Earlier during the Fest, I posted a song from one of my favorite holiday albums, Christmas Goes Baroque by Peter Breiner. This is another of my favorites -- it's called Yulestride, performed by pianist Butch Thompson. Thompson was a long-time music director of A Prairie Home Companion. In fact, I think he was the second one, after the Powdermilk Biscuit Band. "Stride" is a kind of Dixieland jazz, which is how he arranged all the songs and plays them. And that's what I love about the album, its freshness of style. That's a tricky thing with Christmas recordings. Most are just pretty straight-forward arrangements that are familiar and comfortable. Stray too far off that path, and you risk the artistic sin of drawing attention to yourself and away from the work. The "I'm being different for the sake of being different" syndrome. The new arrangements aren't inherently valid for the music, but just because the artist didn't want to be The Same. I find this arrangements by Butch Thompson, though, to be vibrant and thoroughly joyful interpretations of the familiar, that bring out different sides to the music. (If you like the music, you can find Yulestride here. The CD is out of distribution, so it's a bit pricey, but the MP3 files can be downloaded for a very reasonable price.) By the way, though he left A Prairie Home Companion eventually, and Richard Dworskin took over the musical director chores, when they made the PHC movie a few years ago, they thoughtfully brought back Butch Thompson to appear in it -- if not in a featured role, at least sitting in. Here are a couple of songs from the album that I particularly love. The first is "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," which might be one of the last songs you'd think of with stride jazz. But it works as it eventually kicks in his fingers fly across the keyboard. Everything on the CD isn't just like this, but it's all with this sensibility and flavor. And from the other end of the spectrum, slowed down and full of lovely stride texture, we'll follow that up with "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen."
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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