmas classic, but enough of it is great that it’s well worth seeking out. Also: great1 new Christmas albums from young artists are rare enough that I recommend grabbing them when you find them. And going to hear them perform, as well. (You can imagine my dismay when I was unable to perform this year’s Boston Pops concert for corporate sponsors, only to learn that the guest artist was none other than Ms. Samara Joy.)

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a version of Joy with Antonio McLendon and pianist Luther Allison performing “O Holy Night” live for Vevo:

BONUS BONUS: A slightly funkier live version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me” from Joy’s YouTube channel still carries the intimacy of the recorded version:

  1. Mediocre ones, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen. ↩︎

Kenny Burrell, Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas

A cool Yule is in the brilliant and sure hands of this master guitarist.

Album of the Week, December 6, 2025

The dirty little secret of Christmas albums is that a lot of them sound the same. You tend to hear the same arrangements, or arrangements of the same arrangements, of the same Christmas carols and holiday songs over and over again. When an original voice comes along in the genre, it’s a welcome improvement. Such is the case of Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas, the sole holiday album by guitarist Kenny Burrell, released on the Cadet label (home of Ramsey Lewis) in 1966 and arranged by bassist, composer and producer Richard Evans.

We’ve encountered Kenny Burrell many times, all in the company of Jimmy Smith so far. But the guitarist was so much more than a sideman. As a leader, he recorded sides for Blue Note, Prestige, New Jazz (with John Coltrane!) and Verve before recording his first record on the Cadet label (formerly Argo Records, the jazz subsidiary of Chess Records) in 1966. This holiday album followed the same year. Backed with an uncredited orchestra, Burrell’s performances over Davis’s arrangements give both blues and soul, but also unexpected tenderness.

“The Little Drummer Boy” is an unlikely opener, combining the familiar Harry-Simeone-via-Trapp-Family-Singers carol with a steady rhythm section that is, honest to goodness, a direct lift from Ravel’s “Bolero.” Burrell gives us a fairly straightforward reading of the tune, but the solo soon stretches out into a bluesy groove as he takes the guitar higher and higher, with splashes of soul jazz piano and a horn section that grows in prominence but never overwhelms. It’s a masterpiece of a slow burn, with the cool hand of Burrell at the center of it all, right up to the fadeout.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is a quieter, more introspective take on the dark side of this familiar Hugh Martin/Ralph Blane tune. Burrell’s playing is absolutely straight here, with the subtlest of string arrangements underscoring the melancholy of a Christmas song whose original lyrics ran “One day soon we all will be together, if the fates allow/Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”

It surely took a fair amount of gumption to assay a jazz version of “My Favorite Things” in 1966, following John Coltrane’s definitive rendering of the tune in 1961. Burrell and Evans take the tune to a bluesier place, starting with the time signature, a swinging four-four instead of the waltz. But there is some of the transcendence of the Coltrane version in the brief few measures of the bridge before Burrell’s guitar rips through a series of fiery blues licks up until the fade-out.

“Away In a Manger” begins with a solo prelude by Burrell, into the first verse which is played entirely by him and a string section. The bass joins on the second verse; the entire thing is played like a quiet offering, with just enough gospel around the edges to make it a delight.

“Mary’s Little Boy Chile” was not exactly a Christmas-album mainstay even in 1966, but was still widely recorded elsewhere. Introduced by Harry Belafonte ten years earlier, it was written by the great composer and arranger Jester Hairston, who was also responsible for the spectacular arrangement of “Amen” that appeared in the Sidney Poitier film Lilies of the Field. Here the arrangement is simple, just Burrell with percussion and a restrained string section, allowing the calypso to shine forth. The woodwinds join in the last chorus to add a little more gentle oomph.

Burrell’s “White Christmas” is cool and relaxed, with an extremely laid back bassist, piano, and brushes on the drums the only accompaniment. But it carries power and intensity through its simplicity, closing out side one.

“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is a more full-bodied opener for side two, with touches of “Greensleeves” (which Burrell had just recorded earlier that year with Smith) in the arrangement. Burrell’s playing here is cool and precise against a steady backbeat from the rhythm section, but the overall arrangement moves along. “The Christmas Song” has a similar vibe but with more varied instrumentation; French horn and xylophone curl cosily at the edges of the strings, leading into a double-time solo by Burrell that raises the heartrate a good 10-15bpm before relaxing back into a chair by the fire.

“Children, Go Where I Send Thee” is another less traditional choice in a spectacular arrangement. The tune is played with equal parts gospel—every bit as much of a rave-up as the Fred Waring version with full choir—and Blues Brothers-style R&B, with a Hammond organ peeking through the horns.

“Silent Night” gets a mighty gospel arrangement, anchored by the bass and a rolling gospel piano. Burrell’s solo sings without shouting, using chords and octaves for emphasis and power without ever losing the tenderness at the heart of the tune. The “Twelve Days of Christmas,” by contrast, is playful, Burrell’s guitar breakdown on the second day mercifully taking us away from the monotony of the repetitious arrangement. The playing is enough fun that one regrets the band only goes through four days (and three key changes).

“Merry Christmas Baby” is an R&B Christmas song written by Lou Baxter and Johnny Moore; the latter’s Three Blazers recorded the tune with Charles Brown providing vocals and it’s since become a staple of blues and R&B Christmas recordings. Here it provides a purely blues closer, with piano, Hammond, bass and drums providing the accompaniment for the first two verses and the horns building a mighty crescendo under the third and fourth. Burrell’s bluesy guitar gets the last word, bringing the album to a close.

Burrell, remarkably, is still with us. The former Director of Jazz Studies at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, he still appears on new recordings, the most recent a collaboration with Teri Roiger, John Menegon and the late Jack DeJohnette released last year when Burrell was 93, despite health challenges and some controversy about the funding needed to pay ensuing medical bills. This album is a spectacular testament to his playing and his taste, but there are many more worth seeking out—that collaboration with Coltrane for starters. Next week we’ll stay in the jazz lane, with a joyous recent recording by an emerging artist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: From ten years ago, a great trio performance of “My Favorite Things” from Westwood Music.

Jimmy Smith, Christmas ’64

One more organ record—maybe the best known of them all—brings us into this year’s holiday season.

November 29, 2025

Remember how I signed off last week saying we were going to “take a break for some seasonal music,” bringing this run of articles on the jazz organ to a close? Wanna know who our first purveyor of seasonal music is? (Squints) Oh yeah, Jimmy Smith. Had I planned better I could have set this up as a great segue from the organ combo articles into the holidays, but as it is you’ll have to settle for an absolutely spectacular album of both jazz organ and holiday music.

Jimmy Smith in 1964, on Verve, was at the height of both his musical powers and his bankability, and Creed Taylor was not the sort of producer who was above stretching the popularity of his artist for some additional revenue via the time-honored tradition of the Christmas album. Coming off his one-two punch of The Cat and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, you’d be forgiven for expecting that Smith would take things easier on this holiday album. But with a band consisting of many of the musicians who made those great recordings, including Kenny Burrell (and Quentin Warren) on guitar, Art Davis on bass, Grady Tate (and Billy Hart) on drums—plus a whole orchestra that included Jimmy Cleveland on trombone and the elusive Margaret Ross on harp, among others—and charts by Billy Byers and Al Cohn, there was no room for slacking here. This is a seriously hot record, and a fantastic Christmas album to boot.

“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (Big Band version)” begins in big band fashion indeed, with a low-brass processional full of pomp and accompanied by the timpani, right up until “tidings of comfort and joy.” At which point the trumpets call a blue fanfare and Jimmy rolls in. The band continues with a “Slaughter on 10th Avenue” style take on the tune for one more verse, but then Jimmy takes the reins and plays a clean organ trio verse with Kenny Burrell and Grady Tate that is telepathically tight and funky. The horns rise up behind the trio like an incipient ambush until they take one more verse, but Jimmy gets the last word.

“Jingle Bells” is a fine and mellow tune for the trio. Check Grady Tate’s subtle explosions behind the band as well as Jimmy’s understated organ part. The slow crescendos on the two held arpeggios are the only loud part of the arrangement, which fades out just as it gets going. It’s cool—something that can’t be said for the opening of “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” which sports a full symphonic brass arrangement that’s well-nigh Mahlerian, courtesy of saxophonist/arranger Al Cohn. But then it turns the corner into a gospel shouter and we’re really off and running. I would have been pleased to hear a side-long take on the middle bit of the arrangement, but here it’s bookended by an outro version of that opening.

“The Christmas Song” is more swinging, with both Jimmy and the band in a laid back mood. The horns are swinging so hard they’re practically a beat behind, and Jimmy happily burbles bits of mood before playing a doggedly on-model melodic solo as the horns provide chromatically oracular pronouncements. A high chorus of trumpets brings us into a double-time solo wherein Jimmy stretches out over a frantic bit of Grady Tate drumming, then back to the chorus which slowly builds to a massive climax, punctuated by a chime before the final chorus.

The trumpets give us a “White Christmas” opening that could be played by the Boston Pops, key change and all, before Grady Tate takes us into bossa nova land. Jimmy’s solo is low key, in the baritone range, at least until the horns take it up a notch, at which point we get a little happy double time arpeggio, a final chorus, and a little “Jingle Bells” quote to wrap it up.

“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” is a trio number with Quentin Wells and Billy Hart, featuring Jimmy and Quentin trading off licks. The stereo separation (guitar in the left channel, organ in the right) is the only thing that helps to piece apart the players at the beginning, so close is the harmony, especially since Jimmy is soloing without much vibrato. Quentin Wells is a bluesier player than Kenny Burrell and he leans into that here, both in his solo and in the stabs of chords he plays under Jimmy’s solo. Jimmy starts out mellow but builds intensity through his usual tricks, particularly leaning on the tonic and playing bursts of arpeggios around the edges of his solo, all the way into the fade-out.

It’s another Pops-style arrangement for “Silent Night,” complete with bells and flugelhorn, then a handoff to Jimmy and the trio who do what they do best, a brisk, unsentimental swing through the tune. The horns make like “The Cat,” briefly, in the climax of their accompaniment to Jimmy’s solo—indeed, the only thing to criticize here is that they actually overwhelm the organ for the only time on record.

“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (Trio Version)” starts right in, sounding a bit like Jimmy’s version of “Greensleeves.” The trio with Quentin Warren and Billy Hart swings convincingly, with Billy’s snare work so powerful that it causes a secondary rattle somewhere between the snares and the ride cymbal. Jimmy spools off riff after riff in his solo, as Quentin Warren walks around the chords, keeping the rhythm going strong. At several points, it sounds as though the group will fade out, but the producers wisely keep rolling tape as the trio lands the hottest number on the whole record at the very end. Finally as the trio returns to the opening vamp, the engineers bring down the sliders and fade it out into the dark.

About the only thing wrong with Christmas ‘64 is the title; though it wasn’t the only Verve album to include the year in the title, it was clearly not a good choice for a title for a holiday album, which tend to sell between Thanksgiving and Christmas but can continue to rack up sales for many years. Retitled and with a new cover, the album had a long life under its new name, Christmas Cookin’, including in its CD reissue which included two other tracks, “Greensleeves” from Organ Grinder Swing and “Baby It’s Cold Outside” from Jimmy and Wes: The Dynamic Duo.

The better known cover and title for this week’s album as reissued in 1966, courtesy Discogs.

Next week we’ll stay in the jazz lane, with a holiday album by one of the players on this week’s set. You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: This album and its related tracks cast a long shadow over holiday jazz records. The late great Joey DeFrancesco included a rearrangement of Jimmy’s “Greensleeves,” as “What Child is This,” on his superb 2014 album Home for the Holidays:

Duke Pearson, Merry Ole Soul

Album of the Week, December 28, 2024

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 in Religious 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…

Boston Camerata, A Medieval Christmas

Album of the Week, December 21, 2024

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.

It turns out I had things backwards. As I wrote last year, the Nonesuch A Renaissance Christmas was a re-recording of an earlier performance from before the Camerata had signed to a major label. And it turns out that A Medieval Christmas was originally released in 1975, meaning that it precedes Sing We Noel by a full three years.

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.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Boston Pops, Pops Christmas Party

Album of the Week, December 14, 2024

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.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

The Ramsey Lewis Trio, More Sounds of Christmas

Album of the Week, December 7, 2024

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.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Dylan Thomas, Reading (Vol. 1)

Album of the Week, December 30, 2023

It’s the shoulder season of the year, when the Christmas trees are still up but everyone has been Whamageddoned, most of the leftovers from the holiday meal have been eaten, and one could be forgiven for yearning for something to listen to that’s not holiday music. Time for something different, and this record, while still seasonally appropriate, certainly fits the bill.

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas might be best remembered (rightly so) for “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” but it is his story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” that links today’s record with our holiday theme. And what a story it is, especially read in Thomas’s Welsh baritone. The record at hand, Reading Vol. 1, was originally released in 1952, a year before the poet’s death at age 39 from an undiagnosed bronchial infection, complicated by his heavy drinking.

Reading (Vol. 1) is significant in a few other ways. First, it was recorded during the poet’s second American tour, which established his reputation as a poet and as an unpredictably drunken performer. Second, it was the first recording on a new record label. Named after the oldest known English poet, Caedmon Records was founded on a shoestring budget by Barbara Holdridge and Marianne (Roney) Mantell, when both were two years out of Hunter College. They approached Thomas while he was on tour, and convinced him to record his poems.

Thomas recorded five of his best known poems for the record. Different versions have different running orders, but in my copy (released in 1958), the first poem to appear is “Fern Hill.” Written in 1945 as a memory of a farm Thomas visited when a boy, the poem features an unusual nine-line stanza with internal slanted rhyme, and mourns the poet’s inability to escape the passing of time: “Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,/Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

The second poem on the record is “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Probably the most famous villanelle in the English language, Thomas’s fierce address to a dying man, named in the last stanza as his father, has been interpreted both literally and metaphorically over the years as an ode and exhortation to everything from dying relatives to endangered democratic ideals. Thomas’s reading here is both mellifluous and brief, but no less devastating for the brevity.

Less familiar is “In the white giant’s thigh,” which is differently devastating, as the poet’s memory of the carnal, physical joys of better times (summer? Youth?) contrasts with the stark reality of the (cold, aged) present: “And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,/Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,/Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king/Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead/And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring…” The pure pleasure of the language itself holds the dusty fate of the goosegirls at bay; these are no dead thoughts.

“The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait” is the longest poem on the record, and the second longest work after “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” An epic ode to a fisherman who now seems stranded on dry land, the poem both celebrates the wild hunt of the fisherman at the sea and mourns his stranding on land, which not only domesticates him but somehow plants the sea itself with crops: “Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,/To the fisherman lost on the land./He stands alone in the door of his home,/With his long-legged heart in his hand.”

The final poem on the record, “Ceremony After a Fire Raid,” continues in the bleak mood of the other tracks, but here at last there is an apocalypse, as the land is scoured clean after the wreckage of the bombing incendiary damage of the air raid: “The masses of the infant-bearing sea/Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter for ever/Glory glory glory.”

Thomas could be apocalyptic when the mood took him, which is why the irony stands that the first part of the album, with his wryly observed portrait of childhood, recorded only to fill the album, is the best-known recording on the album. I deliberately saved the first track for last, as “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” was not only recorded last, it was added as an afterthought. After recording the five poems above, Thomas was told that they needed more material to fill the album, and he suggested this story, originally published in Harper’s Bazaar and redacted together from a radio broadcast he wrote for the BBC and a 1947 essay written for Picture Post Magazine. The resulting work is delightfully episodic, with the unforgettable episode of the burned Christmas dinner at the Protheros leading off—the dialog between the narrator and young Jim Prothero stands as an economical masterpiece of wry comedy. (Sent to call the fire brigade, they say, “Let’s call the police as well…” “And the ambulance.” “And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires.”) There follows the exhausted and stuffed uncles, the tipsy aunts, the caroling to the haunted house. The whole thing is a closely observed piece of brilliance, a celebration of the delights of festival excess and idle childhood free-range play.

Little wonder that “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” led to the establishment of Caedmon Records as a successful enterprise. The new label went on to record many great midcentury poets and to pave the way for later audio innovations—audiobooks, anyone? We’ll hear more from Caedmon another time. Next week, though, we’ll dive into a different journey.

You can listen to the album here:

Virginia Women’s Chorus, Candlelight Christmas

Album of the Week, December 23, 2023

Sometimes you grow up with your favorite holiday albums, and sometimes you find them on eBay. Today’s record falls in the latter category, and it also marks the intersection of two of my obsessions, vinyl and choral music at the University of Virginia.

The Virginia Women’s Chorus was founded at the University of Virginia in 1974, a few years after undergraduate coeducation had finally reached Mr. Jefferson’s University, courtesy of a lawsuit. Women had performed in choruses at the University before then; graduate students appeared in the University Singers, and during the World War II years the music department had pulled together the Madrigal Group, which appeared several times between 1944 and 1946 and then disappeared entirely. The Women’s Chorus was founded to give women similar choral opportunities to those enjoyed by the Virginia Glee Club; their first director was James Dearing, and later Doug Hargrove; Katherine (KaeRenae) Mitchell, then a graduate student, worked alongside him from 1977 to 1981. She was then hired as a part time faculty member in 1982 and took on the independent directorship of the chorus.

It was under Mitchell’s direction that the group recorded this set, released in 1983, with assistance from harpist Caroline Gregg and faculty member and organist Yvaine Duisit. Mme. Duisit, who was born in France in 1930, attended the National Conservatory in Paris, where she studied piano with Armand Ferté and organ with Maurice Duruflé. She was a piano instructor at the University for years, playing the organ for the first Messiah Sing-In in 1968, and was also the organist at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Charlottesville until her resignation in 2006 shortly before her death.

But it is the student voices that greet us in the first side of Candlelight Christmas, performing Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. As the album was not recorded as a “live in concert” performance (at least, not that I can tell from the audio), the chorus does not process during the opening, allowing the warm acoustic of St. Paul’s to reflect the a cappella performance. The Women’s Chorus is in fine voice throughout, performing with good balance and precise pitch; when the harp enters at the beginning of “Wolcom, Yule!,” it is precisely in the key in which the students finished the Processional. Speaking of harp, Gregg’s solo in the “Interlude” and her accompaniment alongside “In Freezing Winter Night” are meditative, moving, and chilling in equal turns. There are a great many moments of excitement alongside the meditative moments, and the climactic moments of “This Little Babe” and “Deo Gracias” are sung precisely in time and with a great propulsive energy.

Listen to the soloists throughout, who are credited collectively rather than with their individual movements: altos Margaret Callery and Patricia Smith, and sopranos Penny Pennington, Melody Sweeney, Abrielle Taylor-Levine and Sarah Mouzon. In particular, the alto soloist on “That Yonge Child” does a superb job with the difficult tonality and melodic line, and the soprano on “Balulalow” sings with a piercingly pure tone.

The second half of the record features an assortment of traditional carols accompanied by Duisit, including two Wassails, but opens with the Morales “O Magnum Mysterium.” With the Women’s Chorus capable of this level of polyphonic performance, alongside Donald Loach’s Virginia Glee Club of the era, the University must really have been an amazing place for Renaissance performance.

Also of note on this record are the two songs performed by the Virginia Belles. Like their counterparts the Virginia Gentlemen, the Belles were originally formed by Mitchell in 1977 as a small group a cappella subset of the Women’s Chorus before becoming a standalone group. Here they perform an “Angelus ad Virginem” by Williametta Spencer and the two Wassails.

The Virginia Women’s Chorus, like the Glee Club, ceased to be a curricular organization at UVA when the Music Department stopped sponsoring single-sex choruses in 1989. The Women’s Chorus was inactive for several years until a group of women (including my sister Esta Jarrett) reformed the group in 1994. Some of the group’s subsequent history is told in Ten Thousand Voices, my history of the Virginia Glee Club, which makes an excellent Christmas or New Years present for the Hoo or men’s glee club fan in your life. 🙂

There are no copies of this record online, so I’ve posted it here for your listening pleasure. Please enjoy! (I hope to post a better picture of the album soon … as soon as I figure out which shelf my copy is on…)

Postscript: thanks to KaeRenae Mitchell for providing a few factual corrections for this write-up.

Ramsey Lewis, Sound of Christmas

Album of the Week, December 16, 2023

There are some jazz performers who make a career out of breaking boundaries, who record staggering works of genius that don’t connect with the public in their lifetimes but who are celebrated only by a marginally small audience. Ramsey Lewis is not among those performers. A classically trained pianist with populist instincts, he made a career over more than sixty years of recording popular, crowd pleasing jazz influenced by blues, soul, and pop. That’s not to say they weren’t also staggering works of genius in their own right. Case in point: his 1961 holiday album Sound of Christmas, which combines all those influences with the Christmas songbook, in both piano trio and orchestral arrangements.

Ramsey Lewis was born in 1935, half a generation younger than many of the 1960s jazz luminaries we’ve explored in this column, in Chicago to parents who had both migrated from the South. His father was a church choir director, and young Ramsey wanted to follow in his footsteps; when piano lessons were offered to his older sister but not to him, Lewis threw a fit until he was able to take lessons as well. He studied classical piano performance, played in a number of ensembles, and eventually formed his own trio. In October 1961, the trio entered the studio to record their ninth album, and first holiday-themed record. In addition to Lewis, the players included Issac “Red” Holt on drums and Eldee Young on bass, as they had since 1958. In addition to the trio, there was also a string section arranged by Riley Hampton, who was the house bandleader at Chess Records. Hampton had just provided Etta James with the string arrangements behind her career-making smash hit “At Last,” and his skills are on full display on this album… or at least on the second half; the first half is just the trio.

“Merry Christmas, Baby” is a low-key opener. A blues written by Charles Brown and Lou Baxter and recorded by Brown when Baxter needed money for medical care, the lyrics of the song (“Merry Christmas, baby/You sure did treat me nice”) are what distinguish it from any other mid-tempo blues, and they’re not evident in this recording. But the performance here is sprightly and the interaction between Lewis, Holt and Young is electric.

“Winter Wonderland” was written in 1934 by Felix Bernard, with lyrics by Richard Bernhard Smith; originally about a couple’s romance, later lyrics added in 1947 remade the song into a children’s winter fable. Lewis’s version rollicks all over, with help from “Red” Holt’s drumming.

We’ve written about the origins of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” before, when Bill Evans featured it on Trio 64. Unlike Evans’ brisk romp, Lewis takes the song as a bluesy ballad, lending a late-night feel to the classic Christmas tune.

“The Christmas Blues” should not be confused with the other “Christmas Blues,” written by Sammy Cahn and David Jack Holt. This version is written by the pianist and composer Skitch Henderson, and is a straightforward major blues, introduced by a mean Eldee Young bass solo with jingle bells added for flavor.

“Here Comes Santa Claus” was written by Gene Autry, to a tune composed by Oakley Haldeman. Autry was no stranger to Christmas music, having written “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in 1939—and he would go on to debut “Frosty the Snowman” in 1950, making him the single most Christmassy cowboy in America. Lewis’s rendition adds a little boogie-woogie and stride to the performance.

Flipping the record over puts us in a different soundscape, with Lewis’ composition “The Sound of Christmas” introduced by Riley Hampton’s string section and the sound of Lewis on the Celeste. But “Red” Holt’s syncopated beat links it with the first side, and the composition is a jaunty little holiday bop, mingling the flavors of traditional Christmas pop music with Lewis’s blues-flavored piano.

We wrote a bit about the origins of “The Christmas Song” a few weeks ago, and this is a more traditional rendition than Guaraldi’s, with the melody played first in the Celeste, then in the violin before Lewis’s piano takes over with some octave-spanning soulful flavor. The Celeste returns at the end to gently play us out.

“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” is introduced on tubular bells, and then a hard cut into Lewis’s piano and the strings (so hard a cut that it sounds like it might have been an edit rather than part of the original arrangement). Lewis plays a set of blues variations on the ancient melody, bringing in snippets of “My Favorite Things” and a few other standards along the way. The arrangement swings hard, with the strings sounding like they had just come off a Wes Montgomery record.

Lewis’s version of “Sleigh Ride,” by contrast, is pretty straightforward, with the strings doing much of the heavy lifting in recreating the Leroy Anderson composition. Lewis blues some of the chords around the edges a little in his solo but otherwise plays it straight—appropriate since the original number swings pretty hard already.

The record closes with Frank Loesser’s “What Are You Doing New Years’ Eve?,” surely the most lovesick of the traditional holiday songs. As Loesser’s daughter Susan explained, her father intended that the narrator was asking for a commitment many months in advance: “It always annoyed my father when the song was sung during the holidays.” Lewis’s version incorporates jazz ballad style alongside a snippet of “Für Elise” to close out this bluesy, soulful romp through the Christmas songbook.

Lewis would go on to have a long and varied career in jazz, performing with both jazz trio and extended fusion ensembles (which we’ll hear later). Along the way he recorded a sequel to Sounds of Christmas, which we’ll hear another time. Next week we’ll veer back into the traditional lane for a personal favorite of mine.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

King’s College Choir, O Come All Ye Faithful

Album of the Week, December 9, 2023

Today we go from one of the most popular albums I’ve ever reviewed (judging from the number of complete strangers who have visited my site to read about it) to one of the more obscure, sort of. I say “sort of” because while not a lot of people may have this particular record (to be precise, right now I’m one of seven folks on Discogs who own a copy of this pressing), it’s the most traditional of Christmas traditions: the English cathedral carol album. And it’s by a completely top-notch group with a top-shelf conductor.

Of the musical groups I’ve reviewed on this page, the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge is undoubtedly the oldest and most established, having been created by King Henry VI to provide daily singing in his chapel (he is the “King” in King’s College, having founded it in 1441). The men and boys choir has from its inception consisted of 16 boy choristers accompanied by adult male voices, and at least throughout the last four hundred years by organ, though the form and particulars have changed over time. The first recorded director of music was one John Tomkins, the half-brother of composer Thomas Tomkins, who was the successor to Orlando Gibbons as the organist at King’s College.

Between Tomkins’ appointment in 1606 and the late 20th century there were fourteen directors of the choir, most notably including Sir David Willcocks, who directed the choir from 1957 to 1974 and in numerous recordings and broadcasts (and wrote numerous descants which are memorialized in the collections Carols for Choirs). Willcocks was succeeded by Sir Philip Ledger, who conducted the choir for nine years before taking the reins of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Ledger was succeeded by Stephen Cleobury, who directed the choir from 1982 until 2019, a few months before his death from cancer at age 70. Today’s album was recorded in 1984, a few short years into his tenure.

There is something quintessentially English about the King’s College Christmas Eve services, in the form of “lessons in songs and carols,” that have been broadcast worldwide by the BBC for at least the entire time I’ve been alive. A good amount of it has to do with the precise Received Pronunciation of the speakers, but perhaps equally much has to do with the English choral tradition— the clarity of the voices of the trebles, the precision of the diction, and the very English musical choices. This record is a good example of all of the above. It is full of great carol arrangements, but I’ll pick out a few:

“Once in Royal David’s City” is famous for beginning the Lessons services, as it has done since 1918. Written by organist Henry Gauntlett to a text by Cecil Frances Alexander, the carol, originally written for a child’s songbook, is here heard in the expansive arrangement by King’s organist Dr. Arthur Henry Mann which, Erik Routley has written, “turns the homely children’s hymn into a processional of immense spaciousness.” One of the other legendary bits about the carol is that the boy soloist who sings the first verse is only told that he will sing the solo a few minutes before the start of the service; we trust that the unnamed soloist on this recording got a little more notice.

I sometimes forget that Ralph Vaughan Williams, in addition to his considerable talents as a composer, was also a folklorist and song collector, much as Arthur Kyle Davis or Bascom Lamar Lunsford were on this side of the Atlantic. “On Christmas Night” is also known as the “Sussex Carol” after the location where Vaughan Williams heard it sung, in the hamlet of Monk’s Gate in Horsham by Harriett Verrell. It might be one of the definitive English carols, featuring the adult and treble voices in dialog with each other and then in harmony at the end. You can hear more English oral tradition at work in “The Seven Joys of Mary,” which was collected as an anonymous folk song as #278 in the Roud index.

“Ding dong! merrily on high” consists of words written by English composer George Ratcliffe Woodward (1848-1934) to a secular tune by 16th century French composer Thoinot Arbeau. Woodward directed bell choirs, and you can hear the tintinnabulations in his writing.

Cleobury’s version of the Kings College Choir is the one I grew up listening to every Christmas Eve, but it’s worth reflecting that his version is in some ways also Willcocks’, and Tomkins’, and indeed all the different masters of the choir to this point, all blended into one continuous tradition.

We’ll continue to veer all over the map in our appreciation of Christmas music for the next few weeks, jumping back over to the American side of the pond to check out a different take on the holiday. Until then, you can listen to today’s album, which I’ve posted here since there are no streams to be found of it anywhere.

Vince Guaraldi, A Charlie Brown Christmas

Album of the Week, December 2, 2023

It seems to have come from nowhere and to always have been here. For my lifetime, there has always been A Charlie Brown Christmas, and there has always been a jazz piano trio in the background playing to underscore Schulz’s scenes of comedy and pathos, as Charlie Brown and Linus (and Schroeder, Shermy, Violet, Pig-Pen, Frieda, Sally, Lucy and Snoopy) grapple with finding deeper meaning in a holiday designed to stay flashy and shallow at every turn. But it was by no means a destined work, and it was only through the happiest of accidents that Vince Guaraldi was signed up to write the soundtrack that made him famous, and brought jazz into the hearts of countless kids.

Charles Schulz started Peanuts in 1950, after several failed starts in comics (of which the single-panel strip “Li’l Folks” is probably the most worth seeking out). By the early 1960s, the strip was a complete phenomenon, having originated collections of books and merchandise as well as reaching broad nationwide syndication. But television had mostly eluded Schulz. Animated segments featuring the characters were produced for the Tennessee Ernie Ford TV show, but a documentary special, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, was produced in 1963 but never picked up.

It was in the construction of that special that producer Lee Mendelson happened to be listening to the radio and heard Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” (from the album Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus and never intended as a single— it was released in 1962 as the b-side to the bossa nova “Samba de Orpheus”) and hired him to record cues for the documentary. Guaraldi, excited, called Mendelson one night and played him “Linus and Lucy,” which apparently came to him fully formed. While the documentary was never released, Guaraldi released the album Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown, and this association set him up to continue working with Mendelson when the Coca-Cola Company agreed to sponsor A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Guaraldi convened a few different recording sessions between September 17 and October 28, 1965; the players were not noted on the session reels, but it appears Jerry Granelli and Fred Marshall played drums and bass on most of the session, with Colin Bailey and Monty Budwig appearing on a few tracks. Listening to the full sessions, which were released in a super deluxe edition last year, it’s apparent that Guaraldi brought most of the arrangements with him to the group, only working out a few in the studio.

“O Tannenbaum” captures the vibe of the sessions from the beginning. Played solo by Guaraldi on the piano in free time during the first chorus, the drums and bass enter behind him at the beginning to the second and the piece clicks into a jazz shuffle. The sound is kept mellow; the drummer sticks to brushes throughout and the bassist stays to a simple walked line for the next few choruses. When the bass gets a solo chorus, the drummer adds some hits on the hi-hat and snare, but is still kept back in the mix, keeping the overall feeling mellow and contemplative.

“What Child is This” appears late in the recording sessions. The traditional English carol, based on the tune “Greensleeves,” is opened with a rippling arpeggio that introduces the tune and repeats between verses; the tune is otherwise played straight by the combo, and the minor key reinforces the wistful feeling of the album. It’s a quick performance, over in only a few verses.

“My Little Drum” sees the appearance of a lighter tone, with a children’s chorus (the children’s choir of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California) providing a vocalise over the trio. Credited to Guaraldi, the tune is a re-working of Katherine Davis’s “Carol of the Drum” aka “The Little Drummer Boy,” with the drummer adding some subtle salsa flavor behind the bass and piano, who mostly play the melody straight.

The more upbeat feeling continues with the soundtrack’s most famous song (and the first real Guaraldi composition), “Linus and Lucy.” The famous walking bass arpeggio is doubled in the left hand of the piano and the acoustic bass, while the drummer mostly keeps time with hits on 2 and 4 and a shaker. The first bridge veers over into samba territory, with the ensemble relaxing into the tune; the second bridge does a more straightforward blues with a walking bass line. It is more complicated to describe than it is to listen to; aurally it’s like a straight shot of dopamine to my Gen-X cortex.

“Christmas Time is Here (instrumental)” appears twice on the album. The first rendition is kept simple by the trio, with the bass taking the second verse as a walking solo. The drum sticks to brushwork throughout; the final verse has a tremolo effect in both the piano and the arco bass. It’s delicate and wonderful, and more than a little wistful in the chord progression. The vocal version follows as the lead track of Side 2, and features the children’s choir singing lyrics that Lee Mendelson claims to have written on the back of an envelope in “about ten minutes.” The song has become a standard, having been covered by David Benoit, Ron Escheté, Patti Austin, Debby Boone, Mel Tormé, Rosemary Clooney, R.E.M., Stone Temple Pilots, Khruangbin, Sarah McLachlan, Diana Krall, and El Vez, among others. Jerry Granelli once commented, “Vince always wanted to write a standard. So he made it.”

“Skating,” another Guaraldi original, is less widely covered but no less delightful. A study in the use of arpeggios in melody, it’s a relaxed, jaunty melody that soundtracks one of the best physical comedy moments in the special, as Snoopy lures the kids out to skate on the ice only to play “crack the whip” and send them flying.

“Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” the number that closes the actual television special, here appears partway through side 2, with a children’s choir in full “loo loo loo” mode and Guaraldi on the Wurlitzer organ. It’s charming and you can hear the late night of the recording session in the kids’ voices; they were apparently taken for ice cream after the session concluded to compensate.

“Christmas is Coming” is the last of the Guaraldi originals, and it’s a bop. The drummer is let off the leash as the band leans into the tune, bouncing between straight ahead jazz and the samba-inflected bridge. It would have been interesting to hear some of Guaraldi’s later bands, like the one on A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, tackle this tune with a horn section.

“Für Elise” signals one of the few appearances of Schroder as anything other than a background character, as he plays the Beethoven melody while Lucy tries vainly to get his attention. Robert Wells and Mel Tormé’s classic “The Christmas Song” follows, with a solo rendition by Guaraldi for the first verse and chorus; the bass and drums join quietly behind him for the second verse and chorus. Tormé and Wells’ classic has received many cover performances, definitively by Nat King Cole; this version plays it straight and it’s completely unaffected.

“Greensleeves” was added to the definitive running order of the album with the first CD recording in 1988. An alternate version of “What Child Is This,” it was recorded late in the sessions, along with “The Christmas Song,” when the team realized they needed some additional songs to fill out the album. “Greensleeves” returns to the sound world of the second track with a slightly different arpeggiated interlude used in place of the triplets from the earlier track. Listening to the alternate tracks, it’s clear that Guaraldi and Mendelson were looking for a particular mood, trying and discarding arrangements that owed debts to Coltrane and to bossa nova. The band is allowed to stretch out more in this final track, adding a depth of exploratory sound to the album’s final four minutes and playing into different tonalities before concluding.

So we’ve wandered through Vince Guaraldi’s music, forwards and backwards, until we arrived at his most spectacular and most humble production. A Charlie Brown Christmas feels like a standard that has always existed because it captures the peaceful, meditative nature of the holiday alongside the frantic, mysterious, and joyful. Three of the tunes—“Skating,” “Christmas Time is Here,” and “Linus and Lucy”—can be said to have ascended to the realm of jazz and holiday standards. Not bad for 30 minutes of television anchored by a simple jazz piano trio. We’ll come back to Guaraldi once more at some point in the future as we wander through my collection; next week, though, we’ll touch a different Christmas tradition.

You can listen to today’s album here: