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Best wishes and prayers of peace to all my music lover friends. Let's ring out the old year with King Curtis and ring in the new with Otis Redding & Carla Thomas. Here's to a sublime 2010!
Download 19 What Are You Doing New Year's Eve_
Download 18 New Year's Resolution
Merry Christmas everybody! Hope you enjoyed the first (hopefully annual) Christmas Countdown. Here's your stocking stuffer--a bonus track from the best band in the world.
Miss Etta knows if you've been bad or good, so you'd better be good...if you know what's good for you. She is very good on this album, especially on this version of a classic carol. The most appropriate way to end the Christmas Countdown.
If you're a Latino of a certain age, chances are your family's record collection included "Amor," the 1964 album that Eydie Gormé recorded with Mexico's legendary Trio Los Panchos. (Raul Malo of The Mavericks once joked to me that he thought owning that record was a legal requirement for Latinos.) Mine was certainly one of those households. But somehow it escaped me until a few years ago that, in 1966, Gormé recorded the above Christmas album with Los Panchos. I bought two copies--one for me, one for my mom (who wore out that "Amor" album). By the way, according to Wikipedia, Gormé (née Gormezano) is the daughter of Sephardic Jewish immigrants and she's fluent in Ladino and Spanish.
I've been a fan of August Darnell's since he came on the scene in the late '70s with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band ("Cherchez La Femme"), which morphed into Kid Creole & the Coconuts. They put out a series of amazing albums that combined Caribbean rhythms with R&B, rock and anything else Darnell (aka The Kid) could think of. They also put on one of the best live shows I've ever seen, rivaled only by Prince. This song was originally titled "WInter on Riverside Drive" (and recorded by fellow traveler Gichy Dan), but Darnell later remixed it and renamed it "Christmas on Riverside Drive." Today's post goes out to all my New York peeps, especially B'Dilli Bay Minister of Photography John Rynski.
Download 09 Christmas On Riverside Drive
Hadda Brooks (1916-2002) was an L.A. original. Born and raised in Boyle Heights, she became a pianist, singer and songwriter who was known as "Queen of the Boogie." In 1957 she became the first African-American woman to have her own TV series--"The Hadda Brooks Show," which aired on an L.A. station. In 1995, she released "L.A. Christmas Blue," a beautiful ballad with lyrics we Angelenos can relate to:
Tinsel Town just gets me down / at Christmas every year / All my friends and family / I'm wishin' they were here / Sun is out, the sky is blue / sometimes on Christmas Eve / I wish that it were snowin' / but it's 85 degrees...
Who doesn't love "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and the fantastic music written by Vince Guaraldi? We're marking the midway point of the countdown with a double-play Sunday. FIrst off is a fantastic version of "Christmas Time Is Here" by one of my favorite jazz pianists, Brad Mehldau. And then comes Guaraldi's original, remixed by Swedish DJ Markus Enochson.
Download 13 Christmas Time Is Here (Markus Enochson Remix)
This sweet bossa nova by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil isn't from the album pictured here, but I couldn't resist that cover from a 1960 release, which I found on a Brazilian music blog.
If I saw this guy coming down the chimney, it would scare the hell holly out of me. But Aaron Neville does possess the voice of an angel. Here's a great N'awlins doo-wop arrangement of a Christmas standard.
16 Please Come Home For Christmas
OK, so this song (from the 1978 album "Blue Valentine") isn't exactly a Christmas carol, but it is Christmas themed. It's vintage barfly Waits: the story of a guy reading a holiday card from a former flame in which she reminisces about the good times they used to have. My favorite line: I still have that record / by Little Anthony and the Imperials / But someone stole my record player / How do you like that? When Waits would perform this live, after the mention of Little Anthony he'd break into a few lines from "Going Out of My Head." I watched Waits perform the song on "Austin City Limits" right around the time this album was released, and I recently discovered that amazing performance has been released as an import on DVD and vinyl (titled "Romeo Bleeding," available through Amazon). On that version he bookends "Christmas Card" with a few bars of "Silent Night." But here you'll have to settle for the original album version.
Bartender, I'll have another egg nog...with a double shot of bourbon.
10 Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis