CHESTNUTS

The Christmas album is almost as old as the long-playing record itself. It’s an odd sort of beast. An annual seller if you’re lucky but lousy as a gift because who’s going to be playing it after Christmas Day? So I guess most people buy these items for themselves and play them in the first three-and-a-half weeks of December.



No all-round entertainer of the 1950s and ‘60s would be caught not issuing a Christmas album. Though some few were devoted to slightly jazzed-up versions of carols and other church songs, most went the Tin Pan Alley route with a sprinkling of religion among the secular. So while Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas (1967) dares to range through ‘We Three Kings’, ‘The First Noël’ and the American version of ‘Away in a Manger’ (hugely preferable to the saccharine British version), Dean Martin’s Christmas with Dino (1966) sticks to the perennial secular favourites like ‘Winter Wonderland’, ‘Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!’ and (of course) Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’, save for a smoochy version of ‘Silent Night’ with bells and “ooh-aah” choir.



The peerless Lena Horne – Merry from Lena (1965) – takes almost exactly the same path as Dino, setting ‘Silent Night’ among the showbiz slush, though with lush orchestral backing, harp and all and adding the ghastly, semi-religious ‘Little Drummer Boy’ (the song that creepily brought together Bing Crosby and David Bowie long ago), but otherwise playing safe. Lena is always best when she’s being humorous, even sardonic – nobody puts such a spin on “naughty” in the phrase “naughty or nice” as she does in her big-band take on ‘Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town’. As long ago as 1960, Nat King Cole could perhaps be hailed as the pioneer of the cross-over album in which a showbiz/jazz-inflected singer attempts a whole album of carols in his The Magic of Christmas. He even essayed ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ in its Latin manifestation, ‘Adeste Fideles’, which must have confused some of his fans who perhaps thought “ador-e-mousse” (sic) was something to eat.



Doris Day cleaved to commercial songs in her seasonal album, called (sadly not Christmas Day, which is what I would have called it, but) The Christmas Album (1964). As so many do, she included Mel Tormé’s ‘The Christmas Song’, also known as ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’, an imperishably undemanding number that must have been a nice little pension for Tormé, who reckoned he dashed off the music in 40 minutes.



‘The Christmas Song’ turns up, as hilariously as almost everything on the album, on Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart, this year’s seasonal treat that no one saw coming. What odds could you have got in 1963 against Dylan ever recording Tormé, I wonder? Or him doing ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’. Dylan mixes religious and secular, pitching a soupy version of ‘Hark the Herald Angel Sing’ against a work-out for his ancient croak in ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’. It makes you long for the natural follow-up, his version of Rufus Wainwright’s recreation of Judy Garland’s legendary Carnegie Hall concert. What would you give to hear Dylan do ‘The Trolley Song’?



Showbiz Jews have always happily embraced “mainstream” goyim American culture – especially Christmas – so there’s nothing very unusual at that level about Robert Zimmerman/Bob Dylan doing Christmas. After all, Barbra Streisand – much more frankly Jewish than Dylan – has made two Christmas albums, both superb. Both mix in a certain amount of traditional Christian fare and each has a version of ‘Ave Maria’, Gounod’s on A Christmas Album (1967), Schubert’s on Christmas Memories (2001). The first time I heard a pop voice in the Gounod was that of Bobby Darin who made a 1960 album called The 25th Day of December; I bought an EP selection. The full album, which I did not acquire till many years later, is heavily characterised by white gospel-style singing so it was even more adventurous than the Cole album of the same year. I was a devoted fan of Darin who, single-handedly, introduced me via pop to the great songbook of standards that he recorded on his albums; but I didn’t think he quite got away with going classique. Nor really does Streisand, mostly because she is just too reverential. By contrast, her version of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘I Remember’ – not a Christmas song at all but no doubt included for the line “I remember snow” – is glorious; she doesn’t sing enough Sondheim whose acerbic music and lyrics suit her down to the ground.



This year’s most beguiling Christmas album has been Strange Communion by the excellent young English singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore. I love her Joni-Mitchell-meets-Annie Lennox-and-they-really-get-on voice and her writing, though clearly folk-based, is wide-ranging and always ambitious. A couple of the tracks are beautifully chosen covers of others, though certainly not routine ones: Elvis Costello on the one hand, Yoko Ono on the other. I’ll be playing this album a lot and not just at this time of year.



I guess my all-time favourite Christmas albums are, in chronological order, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963) and The McGarrigle Christmas Hour (2005). I bought the Spector when it first came out, being an enthusiast for his stable of singers. The Ronettes were the best, named for the lead singer Veronica whom Spector married. I saw them on tour at the Kettering Granada in 1964. They topped the bill; the first half was closed by a promising if somewhat disreputable English group called The Rolling Stones. I wonder what became of them.



The Spector album, concluded by a spoken track of consuming mawkishness by Spector himself (perhaps he recites it still in his prison cell), was the first pop album to become a serious collector’s item, changing hands for silly money in the mid-1970s. Sadly, I gave my copy away about five minutes before it suddenly became so unexpectedly desirable. This may be the story of my life.



The album by Kate and Anna McGarrigle and their circle is adorable. The choice of songs and singers is always interesting and unusual. The opening track, a version of the traditional ‘Seven Joys of Mary’ with a wonderfully wheezy backing of fiddle and organ, trumpets and pennywhistle, immediately sets out the stall and they never look back. Outstanding in a crowded field are a Jackson Browne song, 'Rebel Jesus’, strongly put over by Lily Lanken and Martha Wainwright, and Rufus Wainwright’s world-beating version of the lovely old Frank Loesser ballad ‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?’

The obvious requirement, I suppose, is that a modern Christmas collection be unexpected but have staying power. But then I guess that would be the formula for just about anything … sex, say …