You don’t have to be religious to enjoy Christmas music. Jazz musicians—instrumentalists and vocalists, have added their interpretations of Christmas classics to the holiday songbook—which is both sacred and secular.
There are thousands of jazz versions of tunes to share from a wide selection of artists. These are a few of my favorites and I hope you’ll join me today by posting some of yours. In past years here at Daily Kos, I’ve featured Nat King Cole in “The king of Christmas soul,” Laura Nyro in “Christmas in her soul,” soulful singers and R&B tunes, and last year’s offering was “'O Holy Night'—a gift to us from a Christian, a Jew and an abolitionist.”
This year, I’d like to open with Ella. From my perspective, Ella Fitzgerald will always be the consummate jazz vocalist.
The purity and clarity of her sound has never been matched.
Dubbed "The First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums. Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with all the jazz greats, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman. (Or rather, some might say all the jazz greats had the pleasure of working with Ella). She performed at top venues all over the world, and packed them to the hilt. Her audiences were as diverse as her vocal range. They were rich and poor, made up of all races, all religions and all nationalities. In fact, many of them had just one binding factor in common - they all loved her.
Here’s Ella’s version of “The Christmas Song”—often called “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”:
Charlie Parker aka “Bird” or “Yardbird” will always be known as an innovative soloist and one of the key founders of “bebop.” Here is Bird, along with Kenny Dorham, Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Max Roach—live at the The Royal Roost on December 25 in New York City.
All I can say about Dexter Gordon’s instrumental version of “The Christmas Song” is that it is mellow, fluid—and superb. I had the opportunity to hear him live quite a few times at The Jazzboat, a small club on New York’s lower east side where I was working as a bartender. I counted myself lucky, because though I had heard him on recordings—during my teen years he was an ex-pat in Europe, where he spent fourteen years. If you have never seen “Round Midnight,” put it on your holiday viewing list. The film stars Gordon as a jazz musician in Paris.
The Dean of America’s Classical Music was “The Duke,” Edward Kennedy Ellington. From his version of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite" here’s his rendition of the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”—humorously dubbed "Sugar Rum Cherry.”
I have a long list of favorite female jazz vocalists—and could easily do a lengthy Christmas song story using only lady-songbirds. Nancy Wilson’s songbook covers jazz, R&B, blues and pop—and she will always be one of my top 10 jazz stylists.
Tony Bennett is 91 and still singing. “Tony became the first male pop star to ever sing with Basie's band”:
Dinah Washington, born Ruth Lee Jones in Alabama in 1924—her fans (and I’m one of them) will remember her as simply “the unforgettable Miss Washington.”
The Modern Jazz Quartet aka “the MJQ” were:
“noted for delicate percussion sonorities, innovations in jazz forms, and consistently high performance standards sustained over a long career. For most of its existence it was composed of Milt Jackson, vibes; John Lewis, piano; Percy Heath, bass; and Connie Kay, drums.
We lost Jon Hendricks this year. He joined the jazz vocal choir in the sky on November 22, 2017:
When the singer Jon Hendricks declared, during a gig at the age of 80, that the next stop was 100, the likelihood of him getting there seemed almost self-evident. Back in 2002, as he bounded onstage at the Jazz Cafe, London, in a glittering gold suit, hat cocked over one eye, his yodelling, scatting, tone-bending reinvention of jazz classics by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk or Count Basie sounded like the work of an indestructible musical force. Hendricks, who has died aged 96, was a funny, articulate and creatively intelligent master of a hard art, who took chances with vocal gymnastics and unpremeditated improv flights that few jazz singers had attempted or imagined before him, and he could mimic the sounds of instruments with uncanny fidelity.
He was a model for some of the best male singers in jazz history, including Bobby McFerrin, Al Jarreau, Mark Murphy and Kurt Elling, but Hendricks’ most lasting legacy was his expansion of the art of vocalese, the technique of fitting wittily hip lyrics to the melody lines of instrumental jazz themes and improvisations, as pioneered by the singers Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure in the early 1950s. Some of the jazz cognoscenti disliked the style’s occasional invitation to technical tightrope-walking and showbiz bravura, but Hendricks was to give vocalese a global platform through his collaborations with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross in the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, will always be my favorite jazz vocal group. When I attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City—your hangout card with the jazz crowd required you to sing all the lyrics to their tune “Cloudburst.”
Here’s their version of Walt Kelly’s “Deck Us All With Boston Charlie,” from his Pogo comic strip.
For those of you who don’t feel like clicking on you tubes—and simply want lots of music—this should hold you. Ten hours of Christmas Jazz:
A musical Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all!
Please join in the celebration and post your holiday jazz favorites below.