You don’t need Pasatiempo to tell you that there are lots of best-selling holiday albums out there by the likes of Mariah Carey and Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole, NSYNC and Boyz II Men, and Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton. We’re here to ferret out the unusual and the unheralded, the jaw-dropping and eye-opening performances that will widen your holiday horizons and bring your jolly party conversation to a halt.
Your intrepid correspondent recently trekked to Eldorado to meet with a husband-and-wife-team whose specialty is everything Christmas, especially the music, the dining, and the décor. The décor items take up most of a two-car garage and the number of Christmas CDs on hand is somewhere between 250 and 300, so they understandably wish to remain anonymous.
Here are some of their musical recommendations, in no particular order, along with one or two of my own favorites.
Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration
This 1992 CD won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Soul Gospel Album. Under the direction of Executive Producer Quincy Jones, 16 segments from Handel’s Messiah were rearranged in a variety of African American musical genres, including soul, spirituals, blues, jazz fusion, rhythm and blues, and hip hop. A fleet of top-drawer talent was then recruited to perform it, so some of the highlights include Dianne Reeves singing “And the Glory of the Lord,” Stevie Wonder and Take 6 singing “O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion,” and Al Jarreau soloing on “Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage?”
Everyone joined together for the “Hallelujah Chorus” as the finale, so additional performers include Andraé Crouch, Kim Fields, Edwin Hawkins, Linda Hopkins, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Johnny Mathis, Marilyn McCoo, Stephanie Mills, Phylicia Rashad, Richard Smallwood, Sounds of Blackness, and Vanessa A. Williams.
Sadly, Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration is out of print at the moment, although used CDs are available from Amazon and other online retailers. The good news is that there’s an excellent video of the “Hallelujah Chorus” recording session to be enjoyed at youtu.be/VoBwzLH2Aig.
Oy to the World! A Klezmer Christmas
There’s a surprisingly strong showing by klezmer bands in the holiday music bins, and The Klezmonauts’ Oy to the World is one of the best. This 2006 CD features a high-energy band assembled by Chicago composer-arranger Paul Libman to work their Menorah-based magic on tunes like “Jingle Bells,” “Joy to the World,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” and “Away in a Manger.”
Some of the cuts include Yiddish-language vocals and there’s one original tune — “Santa Gey Gezunder Heit” (Santa Go In Good Health) — to round out the disc. Libman’s arrangements also include a generous helping of short riffs borrowed from very non-Christmas-like sources, such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly film score, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, and Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida.”
Oy to the World is available from Amazon and other retailers in CD and downloadable MP3 formats.
A Creole Christmas
If you’d like your holiday music served up with Tabasco sauce and chicory coffee instead of schmaltz and a glass of Manischewitz, this CD is for you. A cross-section of bayou-based talent is represented, from Frankie “Sea Cruise” Ford to Doctor John, Aaron Neville, and The Zion Harmonizers. The masterful producer-arranger Allen Toussaint was also a first-rate pianist, and he gets matters off to a blazing start with a no-vocals version of “White Christmas” that would do Professor Longhair proud.
Another highlight cut follows immediately, with Johnny Adams’ passionate, operatic vocal style on full display in “Please Come Home for Christmas.” (A few of the words near the end don’t make complete sense, but you won’t care.) Pete Fountain manages to lift “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” out of novelty-tune tedium with some virtuoso clarinet playing, while Doctor John infuses “Merry Christmas Baby” with the voodoo mystique of his “Night Tripper” period.
New and used CDS of A Creole Christmas are easily available.
Too Many Santas!
Does the thought of all the holiday accoutrements threaten to make your head explode? Guess what? The new-wave a capella group The Bobs felt the same way, and they’ve got the CD to prove it. This parody album features their original material and a few re-tooled covers poking fun at just about every holiday trope imaginable, sung with accuracy and style.
The opener is “Yuleman vs. the Anti-Claus,” the story of a smackdown for the ages pitting a Christmas-mad hero against his Grinchy polar opposite. “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas” is a country-and-western tearjerker about a marriage on the rocks, while “Fifty Kilowatt Tree” is a calypso-tinged ballad about the guy on the block whose outdoor décor casts everyone else’s into the shade. The covers include “Christmas in Jail,” about the evils of drinking and driving, and “Rasta Reindeer,” a Caribbean point of view applied to The Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick.”
Too Many Santas is available as a new or used CD and as an MP3 download.
Hot Jazz for a Cool Yule
Based in San Antonio (Texas, not New Mexico), the Jim Cullen Jazz Band’s live holiday album will strike a responsive chord with those who love early- and mid-20th-century jazz. This 1996 release includes 14 tunes, some played relatively straightforwardly and some in creative arrangements. There’s also an impressive list of guest performers, including trumpeter and flugelhorn ace Clark Terry on “The Christmas Song” and jazz bassist Milt “The Judge” Hinton on “Winter Wonderland.”
Savion Glover of Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk fame provides tap dance percussion for a trio arrangement of “The Little Drummer Boy,” which will be the album’s high point for many. The other leading contender is by band keyboardist John Sheridan, who evokes the celesta’s tinkling on the first notes of “The Sugar Plum Fairy” sequence from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, then kicks it into the stride piano realm of James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith on his “Nutcracker Rag.”
Hot Jazz for a Cool Yule is available as a new or used CD.
Christmas in the Stars
The top-selling holiday album in 1979 was A Christmas Together, by John Denver and The Muppets (still an excellent choice, by the way). In 1981, it was Christmas, by Kenny Rogers. Sandwiched between them was (believe it or not) 1980’s Christmas in the Stars, subtitled A Star Wars Christmas, and the lead performer was Anthony Daniels, the British actor who voiced C-3PO in 10 Star Wars films, narrated much of the album, and sang on a few tunes.
The No. 1 album was the brainchild of Domenico Monardo, known professionally as Meco, a trombonist turned music arranger and record producer whose “space disco” version of the Star Wars theme and the album it came from, Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, both went platinum in 1977. His nine-song holiday LP and cassette tape boasted a few Christmas standards, but most of the songs were specially written by Maury Yeston, at the time a Yale University professor, who went on to write music and lyrics for the Broadway shows Nine, Titanic, and Grand Hotel.
Yeston’s voice, digitally altered and multi-tracked, is heard on the album’s breakout hit, “What Can You Get a Wookie for Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb?),” which reached No. 69 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 1980. Christmas in the Stars also boasted the first professional credit for John Bongiovi (now better known as John Bon Jovi), who sang lead vocals on “R2-D2 We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
The cassette tape version of Christmas in the Stars is now extremely rare and pricey, as are playable versions of the LP. Rhino Records released the album in CD format in 1996, and it is often available from Amazon and other retailers. The enterprising firm Christmas LP to CD has a few of the LPs in their original jackets available for $17 (certainly not playable at that price), as well as a much larger number of CD copies at $24.00. See the sidebar for details.
L’Enfance du Christ
In a more just musical world, symphony orchestras would perform Hector Berlioz’s oratorio L’Enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ) and Handel’s Messiah on an alternating annual basis. A lapsed Roman Catholic and a composer whose music the French public saw as impossibly cacophonous, Berlioz nevertheless produced a score of great lyrical beauty and heartfelt simplicity in his account of the holy family’s flight into Egypt to escape King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents.
Paradoxically, L’Enfance du Christ had its origins in a hoax. During a card game Berlioz scribbled down a few bars of music which he developed into a choral work called “The Shepherds’ Farewell.” He added the piece to an upcoming concert, attributing it to a non-existent 17th-century church musician, and its success encouraged him to make it the centerpiece of a full-length oratorio, which premiered in 1854.
Ever the innovator, Berlioz ended the oratorio with a masterstroke, banishing the orchestra in favor of a six-minute “mystic chorus” for solo tenor and chorus. In his Memoirs, Berlioz described an 1863 performance in an incongruously enormous hall holding 6,000 patrons and 500 performers. “To my great surprise, people were profoundly moved, and tears were shed at ‘Ô mon âme,’ which is sung unaccompanied at the end of the work. How happy I feel when I see my audience weep!”
There are many available recordings of L’Enfance du Christ; good choices include the versions conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, Roger Norrington, and Sir Colin Davis (the 2007 release on the London Symphony Orchestra’s own label).
A Few More Options to Consider
You can “Wipe Out” with The Ventures and their 1965 California surf-music interpretations of holiday tunes via The Ventures’ Christmas Album. Several feature unique introductions, such as having “Wooly Bully” segue into “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “Frosty the Snowman” downing a shot of “Tequila” to start with. Now we know why he was such a jolly, happy soul.
For another klezmerized take on a holiday classic, try Shirim’s Klezmer Nutcracker. The retitled movements include “Kozatsky ‘til You Dropsky,” “Dance of the Latkes Queens,” and “Waltz of the Ruggelah.”
Eurythmics’ veteran Annie Lennox went on to an exceptional career as a vocal soloist alongside her work as a social activist. Many critics consider her 2010 A Christmas Cornucopia one of her best albums regardless of genre, thanks to a thoughtful, introspective approach that rewards repeated listening.
If you want to own just one holiday novelty album, the best choice may well be Dr. Demento’s humbly titled Greatest Christmas Novelty CD of All Time. There’s no escaping a few of the usual suspects such as “The Chipmunk Song” and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” but the real reason to have this album are the songs by some unusual suspects. The brilliant and sadly neglected Stan Freberg weighs in with “Christmas Dragnet” and “Nuttin’ for Christmas,” Weird Al Yankovic offers up “Christmas at Ground Zero,” and Wild Man Fischer duets with Dr. D himself on “I’m a Christmas Tree.”
