A perennial favorite, jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli serves up a dozen holiday favorites dressed up in his fluid guitar and smooth vocal crooning on his holiday album Let’s Share Christmas.  In addition to his own trio, Pizzarelli teams with an all-star cast of arrangers on this album, enlisting the talents of Don Sebesky, John Clayton, Patrick Williams, Michel Legrand, Johnny Mandel and others on the varied tracks.  The mood ranges from a trio performance of “Sleigh Ride” to big band blow-outs (“Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow”) and string-backed crooning (on the title track).  Despite the variation in styles, the overall sound of Pizzarelli holds the whole thing together into one enjoyable holiday package.  If anything, the album reaches styles of music from decades past, which we could still use today in this fast-paced modern world of ours.  This holiday package is like musical comfort food for everyone tired of the mall blasting the same dozen or so songs at us for months on end.  It is out of print on CD but thankfully still available as an MP3 download from Amazon.

in 1987, I guess I was bitten by the same CD buying bug that many were: I bought into the Time-Life “Rock ‘n’ Roll Era” series of CDs.  Thankfully I found that the musical selection on these were fine for my purposes, although the sound often suffered a bit.  It did enable me to amass a good collection of “oldies” that I otherwise never would have bought.  One surprising favorite came my way during the holidays–the compilation Jingle Bell Rock.  A couple of the Motown tracks need to be skipped (the Temptations’ “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” is narcoleptic at best), but for the most part it is a very enjoyable and crowd-pleasing collection of holiday favorites.

On here are tracks by Jan and Dean (“Frosty the Snowman”, rescued from obscurity), The Ventures (“Sleigh Ride”), Jack Scott (“There’s Trouble Brewin'”), The O’Jays (“Christmas Ain’t Christmas Without The One You Love”) and Dodie Stevens (“Merry, Merry Christmas Baby”).  The usual suspects are here also (“JIngle Bell Rock”, “Run, Rudolph Run” and “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree”) and Elton John’s “Step into Christmas” finishes out the disc with the most recent song in the collection.  You can find Jingle Bell Rock if you look hard enough, although you can find another variation or two that changes out and/or skimps on the 25 tracks that this disc offers.

As I prepared to make a few notes about this “new” album, I took a look at the date on which it was released…and am still in disbelief that The Christmas Album was released almost 20 years ago!  Time flies, and yet this recording still sounds as fresh as the day it was released.  While you might expect a Manhattan Transfer recording to feature four-part vocal harmonies and jazz, they reached a bit beyond and enlisted the great Johnny Mandel to handle orchestrations and arrangements, and what you end up with is a beautifully warm and lush holiday recording that transcends musical boundaries.  The rockers and headbangers probably would never warm to it, but it is one of those nice “family” discs that, thanks to the Mandel/Tim Hauser production, can sound lush without straying into sappy Muzak.  Even Tony Bennett pops in for a guest appearance on “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)”.  What really impressed me was the disc opening with the lesser known “Snowfall,” a wintery song penned by Claude Thornhill decades ago.  And, the album closes with the Lennon/McCartney “Goodnight.”  As with any ManTran album, the harmonies are smooth, and each of the members gets their turn in the spotlight.  Warmly recommended!