Christmas Music Worth Listening To

[BillF]

How have we managed to get this far without anyone mentioning my favorites:

Charlie Parker, "White Christmas",

Bill Evans, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

That was me. I bought the one in the middle. I found it totally beyond my listening experience, much as if I had purchased the music of a lost tribe in a deep tropical jungle. It wasn't so much that I hated it. I just found it incomprehensible.

Another thought - most Brits would find it equally incomprehensible. The cultural context of most English people owes more to American popular music - be it Bing, Frank, Elvis, Otis or Madonna - than to anything native.

I'm not sure about that. I realised in 1967 that American music was pretty well as foreign to me as Nigerian. The fact that the songs are sung in a language that more closely approximates to English than Pidgin does is, I feel, deceptive. And people are easily deceived.

MG

[A Lark Ascending]

That was me. I bought the one in the middle. I found it totally beyond my listening experience, much as if I had purchased the music of a lost tribe in a deep tropical jungle. It wasn't so much that I hated it. I just found it incomprehensible.

Another thought - most Brits would find it equally incomprehensible. The cultural context of most English people owes more to American popular music - be it Bing, Frank, Elvis, Otis or Madonna - than to anything native.

I'm not sure about that. I realised in 1967 that American music was pretty well as foreign to me as Nigerian. The fact that the songs are sung in a language that more closely approximates to English than Pidgin does is, I feel, deceptive. And people are easily deceived.

MG

Oh, I'd argue the basic diet of the English in popular culture (music and cinema) is either American or American influenced (I'm talking Sinatra, Elvis, Rodgers and Hammerstein and what used to be called Top Twenty pop here rather than Howlin' Wolf). We've been singing pop songs in cod-American for decades.

We had a young girl in school a few years back who had a great voice and simply shone because she sang in an English accent. All the others learn that mid-Atlantic twang from the music they prefer - even if the accent isn't there, the way they bend the notes owes more to soul music than the grace notes of a traditional English singer (you don't have to watch one of those 'Wanna-be-a-Star' programmes for very long to hear this). The girl with the English voice is now a fairly well known performer on the folk circuit.

Whenever I use folk music in lessons - and there are many songs that are wonderful for history lessons - the kids can hardly contain themselves from falling off their chairs laughing (just as well they weren't subjected to folk music via 'Singing Together' as I was in the early 60s....'Oh No John, No John, No John, No' - the Britten-Pears School of Folk Music!!!).

The Scots and Irish (I'm not so sure about the Welsh) are much better at drawing on their native traditions, mainly because it helps distinguish them from the English. The English seem more concerned to be seen as....well...modern! Which has tended to mean American for about a century.

(Of course this is all complicated by the fact that many English traditional folk songs are re-imports of things that went off to America at some point (either from England, Scotland or Ireland) and then returned again, being reabsorbed into the local culture).

Edited December 7, 2008 by Bev Stapleton

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

That was me. I bought the one in the middle. I found it totally beyond my listening experience, much as if I had purchased the music of a lost tribe in a deep tropical jungle. It wasn't so much that I hated it. I just found it incomprehensible.

Another thought - most Brits would find it equally incomprehensible. The cultural context of most English people owes more to American popular music - be it Bing, Frank, Elvis, Otis or Madonna - than to anything native.

I'm not sure about that. I realised in 1967 that American music was pretty well as foreign to me as Nigerian. The fact that the songs are sung in a language that more closely approximates to English than Pidgin does is, I feel, deceptive. And people are easily deceived.

MG

Oh, I'd argue the basic diet of the English in popular culture (music and cinema) is either American or American influenced (I'm talking Sinatra, Elvis, Rodgers and Hammerstein and what used to be called Top Twenty pop here rather than Howlin' Wolf). We've been singing pop songs in cod-American for decades.

Ah, I see what you were getting at. Yes, that's not what I was thinking of, as you guessed

MG

[Ted O'Reilly]

Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass did a great Christmas CD for Concord.

On the more traditional side, there's a fine LP for World Jazz (I don't think it's ever been on CD) by The World's Greatest Jazz Band of Yank Lawson and Bob Haggart; and the New Black Eagle Jazz Band did a great one for Daring Records that gets lots of play in my house.