A Very Special Christmas was licensed to K-tel from Attic Records. Who knows how this came about, but there was a time the little label from Winnipeg wasn't that little. The album features sixteen tracks that cover all of the required bases. It should be noted that this album predates the A Very Special Christmas anthologies of Christmas music by about a decade. Those were good, but each album was a little less than the one before it ... and so on. But enough of that, this is about THIS.
The album opens with "Deck the Halls (with Boughs of Holly)" a goofy uneven experience. Rather than a choir, we get a selection of gang vocals, mostly in unison that trade back and forth between the men and women. The arrangement is an odd assortment of easy listening tropes that feels awkward. I say to myself, "Hark, be those tap dancing shoes I hear?" Possibly. Maybe they were handclaps. Considering Hagood was best known to me as a piano key tinkler, I was expecting more piano and less ... whatever this was. I suppose this was a sort of easy listening jazz choral assortment. It's actually weird how I've reacted to this one. I've liked stuff by The Ray Conniff Singers and I've heard some real lumps of coal over the years. Why my vitriol was reserved for Mr. Hardy is a bit of a mystery.
The taste from that opening track was still fresh in my ears when the opening piano chords to "Silent Night, Holy Night" started. It took a few moments for me to realize the song wasn't going to devolve into anything unpleasant. This was a pretty arrangement, more along the lines of what I was expecting. Not great, but I'd listen to it again.
However, the respite was short lived, and "Jingle Bells" with it's calypso rhythm and jaunty pace only evoked the impending sense that there was going to be a faux Jamaican vocal coming ... it was a Sword of Damocles sense of doom that never materialized. Thankfully.
Then Hagood was back with a pretty arrangement of the Mel Torme classic "Christmas Song" which was followed by another lounge music arrangement and so it went for eight songs on side one, and another eight on the second. For over three quarters of an hour, including the time to get up and flip it over, it felt like an overly long elevator ride where some brat had pressed all of the buttons and it had to stop dutifully at each floor.
I've listened to this a couple of times, and it's a conundrum. I'm not sure who the target market was for this. The arrangements are the stuff of generic television variety specials and I'm trying to envision this through my mum's ears. It's too busy and frenetic in places to act as background music, and too uneven to just sit and listen to.
I love Christmas music, and there are a couple of Honourable mentions to be found: "When the First Snow Falls" this is really a very pretty song, and there was something about it that was really quite beautiful. I'm not sure if it was because it stood out head and shoulders over many of the other tracks on the album, or if it was that good. It was credited to Hagood Hardy, but then again he's also attributed as the writer for "When A Child" a song that he may have arranged for the album but he didn't write it. The other is the mandatory "Oh Holy Night" which was a surprise. The familiar arpeggio is there, but it's back in the mix. It's a slower interpretation, and some of the instrumentation seems odd with the horns and strings, but there's something delightful here. It has reverence.
Comments
Post a Comment