I’ll Roast Your ‘Chestnuts’
Fallenmonk notes the effect of bad seasonal music on the souls of the workers.
It would be really nice and a ‘Christian thing’ if, instead of the Muzak versions of carols, stores got their music from local choruses and musical ensembles, and offered CDs of the the groups for sale. It would be a win-win-win situation. The sounds would change for the workers, the costs would be minimal for the stores, and the groups would receive some funding.
These days most local bands, and almost every church has the ability to produce CDs of a reasonable quality for a minimal investment, and local music programs could certainly use an additional funding source.
Look, guys, the originals were bad enough, I don’t need to listen to covers of Brenda Lee, Burl Ives, or Gene Autry. Frankly, no one but Mel Torme should ever be allowed to sing the Christmas Song.
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And regarding Mel Torme and The Christmas Song, here is THE Christmas Story as far as I am concerned.
Some things just shouldn’t be messed with. As your link noted, he had perfect pitch in his range, and that is a rare gift.
There has been a lot of bad Christmas music created over the years, which is why I prefer the traditional carols, which were designed and written for congregations of untrained singers. They are tolerable with only a minimum of training and direction, and just improve as the singers improve.
Writing choral music is an art unto itself. Many otherwise fine composers are not very good at it. An example is the late great Lukas Foss. The UH Unversity Chorus performed his work “A Parable of Death” one year; the work has some merit from an audience perspective, but it is a dog-awful thing to try to sing. The massive, fluid larger choral works of Johannes Brahms are possible with a really well-trained church choir; Foss’s work was aimed at a professional choir, and nothing less will do. OTOH, my comp teacher, Thomas Benjamin (retired from Peabody; I knew him at UH and through a local UU church), a composer of medium rank and possibly a hundred published works, was superb at choral composition.
Writing Christmas music, even bad Christmas music, is kinda fun, which probably explains why so many incompetents do it. The absolute worst of it appears in those piano collections of Christmas songs… the piano parts are truly deplorable compositionally: bad choices of harmonies, voice-leadings, you-name-it. But they sell!
Yes, Steve, all is forgiven at Christmas.
Ah now MelTorme is an unknown to me. I will say one thing,there is nothing guaranteed to get me out of a shop as fast as possible is a Christmas song. The one I hate most is called Stop the Cavalry by Jona Lewie. I am surprised that we don’t see more shop assistants carrying out killing sprees generated by a surfeit of xmas uzak
jams, in America, killing sprees are the unofficial job of disgruntled postal workers. (That’s how it’s almost always phrased: postal workers are always “disgruntled,” never “frustrated” or “irritated” or “exasperated.” If I were a postal worker, I’m sure I would be all of those things.)
I don’t see anything in the jobs of a postal worker or a shop assistant [retail clerk] that would make me particularly ‘gruntled’, so being ‘disgruntled’ should be the norm, along with frustrated, irritated, and exasperated. It is amazing that more people aren’t strangled with strings of Christmas/fairly lights in the stores.
I should have spelled his last name Tormé to get the pronunciation correct, but he was known as ‘the velvet fog’ for the smoothness of his voice. His genre was jazz that often crossed over to pop because of his voice. If you needed to relax, he was hard to beat because the sound clicked as the way things were supposed to be. The sound was right; the tempo was right; everything was right. He resonated with most people. This made him popular, but not a ‘superstar’, although he recorded around 90 albums.
Tormé, ever the complete entertainer as well as consummate musician, even made a guest appearance once on the American late-night sitcom “Night Court”!
He was one of the most capable and versatile musicians among singers of his day. Not only was his voice smooth, he seemed to me to have mastered a technique from the Italian baroque era of connecting his “head voice” (falsetto) and his “chest voice” (normal mode) seamlessly. I’ve known and worked with several fine countertenors, but few of those men were equally good as countertenors and as basses, and even fewer could use both voices in the course of the same song. Tormé not only could do it, he could use the smooth transition to good artistic effect. What a guy!
Jams, since you didn’t post a link, or do anything other than mention Stop The Cavalry I will forgive you for the pain inflicted. I can’t believe it is considered a ‘classic Christmas song’ – after 45 seconds my ears shut down. That song has less ‘class’ than Alvin and the Chipmunks, and, no Jams, don’t sample them.
The bad music is the real ‘war on Christmas’.
He was a true musician, Steve, who could use his ‘instrument’ as few people are capable.
from wikipedia:
i loved night court and saw probably every single episode. i already sort of had heard of mel torme, he was from my parents’ generation after all, but i didn’t become a fan of his until he appeared on night court.
He suffered from being a nice guy who didn’t run through multiple wives in public or create scandals for the tabloids, he just wrote and sang songs.
That bloody song Stop the Cavalry is played all the time around Christmas here As far as I am concerned it is straight from the soundtrack of Hell
I’m sure it violates the EU rights convention, Jams. I literally couldn’t listen to a full minute of it. I can’t imagine being stuck in a check out line and forced to hear the whole thing.
I suppose the only real question there is whether Jona Lewie is Jewish. (Backstory). 😈
– Badtux the Evil Penguin
Bad ‘Tux, really bad.