Four examples of music that take a decidedly
different spin on the holidays. by Corbin Smith Over the years, the recording industry has managed to create Christmas music for every mood. Thousands of sad piano takes on "The Christmas Song" (Chestnuts Roasting Over an Open Fire), the pure pop joy of Mariah Carey belting out “All I want for Christmas is you,” the simple, light brain damage you get from a loud, irritating version of “Sleigh Ride.” But what about when you are in a VERY particular mood? When the season has transported you into one of life’s bizarre gutters, left you in such a particular place where you need a very particular sort of Christmas music to haul you out of it? For you, for this, I offer this guide to Christmas music for truly any mood.  •••• For when you and your fellow teenage orphans—residents of a foster home owned by kindly old women in deep with the bank— just pulled off the Christmas Eve heist of the century to pay her mortgage and are tipping back a big ol’ glass of hot cider while looking over Portland: Bob Dylan, Christmas in the Heart A few years back, Bob Dylan, our truest and most loving uncle, made a Christmas album. Surface analysis: it’s weird he did that. Deeper analysis: it’s not actually weird, because Bob admires folk music and the Great American Songbook, and Christmas music is a canon built from both. Even deeper analysis: it’s still pretty weird, because it’s weird to listen to Bob Dylan unleashing his signature late career Warm Croak on Christmas songs you’ve been inundated with your entire life. But when you get past the sheer novelty of King Gravel intoning “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a song made famous by Judy Garland, you remember that, oh yeah, Bob Dylan is one of history’s greatest musicians, and offers a wealth of feeling, warmth and energy—even (especially) when he’s pursuing a strange muse. His “Must Be Santa,” anchored by a loud accordion and augmented by a rechristening of the reindeer as post-war presidents, is pure jalopy shit—a sound of the Christmas gathering flying apart at the seams as candy-ridden children roam through the hallway and shove each other into toilets. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” is a standard ‘50s pop music take, lifted into something transcendent by Bob’s presence behind the microphone. “Winter Wonderland” and “Christmas Island” presents an alternate world Dylan, one more into vibing and tipping back, as opposed to an artist with an endless appetite for work and startling discipline. The best song on here is Bob’s version of “Do You Hear What I Hear.” He is, after all, an old wise man now, wandering through deserts, handing out gifts. His intonation on “A child, a child/Sleeping in the night/He will bring us goodness and light,” is struck through with a warmth and sincerity that you don’t associate with Trickster Bob. Is it a performance of awe, trying to capture a world that still had some sense of the divine? Is it a true wonder in the potential of the child, a hope for the future? Is it just a straightforward exaltation of Christ himself? You can never really know with Bob, of course, but it stirs. •••• Courtesy Hallmark For when your company—an international logistics concern—sent you on a last minute overseas business trip over Christmas, and you stroll the streets alone and alienated on Christmas Eve, until you walk into a fancy cocktail bar and lock eyes with another disaffected expat at the bar: Duke Ellington, The Nutcracker Suite Did you know that Duke isn’t his real name? You see, when Duke Ellington was a child, everyone who lived in his neighborhood thought he seemed like minor royalty, and just started calling him Duke as a result. That was how smooth this man was, folks. But it would not have meant much if the Duke was not also a world historic musical genius. A bandleader, composer, a thinker, whose work brought a formal precision and imagination to jazz that changed the enterprise forever, transmuting it from an outgrowth of blues into the great American musical form. One of the ways that Duke built this new form was taking forays into classical music, breaking apart or injecting the classical canon with improvisation and swing time, or likewise, taking the forms of classical music and overlaying them with original compositions informed by his lifetime as an orchestra leader working in a jazz idiom. In Duke’s hands, genre distinctions, of dance music or concert music, become wobbly, fall off the boat, drown in the ocean of his genius, and are reborn into an object of pure American greatness.  In 1960, Duke, riding a popular revival as newfangled bebop artists codified his importance in their own development, worked with Billy Strayhorn—his longtime arranging partner—to break apart Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite, perhaps the most famous piece of dance music ever composed, and reforge it into this album, which takes Pytor’s famous melodies and remakes them into nine swing numbers.  “The Dance of The Sugar Plum Fairy,” all ethereal glockenspiels in the ballet, becomes “Sugar Rum Cherry,” a terribly horny reforging that asks a question that would not occur to you otherwise: What if I kind of want to fuck the Sugar Plum Fairy? “The Nutcracker March” is now “Peanut Brittle Brigade,” a New Orleans parade of nutcracker men. “Chinoiserie,” the Duke’s version of “The Chinese Dance,” loosens up the source material to the point where it sounds like something someone might actually dance to as opposed to the Tchaikovsky original, bloodless to the point of making its subject seem alien. •••• Courtesy Sony Legacy For when you’re driving home from your family’s yearly Christmas gathering—which was good, for the most part, but your Aunt Shelly got WAY too blitzed on eggnog and hot toddies and vomm’d in the backyard: Wynton Marsalis, Crescent City Christmas Card There’s a lot to know about Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter, band leader, and academic, who has long represented a kind of traditionalist approach to jazz performance and composition that can maybe seem a little square. And while I personally don’t know a lot about Marsalis, I do know about this album, a suite of Christmas standards he released in 1989. A lot of it is fairly standard jazz takes on Christmas classics: a trumpet playing a slightly off-kilter rendition of “Winter Wonderland,” a brassy vocal take on “Sleigh Ride,” “Carol of the Bells” with the forward momentum of the death chant replaced by laconic swing music jamming, and “Jingle Bells,” with a li’l woodblock that brings horse evocations to the party.  But some of it is insane—insane in a way that makes you wonder what Wynton is trying to get out. Take this album’s version of “Silent Night”: a standard female vocal, trilling and ethereal, but set to a backdrop of woozy, uncertain horns, that give the thing a vaguely creepy vibe. What does it mean to set a hymn of the infant Christ in front of trumpets that suggest a danger lurking on the horizon? Is it an evocation of Herod’s men in the field, looking for the child so he may butcher any competition for his spot at the top of Israel’s local government? Is it broadcasting uncertainty about the future of this child’s life, over the fanaticism he would come to embrace, the horror of his violent death? Is it a way of juxtaposing the sentimental story of Jesus’ birth with the world of unease and terror that would form in his wake?  Why would someone make a version of “Little Drummer Boy” that seems to intentionally bury the drums in the mix? Trumpeter’s jealousy? What does a laid back swing version of “We Three Kings” mean? That the kings were cool? Were they cool? I have never thought about it, really. By insisting that he press as much jazz shit as possible into these standards, Wynton runs up against the idea of these things as content about Christmas and into the idea of them as forms. •••• Courtesy CD Baby For when she took the kids home after their mandatory Christmas Eve visit and you have wandered out into the cold night, purchased a six pack of Rolling Rock and a bottle of Mad Dog, and—two brewskies and five sips of fortified in—you plop down in the arched, gothic-style doorway of a neighborhood church, and just sit there, sipping and watching the rain come in, wondering when and how it all went so wrong: Benjamin Britten, Ceremony of Carols 20th Century British Composer Benjamin Britten was a sad man who made beautiful music. Ceremony of Carols is a song cycle for boys choir and solo harp, written on a boat coming back to England during the middle of World War II, when U-Boats were scouring the ocean, looking to send boats full of British guys plunging into the icy ocean. It takes a bunch of old Christmas and Baby Jesus related poems in various languages, sets them to music, and goes at it hard as hell. It’s beautiful, it’s faintly sad, it’s everything you need for a Christmas where the disappointments of the year fight against the idea of a wee babe, born in a barn, bringing hope into the world. NOT FOR LIGHT LISTENING, but essential for any soul slipping into darkness.