Christmas with The Believers

This year, we'll travel to Ames to celebrate Christmas with my wife's family. While we all get all the kids presents, among us grown-ups we've done a secret Santa style craft exchange for a number of years now. I won't say what I've been working on, but I will say that I've been hopping around in the kitchen all morning, listening to “the best Christmas album you’ve never heard”, Christmas With The Believers.

When I was a kid, the night that The Charlie Brown Christmas Special was aired was almost a holiday unto itself. Maybe because it wasn't that old when I started watching it, that show almost has a primal hold on my concepts of Christmas, and part of that is a really early appreciation of Christmas jazz thanks to the Vince Girabaldi Trio. While the opening chords of Linus and Lucy would also send a thrill of excitement up my spine, the jazz arrangements of those classic Christmas carols that I knew so well felt strange and mysterious, almost otherworldly.

Christmas with The Believers captures that sound perfectly. A live recording of a Christmas show at a jazz club in San Francisco, the album shouldn’t even really exist. One of the band member’s brother recorded it, and then forgot about it. When he came across the recording, the group had broken up, and his brother was playing in Japan. When he asked what he should do with it, the brother replied to just put up on the internet, and hopefully someone will enjoy it.

I thought I found it through Kottke.org, like a decade ago, but I can’t find a reference to it there. I did find a bit on Metafilter about it, and maybe that’s where I heard it, but I do remember that story about the recording, and that’s not there. So, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll just be one of those internet mysteries.

Anyway, no matter what you celebrate, I hope you enjoy your time here at the end of 2018. I’m looking forward to it.