Let it swing, let it swing, let it swing!

By Derrick Bang 

[Web master’s note: Northern California film critic Derrick Bang — still the eldest, youngest and only son of this site’s jazz guru, Ric Bang — has surveyed the holiday jazz scene for 21 years, with lengthy columns that just keep growing. Check out previous columns by clicking on the CHRISTMAS label below.]

It’s another solid year for holiday jazz albums, and the nicest surprise — to paraphrase the Old English rhyme — is that this year’s offerings feature both “something old, something new.”

To be more precise, a trio of “something olds.”

Longtime readers of this annual survey know that three vintage albums have topped my Gotta Have list for decades: classics which, for unknown reasons, have neither been digitized nor re-released since their initial vinyl appearance. I’ve complained about this for years and years; apparently, somebody finally listened.

To a degree.

Jazz pianist Bobby Timmons released Holiday Soul on the Prestige label way back in 1964; jazz organist Don Patterson confused things by using exactly the same title for his Prestige release the same year. Five years later, jazz pianist Duke Pearson produced Merry Ole Soul for Blue Note. All three albums are terrific, although Pearson’s boasts the most inventive arrangements and tastiest jazz chops; his iconic cover of “Sleigh Ride” has been included on at least a dozen holiday jazz compilation albums.

(For the sake of historical accuracy, I should mention that Pearson’s album was issued on CD by Japan’s Toshiba EMI in 2004, with a bonus track — “An Old Fashioned Christmas” — that isn’t available anywhere else. But it’ll cost you a pretty penny, assuming you even can find the blamed thing.)

All three albums once again are readily available — finally! — but with a hitch. In a nod toward current market forces, you have the option of vinyl or streaming ... but not CD. That’ll be fine for vinyl purists who prefer the warmth of LPs, and new-tech streaming fans who aren’t concerned about bitrates and information loss via compression ... but it leaves CD fans out in the cold. Which is a shame.

As for this year’s crop of new releases ... read on!

Holiday Jazz: How it all began

By Derrick Bang

[Web master’s note: Northern California film critic Derrick Bang — the eldest, youngest and only son of this site’s jazz guru, Ric Bang — began writing about the annual holiday jazz scene in 1997. His interest in the sub-genre began many years earlier, however, as the following essay explains. Quick links to these annual columns — archived within this blog — can be obtained by clicking on CHRISTMAS in the list of labels at the bottom of this post.]

It started reasonably enough.

Back in the Stone Age of the 1970s, years before our local National Public Radio outlet (KXPR) begat a sister station (KXJZ), the former catered primarily to local classical music enthusiasts. Jazz fans were restricted to the late evening hours, when most sensible people would be getting ready for bed. (I could argue that jazz fans rarely are sensible people, but that’s another discussion.)

Aside from the occasional one or two tunes that might pop up in the middle of otherwise conventional sets, jazz covers of familiar Christmas songs were restricted to a two-hour, 10 p.m. to midnight timeslot on Christmas Eve, appropriately dubbed Jingle Bell Jazz.

I lived for those two hours.

Although I grew up enjoying the holidays, and particularly its melodies, there was something faintly ... well ... corny about most Christmas music being played in the ’70s. It was the stuff of Muzak and easy-listening schlock, with gag-me choruses and more damn strings than you’d find in most symphony orchestras. Much like some aspects of the holiday itself, most Christmas music had become gaudy, overly commercialized, lowest-common-denominator pap.

Christmas jazz, though ... now that had an edge: some genuine bite and enough musicality that you’d stop and really listen to the stuff, instead of tuning it out the way you’d desperately ignore the junk you heard in department store elevators.

No seasonal trauma is too great that it can’t be alleviated by a warm fire, a warmer companion and a soulful interpretation of “Silent Night” or “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” by the likes of Oscar Peterson or Dave Brubeck.

And for an all-too-short 120 minutes every Dec. 24th, host Gary Vercelli played a tasty and delectable selection of hip holiday tunes, drawing from a woefully limited supply. Options were few back then: CDs weren’t even a dream on the horizon, let alone iTunes and other Internet downloading sources. LPs still ruled the roost, and many of those had gone out of print. That’s what made radio both good and bad: Avid listeners often heard things they didn’t own, but at the same time might have little chance of purchasing, short of a lucky find in a used-record store.