[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.
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.
