Christmas Records, Day 21: Carla Bley

Carla Bley w/ Steve Swallow and the Partyka Brass Quintet - Carla's Christmas Carols

(Watt Works/ECM, released 2009)

The sound of a brass ensemble is an important element of musical tradition at Christmas, that horseshoe of buskers thumbing, fingerless-gloved, through the book of Salvation Army carol arrangements in the corner of a town centre. There's something of this tradition that American jazz composer Carla Bley evokes and re-works in an album that glows with the warm tone of The Partyka Brass Quintet and sparks with the jazz inflections brought to familiar material. There is a brightness to much of the music, helped by the clarity of Steve Swallow's guitar sound and the use of glockenspiel, celeste and chimes; but largely this is the result of Bley's inventive and humorous re-composition. God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman begins with a lullaby lilt reminiscent of Gershwin's Summertime, before giving way to a Take Five riff over which trumpeter Axel Schlosser improvises harmony-stretching lines. A boozy blues sensibility informs It Came Upon A Midnight Clear, which borrows drunkenly from My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean. Elsewhere, Bley's reworking is subtler, embracing the richness of traditional brass chorale writing. Her re-harmonisation of O Tannenbaum is simple beauty, an old tune cloaked in new chord progressions, capturing a sense of the mournful nostalgia that can also be part of Christmas.