Keep cool at Christmas

David Ian, Vintage Christmas Trio

In Joel Dinnerstein's The Origins of Cool in Postwar America we learned about the jazz roots of cool; if anyone could be said to have 'invented' cool, it would be Lester Young. When I heard Vince Guaraldi's music for A Charlie Brown Christmas on December 9, 1965 I heard Christmas music with a cool new sound. Of course I didn't know then about Bill Evans' amazing 1963 recording of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, or the other Christmas jazz standards from the late 40s and the 50s, but this was prime time on CBS (or rather, in Canada, the CBC), so I got that something had changed in the mainstream. Ever since then I've been looking out for this kind of hip sophistication to go along with more homespun and square (but still cherished), Christmas traditions.

In 2015 the Toronto-born David Ian released his first Vintage Christmas album, a very pleasant collection of Christmas standards inspired, he says, by Bill Evans and Vince Guaraldi. He's back this year with Vintage Christmas Trio, which features bassist Jon Estes and drummer Josh Hunt. These are appropriately relaxed and spare arrangements, steering clear of lounge excrescences and adding tasteful bits of Bach and the blues. There are some really successful songs here; one of my favourites is the under-appreciated Johnny Marks tune I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, which features a fine bass solo by Estes with Bill Evans-style voicing from Ian. Another fine song is It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, with standout percussion from Hunt. I heard this morning the sad, sad news about the passing of Walter Becker. His Steely Dan partner Donald Fagen said in a statement "We liked a lot of the same things: jazz (from the twenties through the mid-sixties)..." This isn't about any neo-Bop purism, especially of the muddled kind peddled in La La Land. It's really more about the nostalgic legacy of the Baby Boomer (Becker was only two years older than me), and that's what we're getting in this mid-century-designed album, for the Feast Day of Baby Boomer Nostalgia, December 25th.

The new album will be released on November 3, 2017. Until then, here's a nice version of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne's Christmas Waltz from the first Vintage Christmas.