arrange • compose • conduct
Posts about Christmas-related topics
My family is wishing you peace and connection this holiday season. We made this little music video together just for you! Wishing you all a Happy Holidays! We’ve built a lot of skills this year in our house – singing, juggling, audio & video engineering. And we decided to put […]
Our family usually counts down the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas not with days, but with concerts. Twenty in these three weeks of school isn’t out of the ordinary. Of course, there won’t be anything close to that this year. What’s to come of a December without concerts? Well, probably […]
I’m not sure any album says Christmas to me more than The Manhattan Transfer’s A Christmas Album. I got it in 1992 when it was brand new and I was brand new to vocal jazz. I listened to it obsessively every December, long before I was exposed to many of my […]
As in past years, I devoted an hour of my weekly two-hour rehearsal this week to a guided listening. For an hour, we listen to different interpretations of the same Christmas classic. It enables us to focus on tone, interpretation, creativity, and any number of other factors. Here are 2014 […]
A reader asked me what I most often listen to when I deprofessionalize my Christmas listening. Here are 20 of my most likely go-to Christmas albums. (You can check out a shorter Christmas playlist here.) Solo Singing The Christmas Song (Nat “King” Cole) A Merry Christmas With Bing Crosby and the Andrews […]
Every December I like to take an hour of rehearsal and do a guided listening with my students. An hour is half of our weekly time together, which should give you an idea of how important I consider this activity. Christmas songs are great for guided listening because of their ubiquity – we […]
I love to set aside time for a guided Christmas listening during the last week of school before Christmas Break. A Christmas listening is especially enlightening because the songs are so familiar. You can find a bunch of wildly different versions of one song, and listen back to back. Because the song is known, […]
This was my first vocal jazz Christmas album, purchased from Harmony House when I was a sophomore in high school. Was I lucky, or what? It contains marvelous arranging by masters of the genre, a guest appearance by Tony Bennett, and The Manhattan Transfer singing at the top of their […]
Every December I like to take an hour of rehearsal for a guided listening of a single Christmas song, performed by multiple artists. This approach to guided listening has several advantages: Listening to the same song allows us to focus on other aspects of the recording. Christmas songs are so […]
By my count, Chanticleer has released six Christmas albums and a DVD. Of them, my favorite is probably “Christmas with Chanticleer” featuring Dawn Upshaw. Today, however, I want to talk about their 2007 album “Let it Snow”. Over the years, Chanticleer has dabbled in vocal jazz – most memorably in their commissioned […]