A Real Gone Christmas, part 2

Last time, I reviewed four new CDs of reissued Christmas music from the late 50s and early 60s from Real Gone Music. Roughly in order of my preference from best to least, they were by Mitch Miller and the Gang, The Robert Shaw Chorale, The Norman Luboff Choir and The Ray Conniff Singers. Today I decided to test drive, so to speak, my favorite carol, one which all four groups perform, "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." I'll be comparing them to my favorite version which is from my favorite carol album, Carols for Christmas by David Willcocks and the Royal College of Music Choir and Brass Ensemble. Their version opens with a nice blast of brass though the accompaniment remains fairly subtle throughout. They also sing all three of the verses. I found I ranked the four albums' renditions in the same order I ranked the albums.

The Mitch Miller version begins with a slight bit of music box-like instrumentation but is otherwise acappella, with the voices vigorous and clear. The Shaw version is part of a medley and is fine if unremarkable. On the Luboff album, it's also part of a medley (and they only sing the first verse) and uses full orchestral backing which occasionally threatens to upstage the singers. Of course, the Ray Conniff version, also in a medley, is the odd one out; the choir sounds almost folksy, like the Kingston Trio or the Brothers Four, with a sort of samba beat. It's not exactly unpleasant but it's, well, weird.



This got me thinking about the Christmas music canon and looking at the very traditional selection of songs for these albums, most all of which we still hear over and over again today. The Mitch Miller album has 13 songs (plus some bonus tracks from later projects) and all of them are familiar carols, including "Joy to the World," "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," "The First Noel," and of course, "Silent Night." For the most part, the same can be said for the Shaw and Luboff albums, though the outlier is "Baloo Lammy," a Scottish carol which I'd never heard before, and which Luboff does two versions of--the CD is a collection of two albums.

Both Shaw and Luboff do lots of medleys which seems like a strange strategy. Mostly, the songs are not melded together, but simply performed separately with a few seconds of silence between them, and they are not typically put together for any logical reason. For example, one of the Shaw medleys consists of the spiritual "Go Tell It on the Mountain" followed by the Ukranian "Carol of the Bells," the British "Here We Come A-Wassailing" (with a slight variant melody), and "Deck the Halls." Nothing seems to connect them except perhaps that they are all more joyful than somber. But Luboff connects "The First Noel" with "Wassail Wassail All Over the Town," and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." Definitely not sure why.

The Conniff CD is the only one in which pop Christmas songs ("White Christmas," "Winter Wonderland," etc.) outnumber carols, as befits his jazzy easy listening arrangements, and again, they are all songs we still hear, except for an original, "Christmas Bride," which is actually a decent little pop tune. So my guess is that, just as the 50s made albums popular, they also set in place the modern pop Christmas canon, which does get added to over time (The Eagles, Mariah Carey, Wham!). But any current-day listener will find little on any of these CDs that he or she can't sing along with.



Lastly, a curmudgeonly rant: Real Gone, do you really sell the bulk of your material in brick and mortar music or book stores? I bet you don't; I bet you sell primarily online. Then why do you insist on using that old-fashioned "security" labeling adhesive strip at the top of the CD that requires such work to peel off and then requires an application of Goo Gone (or peanut butter) in order to get the sticky mess off the plastic?? I still buy several physical CDs a year, and it's been my experience that many if not most of the majors aren't using this method anymore, or they're using a cleaner adhesive. Honestly, this will affect future buying decisions of your products on my part.

A Real Gone Christmas, part 1

Real Gone Music is a reissue label run by one the founders of the great reissue company Collector's Choice Music. They license music of the past from record labels such as Columbia and RCA and do historical reissues of albums long out of print. This fall, I bought some of their CDs of newly reissued Christmas music from four groups and artists of the 60s: The Robert Shaw Chorale, The Norman Luboff Choir, Mitch Miller and the Gang, and The Ray Conniff Singers.

These albums run the gamut of traditional Christmas styles of choral group recordings of the 1960s (as opposed to solo singer albums). As I listened, I realized that the four here are all examples of different kinds of choral recordings, and as I have no real knowledge of the musical vocabulary used in the field, I'll use my own jargon. The Robert Shaw Chorale's Christmas Hymns and Carols, Volume 1 is an example of the traditional choir, one you might hear in your own church or local concert hall. It's a full sound, numbering I would guess between 30 and 50 singers, and it's given a large, echoey ambience, as though recorded in a cathedral or hall. I would assume their repertoire would be mostly sacred or classical. The voices are arranged and recorded to be well-blended, with individual singers not standing our from the crowd. Depending on the song ("O Come, O Come Emmanuel," "Silent Night") it can be a rather hushed sound, especially as all the songs are unaccompanied by instrumentation, so I had to crank the volume while I was in the car, but this one comes closest to a traditional Christmas Eve album, at least in my house. 3 stars out of 4 for this one.

Next is the Norman Luboff Choir who, despite its name, is more a chorus than a choir. There is apparently not a hard and fast distinction, but the Luboff group sounds smaller than the Shaw group, their arrangements are generally more "popular" in style, and the voices are not as well blended, whether due to arrangement or recording--you can hear the occasional distinct singer bleeding through the choral mix. This CD contains two albums. The first one, from 1956, consists of acapella traditional carols; the second one, from 1964, features full orchestral backing and markedly more modern arrangements, and though it repeats a handful of carols from the first album ("Joy to the World," "The First Nowell"), it also contains a number of contemporary songs such as "Silver Bells" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." As such, it is practically an archetypal example of the 60s pop choral Christmas album. The recording is clear and shiny, and digital cleanup makes it sound much more recent than over 50 years old. 3 stars.

My personal favorite of the four albums is Christmas Sing-Along with Mitch Miller and the Gang. Miller's group had a hot streak in the late 50s and early 60s with albums and a television program in which he conducted a male chorus in mostly old-timey standards; the Sing-Along part relied on printed lyrics provided with the records and lyrics at the bottom of the screen for the TV show. On this album, a few female voices join the men. The carols (all traditional ones) are mostly unaccompanied except for occasional bells or a harp starting a song off. The singing is robust without needing tricked-up arrangements and, again, the remastering makes it sound crisp and strong. 4 stars.

Now, the strange one. The name Ray Conniff always conjured up smooth, easy listening elevator music to me. But this CD, The Complete Columbia Christmas Recordings, is mostly anything but. Actually, individual songs could easily slip in and out of one's consciousness without leaving a mark, but some of the arrangements are fairly jazzy, and sometimes way out in left field. The singers are surrounded by a lush and playful orchestra, and the singers sometimes make an effort to sound like they're indulging in impromptu horsing around, as in "Sleigh Ride" when someone yells, "Hey kids, wanna go on a sleigh ride?" and the response is a gruff, deafening cacophony of yelling, and not even particularly joyous yelling. Many of the songs have been modernized; added lyrics to "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" include, "He had a red schnozzola/It was like a traffic light." I'm not sure I can give this style of singing a name--it's a middle-class white 50s middle-of-the-road jazz chorus? I can't take too much of this in one sitting, but it does make for something different. 2-1/2 stars.

Next post, some musings about these albums and the establishment of the Christmas song canon, and a curmudgeonly complaint aimed at Real Gone Music.

2 Beach Boys

The Beach Boys are by now a legendary band whose vocal and instrumental.arrangements changed the face of pop music in the 60s. Part of their myth is that Brian Wilson was the musical genius whose various beakdowns--caused by drugs, past parental abuse, and the music business--brought an end to the Boys' most fertile period of creativity (1963-1968). While Brian more or less sat out the rest of the decade, the rest of the band, led by Brian's cousin Mike Love, kept touring and remained popular not due to any new music but to the repackaging of their classic material. I've read two books by outside authors about the group, and now we have two memoirs published this season by the two "leaders" of the band, and while Wilson and Love obviously have different takes on what happened, they somewhat surprisingly reinforce the myth in non-contradictory ways.

"I Am Brian Wilson" is Wilson's second book (the first, Wouldn't It Be Nice, from 1991, which I have not read, was not well-received). This is one the better celeb autobiographies I've read, largely because his voice on the page sounds like what I imagine he actually sounds like: a little child-like, lost and hurting (though not self-pitying), but also aware of his success and what his music has meant for his fans. He lays bare most of the events of his life, from his complicated relationship with his bullying father to his ambiguous feelings about his brothers and bandmates, to the abuse he suffered at the hands of his infamous psychiatrist, Eugene Landry, to what seem to be his very rewarding years of the past decade. It's an interesting and briskly-paced read, but also depressing when you consider the great music that Wilson never made, or think about the band the Beach Boys might have become but didn't.

Mike Love, a lead singer and songwriter, is the Beach Boy who has the reputation for being hot-headed and contentious. His style (or his co-writer's style) is smooth and very readable, but he still comes off as a little pompous and not immediately likeable. Though he tries very hard to come off as sympathetic to Brian and his troubles, it seems clear that he carries some resentment about the collapse(s) of the band, and understandably so. This book works best as a complement and corrective for Brian's book--I read Brian's first which may have affected my reactions. Love makes a particularly good case that he was shafted for years by Wilson over songwriting credits, a problem which led to a lawsuit that Wilson doesn't talk about in his book. I also have to give credit to Love for sticking with the group all this time. Without him, the band would surely have ceased to exist many years ago, and even if they haven't made truly great music since the 70s (though I very much like the 2012 album That's Why God Made the Radio), I still like knowing they're still out there plugging along in some form. Both books are interesting, though if you only want to pick one, I'd go for Love's book which is more direct and less fuzzy than Wilson's.