This 1956 LP is unusual in that it is comprised entirely of original music written for the Christmas season. ------------------------------------ My brain is telling me that this is not a "first,"
I never claimed that it was a "first," just "unusual." Off the top of my head, it was preceded by "Amahl and the Night Visitors" (1951), an original Christmas opera by Gian Carlo Menotti.
This 1994 recording is the soundtrack (more or less) from a Bob Hope Christmas special that aired on NBC on 14 December 1994. The recording, however, seems to have been a vanity project for Hope and his wife Dolores, perhaps produced for friends and family. The recording is not on any label, but is just credited to Hope Enterprises, Inc., and was likely never sold in stores. The recording also does not feature any singing by the main musical guest on that Hope special, Tony Bennnett, no doubt for contractual reasons.
The couple sing mostly duets, accompanied by an orchestra and chorus. While Dolores is still in fine voice, Bob is a little croaky. The album (and I guess the special as well) was produced, arranged , and conducted by Nick Perito, the veteran producer-arranger who worked on many Perry Como specials. Among the songs is "Silver Bells," which Hope introduced in the 1951 film THE LEMON DROP KID. Hope sang the song at least 17 prior times on his televised Christmas specials.
There are albums consisting of nothing but Christmas carols rendered by antique music boxes. These can sometimes get a little monotonous. This 1967 Vanguard recording mixes its 10 music box tunes among 15 songs sung by "The Carolers," the Chamber Choir of the University of Utah. This is the 1988 CD re-issue.
Large retailers often release albums of Christmas music during the holidays, usually offered at a nominal cost, in order to drive traffic to their stores. During the 1960s, for example, Firestone Tire and Auto Centers offered a Christmas album for many years running. These LPs have become prized by collectors because each was a new production, uniquely made for the season, with singers specially contracted for the album, usually accompanied by "The Firestone Orchestra And Chorus."
More often, a retailer will contract with a record company to create a compilation album of Christmas songs from the label's archives. Such is the case with the 2007 CD below, "Christmas In the City," which Universal Music compiled for the now-defunct Circuit City chain. True to its title, the album was comprised of songs by Universal's "urban" artists, including The Jackson 5, The Isley Brothers, and New Edition.
This 1982 release was a late entry in the catalog of albums that offered "turned on" versions of tunes (classics, movie themes, show tunes, etc.) set to a disco beat. The eight medleys on this release cover 85 different songs (not all of them Christmas-related), with each one given about 30 seconds of air time.
I was just about to ask if you know of a disco Xmas album, but you're way ahead of me, Bob.
Barbra Streisand released her first "Christmas Album" early in her career, in 1967. Among the more traditional songs, such as "White Christmas," she included more diverse selections, such as "My Favorite Things," from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music. Streisand's album went a long way towards turning that song into a Christmas classic. The album also included a new song, "The Best Gift" (in celebration of her soon-to-be-born son Jason), Gounod's "Ave Maria," and a romping, jazzy "Jingle Bells," in which Streisand deconstructed the song into something completely her own.
Nearly 35 years later, in 2001, Streisand went back into the studio to record her second Christmas album, "Christmas Memories." This time, the songs were almost all contemporary, with contributions from songwriters such as Frank Loesser ("What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?") and Johnny Mandel and Alan & Marilyn Bergman ("A Christmas Love Song"). In addition, she chose a Stephen Sondheim song, "I Remember," from his 1966 television musical Evening Primrose. Since the song wasn't written as a Christmas song, Streisand asked Sondheim if he could add a verse to make it a more appropriate fit for the album. As he had done in the past for other Streisand albums, in which she sang altered versions of his "Send In the Clowns," "Putting It Together," and "I'm Still Here," Sondheim was happy to comply, and provided a new opening verse to the song. William Ross arranged the tune.
Although he was not the first to record the Johnny Marks song "Holly Jolly Christmas," Burl Ives is the singer most associated with the tune. He first sang it for the 1964 Rankin-Bass Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, in which Ives voiced the narrator, "Sam the Snowman." Later that year, Ives re-recorded the song as a single and later featured it the following year in his 1965 Decca Records holiday album, "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas." All this is by way of explaining why the song does not appear on his subsequent "Christmas Album" for Columbia Records, released in 1968. The album was re-issued on CD in 1995.
CD bargain bins are kind of a thing of the past. They usually contained cut-outs of mainstream albums, but you could also find musical fodder specifically created to sell at bargain prices, often on foreign labels. The Nat King Cole "Christmas Gift Collection" is one such creation. It comes from Italy on a label called Digital Dejavu. The album's name is somewhat of a cheat, since only 5 of the 12 tracks are Christmas-related. The label also cheated on its sources, since these are not licensed tracks from any of Nat King Cole's recordings. They aren't even vinyl rips under some European 50-year copyright rule. Instead, most of the tracks are lifts from the mono soundtracks of episodes of Cole's 1956-57 television series The Nat King Cole Show.
One of the first albums ever released by the piano duo of Ferrante & Teicher was a 10-inch mono LP on the Westminster label, a 1954 Christmas album oddly titled "Xmas Hi-Fivories." (I'm sure that rather than playing off the idea of a "high five," a term that probably didn't exist in 1954, the title was a mash-up of "hi-fi" and "ivories," as in piano keyboards.) The album was a far cry from Ferrante & Teicher's later elaborate orchestra-heavy albums of movie themes and popular songs. This was pretty much a solo (OK, duo) piano album of eight classic Christmas tunes.
The pair revisited the holiday genre in 1962 for their United Artists album "Snowbound," which in addition to Christmas favorites like "Sleigh Ride" and "Jingle Bells" included tunes such as "Moonlight In Vermont" and "June in January."
Ferrante & Teicher's final Christmas album was the 1966 UA release "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," which was all-Christmas, all the time, without any diversions into non-Christmas wintery-related tunes. The latter two albums added a lush orchestra and were produced by Nick Perito. United Artists combined these two albums into a 1992 CD release.
Trans-Siberian Orchestra is an American rock band founded in 1996 by producer, composer, and lyricist Paul O'Neill, who brought together Jon Oliva and Al Pitrelli (both members of Savatage) and keyboardist and co-producer Robert Kinkel to form the core of the creative team.
Their debut album, the first installment of the intended Christmas Trilogy, was a rock opera called "Christmas Eve and Other Stories," and was released in 1996. It remains among their best-selling albums. It contains the instrumental "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24" which originally appeared on Savatage's rock opera "Dead Winter Dead," a story about the Bosnian War.
Over its two CDs and 50 tracks, this 1993 compilation features contributions from 25 world-famous solo artists and choral groups. The soloists include Kathleen Battle, Marilyn Horne, Sergio Franchi, and Jan Peerce. The groups include the Vienna Choir Boys and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The albums were compiled by the direct marketing arm of BMG in cooperation with Warner Classics.
Born and raised in the St. Louis, Missouri, area, David Kenneth McComber is a former "Malibu" band member, an alternative rock group from the 80's. He also played the keys in a classic rock group called "Illegal Tender". To reduce production costs, this self-released solo piano album (augmented by some electronic strings) consists entirely of Christmas carols in the public domain. It was released in 2003.
At the dawn of the CD era, a new magazine was created by publisher Wayne Green. It was called Digital Audio and it focused on the new medium of compact discs. Always interested in technology, Wayne Green had been involved in ham radio in the 1960s and 1970s, and championed many of the technology advances in that field. Green embraced the personal computer when it first emerged on the scene. He was involved with, or created many of the early magazines focused on microcomputers, including Byte, 80 Micro, Kilobaud Microcomputing and Pico.
Digital Audio soon morphed into Compact Disc Review and then just CD Review. For a dozen years, until it ceased publication in 1996, CD Review critiqued and rated the artistic and technical merits of thousands of compact disc releases. But Wayne Green was not just interested in the big label releases that were the mainstay of his publication. He also championed independent artists and labels. Towards that end, he released a series of sampler CDs under the moniker “Adventures In Music,” selling for $4 each, which featured nothing but artists from these small independent labels. Each release had tracks from some 15 to 20 different singers or musicians. Released from 1990 to 1992, the series encompassed nearly six dozen albums. Five of these releases were devoted exclusively to Christmas music: “Christmas Sampler” (#5, 1990), “Traditional Christmas Music” (#24, 1991), “Contemporary Christmas Sampler” (#26, 1991), “Christmas Volume IV” (#60, 1992), and “The Christmas Revels Sampler” (#71, 1992).
As Wayne Green’s interests wandered to other technologies, he started magazines such as Cold Fusion. Many of his magazines were started in the area around Peterborough, NH, where Green lived for many years. Wayne Green died in 2013 at the age of 91.
If you just glanced at the title of this CD—“Universal Motown All-Star Holiday Revue”—you could be forgiven for concluding that it contained holiday songs sung by some of Motown’s most prominent “All-Star” musical acts. In that, you would be wildly wrong. In fact, the CD has only seven tracks (12 minutes!) of music, sung by a “chorus” of about 120 Universal Motown employees, in what appears to be a recording produced as a memento of their office holiday party in 2000. The thing has a bar code on it, not because it was expected to be sold, but because everything pressed for Universal Records needs one for inventory control.
Robert Vickery is best known for his organ transcriptions and interpretation of the Romantic repertoire. He has studied piano with Thelma Johnson, organ with Dr. Edward Berryman and harpsichord with Jane Burris. He considers the late Virgil Fox to have been the artist most influential in the development of his playing style. Mr. Vickery made his New York City debut in November 1983, playing the third annual Virgil Fox Memorial Concert.
The 1990 CD below gives no indication as to where it was recorded, but Vickery has made recordings featuring the organs of the Cathedral of St. Paul, St. Paul, Minnesota; the Cathedral Church of St. Mark, Minneapolis; and the 85-rank Aeolian organ housed in the Watkins Mansion in Winona, Minnesota.
This 2000 CD has 10 Christmas songs by 10 country music artists, including Porter Wagoner, Lee Greenwood, and Roy Clark. More interesting is the label—KRB Music Companies—formed by Kenneth R. Bennett. For 15 years (1993-2008), the label licensed albums from other labels for re-issue, as well as individual tracks to create compilation releases, such as this one.
Jerry Ray is primarily an arranger, whose name appears as such on a lot of piano score books. His recording career is much more sparse. This 2000 recording of piano solos of Christmas carols was recorded in Pasadena, CA and was released by Ivory Coast Records, part of Music Media Group, Inc. Both of those outfits seem to be defunct.
In 1991, Intersound Inc. of Rosewell, GA released to the bargain bins about eight of these similarly designed CDs, each loaded with more than an hour of Christmas music. The catch was only one of them (a collection of carols played on the organ) identified who the artists were (the tracks were mostly orchestra and chorus). And since many of the discs had the same carols, it was equally unclear as to whether similarly titled tracks on different CDs were by the same or different artists.
