Carla’s Christmas Carols (ECM)
Carla Bley
Released November 6, 2009
Last.fm Top Christmas Jazz Albums
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=wE0Om3nhpZ0
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=JWQy9LPAzdU
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=jKtWTthC1GY
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=X005GKHYFl0
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/intl-pt/album/35UKwJSye10xPwHukR51CA?si=8m0ZsYQzQYC-OvioLwQjWw
About:
Carla Bley writes: When I was a child, I loved Christmas. The balsam
tree – with its strings of colored lights, reflective ornaments, tinsel and the
brightly wrapped presents under it – looked so beautiful and smelled so good.
Our Swedish-American family would have a full smorgasbord on Christmas Eve,
then open the presents. I always got socks or handkerchiefs, so presents were
not so thrilling once the shiny packages had been opened, but there was
Christmas day to look forward to. My father was the church organist and the
choir sang all of my favorite carols. The children were given packages of
assorted hard candy, which seemed especially delicious to me.
As I got older I rebelled against all holidays (except Halloween) and all that
remained of interest to me about Christmas was the music. In the sixties I got
a job arranging Christmas carols for a book intended for use by public schools;
I made sure that all the harmonies were as I remembered them – no fancy
substitutions. A few years later The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra had a Christmas
party at its office in New York. I wrote out the arrangements from the
Christmas Carol book and told the horn players I’d invited to bring their
instruments. As they walked through the door they were persuaded to join the
group and play. I had some of the best, most modern players in New York playing
old-fashioned five-part harmony. I decided then that I had to write a program
of Christmas music someday.
In the eighties there was an infamous music school in Woodstock, New York called
Creative Music Studio. Dr. Karl Berger founded it, and many avant-garde
musicians taught there. I was informally associated with the school for about a
year and when December came I got the students to perform strange arrangements
of Christmas music that I had concocted for the occasion. I remember telling
everyone to sit in a large circle, and then to switch instruments with the
person on their left and play The Twelve Days of Christmas. Another piece
involved giving each student a pitch to remember and sing on demand. I called
the resulting “instrument” on which I played some of the simpler carols, the
Humatron.
My accumulation of Christmas repertoire continued when I was one of a group of
pianists asked by National Public Radio in the United States to do solo piano
versions of several carols for a Christmas program. I did a gospel version of
It Came Upon A Midnight Clear, which was always one of my favorites, and a Soca
(a Caribbean-style combination of Soul and Calypso) treatment of Jingle Bells.
By then there was a big folder in my music room labelled “Christmas”. But all
the arrangements were for odd assortments of instruments. Even if I were to
re-arrange them for one of the groups I toured with, that group would only be
able to tour at Christmas time, which is an awkward time of year to ask
musicians to go on the road. So when the London Brass asked me to write a piece
for them I immediately wrote back and told them I’d like to do Christmas music.
There was total silence from their end. Maybe they were hoping for something
more modern. I never heard from them again.
Then, finally, an opportunity to pursue this lifetime interest appeared.
Michael Kaufmann, the director of the Philharmonie in Essen, Germany, asked me
to do a series of projects over the period of a year. To end the series, I was
invited to write a program of music of my own choosing. I didn’t know what his
reaction would be, but I instantly told him I wanted to present him with a
Christmas program featuring arrangements of Christmas Carols for brass quintet.
Luckily, he liked the idea, so I got together all the Christmas material I had
created over the years and started organizing it. I hadn’t realized how much
re-orchestrating would be involved, and many of the older efforts weren’t as
good as I had remembered, so I ended up writing a lot of new material. The
arrangements for brass quintet were all new.
The Essen Christmas concert took place in early December, 2006. We hired Ed
Partyka, an impressive tuba and bass trombone player who lived in Berlin and
knew all the good players, to assemble a brass quintet. I was the pianist,
Steve Swallow played bass, and we added alto saxophone and drums. It was a very
satisfying and fun experience, and I hoped that this wouldn’t be the last time
we could play this music.
The following year I remained interested in writing Christmas Carol
arrangements for brass quintet, and when it was time to decide about tours for
2008 an idea sprung to mind. Steve and I hadn’t played duets for many years. We
had toured and recorded as a duo, then with a trio, then a quartet, then a
quintet. The more people there were on the stage with me, the more comfortable
I felt, so every time we thought about reviving the duets I would ask Steve if
we could please include some type of distraction – a troupe of jugglers, a
gospel choir or even a movie projected onto the stage while we played, so I
wouldn’t feel so self-conscious. This might be the perfect solution: Carla Bley
and Steve Swallow plus Brass Quintet playing Christmas Carols!
We told Ed Partyka our idea and asked him to try to get the same brass players
we had used in Essen and to keep the first week of December open. Then we asked
Karin Kreisl, our agent at Saudades, to book us a Christmas tour directly
following the final concert of my residency at the Essen Philharmonie. She
wasn’t sure she could pull together a tour at that time of year, but eventually
got enough concerts to make it worth doing. I started re-writing the pieces
that had included alto and drums, and also discovered a few more Christmas
songs I wanted to arrange for my new band.
It turned out to be a wonderful little tour. We played in Italy, Greece,
Germany, Poland and France – five countries in five days. The brass players
(the same musicians we had played with a year earlier except for a new Horn
player) were fun to travel with and they all played great. And during the
pieces where only the brass played, Steve and I got to sit at the back of the
stage, just listening. After the last concert we went to a little town in the
south of France and recorded at La Buissonne, our favorite studio. Sometimes
everything works out just right.
Track Listing:
1. O Tannenbaum (Traditional) 02:30
2. Away in a Manger (James R. Murray) 05:54
3. The Christmas Song (Mel Tormé / Robert Wells) 05:15
4. Ring Christmas Bells (Mykola Leontovych) 05:49
5. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Pt. 1 (Traditional) 04:47
6. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Pt. 2 (Traditional) 05:19
7. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (Richard S. Willis / Edmund Sears) 04:57
8. Hell’s Bells (Carla Bley) 05:13
9. Jesus Maria (Carla Bley) 08:33
10. Jingle Bells (James Pierpont) 03:06
11. O Holy Night (Adolphe Adam / Placide Cappeau) 07:29
12. Joy to the World (Lowell Mason / Isaac Watts) 01:38
Personnel:
Carla Bley: piano, celeste
Steve Swallow: bass, chimes
The Partyka Brass Quintet
Tobias Weidinger: trumpet, flugelhorn, glockenspiel
Axel Schlosser: trumpet, flugelhorn, chimes
Christine Chapman: horn
Adrian Mears: trombone
Ed Partyka: bass trombone, tuba
Recorded December 8-9, 2008 and Mixed and Mastered at La Buissonne Studio, Pernes Les Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard
Tracks 11 and 12 recorded live December 4, in Berlin, by Rundfunk Berlin-Bradenburg
Album design: WATT
Produced by Carla Bley and Steve Swallow
Review:
Carla Bley and Christmas carols? You bet. She loves them and has incorporated them into her live sets for decades now. On this WATT release, recorded in 2008 at La Buisonne Studio in the south of France, she and bassist Steve Swallow took a couple of days off a European tour with the Partyka Brass Quintet and cut ten of the 12 selections here. The other two pieces — “O Holy Night” and “Joy to the World” — were taken from a concert performance four days earlier in Berlin. This may be the Christmas recording of 2009. Bley’s arrangements are both elegant and sometimes quirky, but always engaging and fun, and show a complete love of the original material. Check her readings of “The Christmas Song,” the two-part “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and the deeply moving and soulful version of “O Holy Night,” where the lead melody is played by Swallow. In addition, these songs in Bley’s hands all have swing in them — a beautiful example is in “Ring Christmas Bells,” with Bley’s added cadenza in the bridge. There are also two Bley originals in the set that serve as a very proper and even surprising introduction to “Jingle Bells.” The first is, of course, the utterly playful “Hell’s Bells” and the grooving hard bop swing in it provided by Swallow’s playing. In the middle section he and Tobias Weidinger’s trumpet go head to head, followed by some ensemble play and Bley’s own solo before the “Jingle Bells” theme is stated in striated harmony. This segues into an absolutely gorgeous “Jesus Maria” (which Jimmy Giuffre first recorded back in 1961), and is quite at home in this collection of carols. “Jingle Bells” itself is like a mini-suite of jazz from New Orleans to New York (with nice touches from Weidinger’s glockenspiel and Edward Partyka’s tuba). While the argument that there should be a moratorium on Christmas recordings is a good one in the 21st century, Carla’s Christmas Carols provides a powerful counter to that view. She has added so much to these songs without taking away any of the warmth, joy, and nostalgia inherent to the season or their place in it.
Thom Jurek (AllMusic)
