Christmas Music

  A recent discussion turned to Christmas music. It may be too early for many of you, but I love Christmas music. With one caveat. I worked in retail for 20 plus years, and this time of year, retailers are working hard trying to get their customers into a Christmas shopping frame of mind, so the Christmas music tend to come out early. In an effort to maintain sanity in the face of 8-12 hours of Christmas music daily we went looking for more interesting music.
  From the owner's perspective, his customer is only in the store for 15-30 minutes at a time, so any Christmas music will do. My boss tended to put on the local EZ-Rock radio station that played Christmas music 24-7 starting about September, it seemed. Of course, for the employees, the radio station tended to repeat the same songs on about an hourly cycle, and usually the sappiest ones were played most often. After about three days, we were ready to put our heads through the plate glass front window. The solution was a multi-disc CD player, and a wide variety of Christmas CDs. Everybody would bring in their collection, and we would load up a jukebox style CD player with about 30 CDs and put it on random play. That way, you might not hear the same song repeated for three or four days. Of course, by late December we had still heard every song it seemed like 100 or more times, but by then it was so busy we didn't really have time to think about it.
  With thirty Christmas CDs in one place, it's hard not to have some amount of redundancy, so we would try and find Christmas CDs that were a little out of the ordinary. That led to my personal tradition of buying myself a new Christmas CD every year. A new and interesting Christmas CD that is. This year's purchase will be my 20th Christmas CD. Now I didn't buy all of those. A couple were freebies from suppliers. A couple were freebies (with purchase from some store or another), and a couple were gifts. I believe this year will be the twelfth in a row I have purchased one(1) new Christmas CD for the sake of tradition. Here are a few of my favourites.

The Blind Boys Of Alabama-- Go Tell It On The Mountain.
The Blind Boys of Alabama have spread the spirit and energy of pure soul gospel music for over 60 years, ever since the first version of the group formed at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in 1939. Today, founding members Clarence Fountain, Jimmy Carter and George Scott are joined by more recent arrivals Joey Williams, Ricky McKinnie, Bobby Butler, and Tracy Pierce on a mission to expand the audience for traditional soul-gospel singing while incorporating contemporary songs and innovative arrangements into their hallowed style. -http://www.blindboys.com/about/

Various Artists-- Merry Axemas- A Guitar Christmas.
The world's favorite instrument and its highest holiday come together in a rocking musical celebration. It's an event which highlights the heartwarming sounds of the Christmas season, while dazzling and delighting fans of great guitar music: Merry Axemas features some of the world's finest guitarists putting a bold new stamp on beloved traditional carols. -http://www.epicrecords.com/merryaxemas/
-note: While it isn't explicitly stated in the description of the album, they mean electric guitar, and the artists featured include Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Jeff Beck, and Joe Satriani. There's no Segovia here.

Loreena McKennitt-- To Drive The Cold Winter Away
Loreena’s second, self-produced recording presents seasonal music with a fresh and serendipitous approach. This collection of traditional and lesser-known winter and Christmas carols was recorded in 1987 on location at The Church Of Our Lady in Guelph, Ontario, and, in Ireland, a Benedictine monastery and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig.
-http://www.quinlanroad.com/en/01_explorethemusic/todrivecoldwinter.asp

The Vince Guaraldi Trio-- A Charlie Brown Christmas ( The original sound track recording of the CBS television special)
If anything deserves the meme descriptor, it is the jazz arrangements of traditional favourites and original compositions that are immediately recognised by anyone who's ever watched a TV Christmas special. Guaraldi went on to work on several more Charlie Brown televisions specials.

Various Artists- A Very Special Christmas
2004 marks the ninth edition of the Very Special Christmas series, which features pop artists performing both traditional and contemprorary songs. Proceeds from the sale of these discs are donated to The Special Olympics. This year's offering appears to showcase artists like Mary J. Blige, Norah Jones, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton, and others.
I have the original AVSC CD and AVSC3.

Yeah, yeah. I know it's early. Merry Christmas anyway.