Mark's Top 5 Jazz/Blues Holiday CDs of All Time!

  

My Top 5 Jazz and Blues Christmas Albums

By Mark Arnold

            For me one of the things that makes Christmas time so special is the music. Judging from the popularity of Christmas music this is true for many of us. As a Jazz and Blues fan I particularly like Christmas songs styled in those genres. Every year Tammy and I add a CD or two to our collection and we have accumulated a number of them, so I thought I would let you know what I consider are the top 5 Jazz and Blues Christmas albums of all time. Here they are, starting with number 5:

Number 5: Dianna Krall Christmas Songs

Artist: Diana Krall

Label: Verve,  2005

We picked this one up a couple years ago and it has been one of our favorites from the moment we played it. We are big Diana fans generally and this CD does not disappoint.  Diana does a fabulous job swinging her way through a dozen holiday standards ranging from “Jingle Bells” and “Let It Snow” to “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” and “Count Your Blessings Instead Of Sheep”, the latter included as a tribute to Rosemary Clooney who sang it in Tammy’s favorite Christmas movie “White Christmas”. Diana is great on piano of course and she is backed by a great band , the Clayton/Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. An added bonus is that when you buy the CD you get to look at the great pictures of Diana on the front and back cover and in the liner notes. The girl is a knockout!!!!!

Number 4: Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas

Artist: Ella Fitzgerald

Label: Verve, 1988 (from sessions recorded in 1960)

This one would make the top 5 of anyone’s jazz/blues Christmas list; the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald blows your holiday socks off. This CD starts off with “Jingle Bells”, just like Diana Krall’s does, and when you hear Ella you will also hear the impact she has had on later jazz interpreters (like Diana Krall). Specifically check out Ella’s versions of “Good Morning Blues” and “What Are You Doing New Years Eve” (They are my personal favorites) but the whole CD is great. The Frank DeVol Orchestra backs Ella on all of the cuts.

Number 3: Jingle Bell Jam: Jazz Christmas Classics

Artist: Compilation, 18 different artists or bands

Label: Rhino,  1994  (from sessions recorded between 1948 and 1991)

Back around 1998 or so my stepson Aaron gave this CD to Tammy and I for Christmas. I am not big on compilation CDs and I just thought it would go the way of many CDs given and received at Christmas. (After a few months sold or exchanged at the CD store, if they’ll take it.) That’s what I thought until I played it. Now I would never think of selling it. There are too many artists on this CD to mention them all but every single track (all 18 of them)  are exceptional. Those I would specifically highlight  are Duke Ellington (who unfortunately never recorded a Christmas album) performing “Jingle Bells”, Charlie Parker and his band performing a beboppy version  of “White Christmas” (recorded on Christmas Day of 1948), and Booker T and the MGs with a soulful version of “Merry Christmas Baby”. These are all great but for me what takes the cake on this CD is Lou Rawls’s interpretation of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”. Once you hear Rawls sing this tune every other version will pale in comparison…I guarantee it.  And don’t mistake this version with a later version Rawls did for a Christmas CD he released in 1993. This version was recorded in 1967 and the band behind Lou swings while his voice is in perfect form. You can’t beat it.

Number 2: Roomful Of Christmas

Artist: Roomful Of Blues

Label: Bullseye Blues, 1997

If you are not familiar with the band “Roomful of Blues” you should be. Back in the mid ‘90s I got really revitalized on music, particularly the blues, and as a result became familiar with a blues/jazz guitar player named Duke Robillard. ( I have since become a huge fan of Duke’s and see him live whenever he comes to Seattle.) Duke founded “Roomful…” in 1967 with fellow musicians from their home state of Rhode Island and the band has been swinging and rocking ever since (though Robillard left them in 1980). In “Roomful Of Christmas” the band performs a set of 10 songs, most being holiday standards but several you may not recognize unless you are well steeped in R and B artists and history. Regardless, the band is in top form on all of them and you will find yourself toe tapping if not outright dancing as the band rollicks its way through the songs. The vocals by Sugar Ray Norcia are particularly good. If you like “jump”blues and swing, which I personally love, you can do no better than “Roomful of Christmas”..which is why it is number two on my list.

And now …drum roll if you please…my number ONE Jazz/Blues Christmas Album of all time:

Number 1: Cool Christmas Blues

Artist: Charles Brown

Label: Bullseye Blues, 1994

I just can’t think of Christmas without thinking of “Cool Christmas Blues” by Charles Brown! If I had this record in vinyl it would be worn through by now. Charles Brown is a blues piano playing virtuoso who was born in 1922 and died in 1999. Basically he had two careers, one in the mid 40s to mid 50s in which he established himself both as a great bluesman and also as a recording artist and live performer. During this time he had several national hits. As rock and roll came on the scene later in the ‘50s Charles faded from popularity but in the late ‘80s and on into the ‘90s he made a come back, recording  8 albums between 1990 and his death in ’99, including 1994’s “Cool Christmas Blues”. For me this recording is the definitive Rhythm and Blues Holiday album. I love piano blues anyway and Charles will have you singing and bouncing to the music, whether he is playing any of the traditional songs included in this collection, or the two famous holiday songs he penned himself; “Merry Christmas Baby”  and “Please Come Home For Christmas”. I guarantee you will love them all, if you love the blues, and so I have awarded Charles Brown and his “Cool Christmas Blues” number one status on my list.

There you go…the top 5 Jazz/Blues albums of all time. Check ‘em out yourself and see if you agree.

Happy Holidays

Mark Arnold

Ichiro and Gorgeous George Foreword

Ichiro and Gorgeous George: A Fan’s Look at Baseball, Life and Ichiro Suzuki’s Magnificent Run at George Sisler’s Single Season Hit Record…

by Mark Arnold

Foreword                            

          The 2004 baseball season was, for the Seattle Mariners, a disaster. The team won 63 games that year, which as any fan knows means they lost 99, and finished in last place in the American League West Division. But the magnitude of the disaster can only be appreciated when you realize that in 2001 the Mariners had astounded the baseball world by winning 116 games, the most since the 1906 Chicago Cubs. That was the year the Mariners should have gone to the World Series and won their first Championship. Instead the catastrophe of 9/11 happened and nothing in that season was the same after that. The Mariners followed their great 2001 season with consecutive 93 win seasons in 2002 and 2003; pretty good normally but in those years not even good enough to make the playoffs. Confronting the above you can now appreciate the disaster of 2004. With 63 wins the Mariners didn’t just decline, they fell off a cliff!

           By mid August of the 2004 season most Mariner fans were being distracted from the team’s won / lost record however. The reason? They were busy watching Ichiro Suzuki, the team’s right fielder and the first Japanese regular position player in the Major Leagues, wielding his bat like a wand while chasing down one of the longest standing major records in baseball: George Sisler’s all time record for hits in a single season. While the rest of the team was stinking up Safeco Field with their play, Ichiro was gracing this otherwise lost Mariner season with magic.

          Sisler’s record, which he set in 1920 when he accumulated 257 hits, had stood strong for 84 years; longer than Ruth and Aaron had held the Home Run record combined and longer than DiMaggio has held his 56 consecutive game hit streak record. In the 1920s and early ‘30s several players had come close to breaking it, but in the modern era no one had ever come close; not Rose; not Gwynn; not Carew; not Williams and not DiMaggio. The closest in the modern era had been Ichiro himself when he had 242 hits during his rookie 2001 season. It appeared to many that Sisler’s record would never be broken. And yet, as mid August turned into late August and late August turned into early September and as Ichiro piled up the hits, it was becoming clear that he had a real shot at it. Mariner fans and baseball fans everywhere joined the “Ichiro watch” with a passion, eager to see if he could do it.

           Written from a fan’s perspective, “Ichiro and Gorgeous George” is the story of Ichiro Suzuki’s marvelous assault on Sisler’s record. Told against the backdrop of Ichiros’s first few seasons as a Seattle Mariner, including the devastating effect of 9/11 on the phenomenal Mariner 2001season, the story gradually builds the case for a stunning possibility regarding Ichiro and his relationship to Sisler and the  record that will forever link them in baseball lore. Along the way much of both Mariner and general baseball history is toured, including the trades of Mariner stars Randy Johnson and Ken Griffey Jr., the loss of Mariner manager Lou Piniella to Tampa Bay in 2002, Bill Buckner’s life ruining error in the ’86 series, Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier with the Dodgers in 1947, details of George Sisler’s life and career and much more.

      More than a story about the game of baseball and a great player’s accomplishment, “Ichiro and Gorgeous George” is about the game of life, the spiritual connections that bind us all and the lessons to be learned between the lines. As such it is a story, not only for students and fans of baseball, but for the students and fans of life itself.

                                                                                Mark Arnold

                                                                                September 26, 2012

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 About Mark Arnold

          Mark Arnold is a lifelong baseball fan who grew up in the Seattle area and has lived there his entire life. As a kid he followed the Seattle Rainiers in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s and mourned the loss of the Pilots following their one season in Seattle in 1969. Since 1977 he has lived and died with the ebbs and flows of the Seattle Mariners, taking his lumps with the frequent losses and reveling in the less frequent victories. He is the author of many articles on a variety of subjects as well as a number of short stories and one novel. “Ichiro and Gorgeous George” is his 3^rd published work following 2007’s science fiction yarn “Only On A Tiny Planet” and 2008’s comment on the financial crisis “Bailout is the Name of the Game”. He currently lives with his wife Tammy in Seattle’s Ballard district.