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Best-Selling Children’s Records (Xmas)

Joel Whitburn Presents Christmas in the Charts, 1920 to 2004 shares this information: “Billboard published a best-selling children’s records chart from June 12th, 1948 through November 12th, 1955. This chart was researched for children’s Christmas records that charted during the holiday season.”

There were a lot of repeated songs, which might have led to the chart’s demise.

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer – Gene Autry (1949), #1. After my father-in-law Richard died in 2020, I went through many of his CDs, a collection I had previously been unaware of. I got a non-holiday Gene Autry.

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus – Jimmy Boyd (1952), #1

Frosty the Snow Man – Gene Autry (1950), #2. With the Cass County Boys and an orchestra conducted by Carl Cotner. This was available as a 78, then a 45.  

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus – Spike Jones (1953), #4. The little-child vocal is by George Rock, “the heavy-set trumpeter in the Jones band.” 

Thirty-Two Feet, Eight Little Tails – Gene Autry (1951), #5

Susie Snowflake – Rosemary Clooney, #5. The orchestra was conducted by Tony Mottola.

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer – Bing Crosby (1950) #6. With Jud Conlon’s Rhythmaires and John Scott Trotter & his Orchestra.

St. Nick

The Night Before Christmas – Milton Cross (1948), #6. The Clement Moore poem was originally released on a 1939 Victor recording. Musical background was performed by the Victor Salon Orchestra and was arranged and conducted by Rosario Bourdon. 

Frosty the Snow Man – Red Foley (1951), #6. With Shirley, Julie, and Jenny Foley, “The Little Foleys.” Producer: Paul Cohen

A Visit From Saint Nicholas (‘Twas the Night Before Christmas) – Fred Waring (1952), #6. This was originally released in 1942.  Waring and his Pennsylvanians, vocal by the Glee Club, Swingarettes, Jack Best, Gordon Goodman and Twin Trios Here’s the familiar Ken Darby arrangement. Waring would re-do it in later years, once more for Decca and then for Capitol. When I was in the high school choir, we performed a lot of Fred Waring song arrangements. 

47th Kennedy Center Honors

Francis Ford Coppola; Grateful Dead; Bonnie Raitt; Arturo Sandoval; Apollo Theater

Francis Ford Coppola

One of the more random items I have ever blogged about is a song called Mill Valley. It led to a video by an “obscure young director named Francis Ford Coppola, who, two years later, would direct the film that would win the Oscar for Best Movie, The Godfather.”

In 2008, I did a quiz for The Director Who Films Your Life Test, and it turned out to be Coppola. This is interesting in that I’ve only seen a handful of his films: the original Godfather in 1972 (I even remember with whom I saw it and where, in Syracuse, NY);  The Conversation (1974), which I saw on television in 2006; The Outsiders (1983); and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).

This 2020 interview was quite enlightening.

Grateful Dead

I never saw the Grateful Dead perform, although I saw a Dead-adjacent concert in 1975, which included Bill Kreutzmann and Bobby Weir.

Grateful Dead albums I enjoy include American Beauty and  Working Man’s Dead. I should note that these albums are available in full on their YouTube channel; that’s no way to operate capitalism. Then there’s at least one I hate, which is on a list of the worst albums ever: Dylan and the Dead.

I’m also fond of Deadicated – A Tribute to the Grateful Dead from 1991. Mickey Hart put out Music To Be Born By, which I listen to occasionally. 

Note that the KCH only selects the members of a group who are still alive at the time of the selection, so no Jerry Garcia, Pigpen, et al.  Phil Lesh died in October, but he had been chosen before that.

I’ve mentioned the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee several times in this blog, most notably when she turned 70. My friend Mary sent me an article from the Washington Post, which is behind a paywall. I’ll give you just a flavor of it.

“In the late 1960s during her sophomore year, Bonnie Raitt took a leave from Radcliffe. Her intention was to hang with blues legends Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, who were managed by her then-boyfriend Dick Waterman, inhaling the sort of storied education that wasn’t offered at Harvard… [She] has helmed a rock, folk and blues odyssey that is as improbable as it is lengthy, 21 albums and 54 years of touring punctuated by triumphs that erupted decades apart in an industry that tends to Vitamix its young.”

 

I continue to buy her albums. Wikipedia:  Just Like That… is the title track of her eighteenth studio album, Just Like That…, which was released on April 22, 2022, by Redwing Records. The song was written and produced by Raitt and lyrically details the story of a woman who is visited by the recipient of her son’s heart, which he received in a life-saving organ donation operation. The song won Best American Roots Song and Song of the Year at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards, with the latter award regarded as an upset over several higher-charting songs,” much to her obvious shock.

 

However, I never made the connection between John Raitt, the singer on many movie musicals, with whom I was somewhat familiar, and his daughter Bonnie until several years after she entered the music scene.
Arturo Sandoval

The theater was/is the mecca of music for nine decades, from Bessie Smith’s four-week run in the 1930s to Miles, Coltrane, and Monk in the 1950s, the legendary James Brown performance, and the Motortown review in the 1960s, Aretha in the 1970s, and much more.

Yet I had never been there. So when I got an invitation to see Lonnie Bunch there – I am a charter member of the National Museum of African American History and Culture – I was THERE.

The presentation was on Sunday, December 8, 2024. Celebrate the 47th Honors, hosted by Queen Latifah. CBS Broadcast: Sun. Dec. 22, 2024 at 8:30/7:30c.

Rebecca Jade and the Dave Koz Christmas Tour 2024

Nw Haven, CT

In case I haven’t mentioned her often enough in this blog, my first niece, Rebecca Jade, has made a career as a singer. In 2024, she performed with saxophonist Dave Koz on his Mediterranean tour. Then, she flew from Greece to Portugal for another gig, followed by a jazz festival in Indonesia. My family got to see her in Elmira in August. 

Once again, she’s on the Dave Koz and Friends Christmas tour. I attended a performance on Long Island back in 2021 without my wife and daughter, much to the chagrin of my child. So this time, we decided to trek down to New Haven, Connecticut, when we discovered Rebecca would be singing there, the closest she’d get to Albany, NY.

We stayed at a timeshare, which was more complicated to describe here, except that entertaining and parking were challenges. 

My daughter took the train from western Massachusetts, and my wife and I drove. We picked her up at the Union Station in New Haven. (There are lots of Union Station railroad locations in America.) After that, we got something to eat at a restaurant. 

The John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut University was the venue. We parked in the spillover section.

Unlike the last time I saw her, when she didn’t appear until song five, she appears right off with Dave’s longtime cohort Jonathan Butler, saxophonist Vincent Ingala, and guitarist Adam Hawley.

Just Another Christmas Song

The musicians appeared on the stage in various combinations. Each of the other artists received their own time to shine. Rebecca, for instance, had a chance to sing the first song from her Christmas EP, Just Another Christmas Album. The song is Just Another Christmas Song (This Time I’ll Sing Along); you can hear it (or order it!) on Bandcamp, Apple Music, or Spotify. (Just dropped: a video of Merry Christmas, Darling.)

As was the case three years ago, a highlight of the evening was Rebecca Jade and Jonathan Butler singing Mary, Did You Know; here’s a 2021 performance in San Diego.  

The one downside is that the stage lights hit many of the audience members right in the eyes. They were small but powerful and irritating. Later, I discovered that the lights are usually positioned in a larger venue, where that would not likely happen.

After the show, some of us got to meet the artists backstage. Rebecca took us to the tour bus. They may seem exotic and fun, but it’s not all glamorous, given that ten people travel in this vehicle. It does get them from place to place; they went from New Haven to Cleveland, an eight-hour ride, to perform the next night before they had a couple of nights off. 

The next morning, after we left our temporary abode, a marathon took place on the streets north and south of us. So the restaurant that happened to be across the street, Icaru, a Peruvian place, had no customers. We ate there, and the food was very good. Then we drove to Union Station, dropped off the college student, and my wife and I went home.

Movie: A Real Pain

pilgrimage

My wife and I recently went to a Friday matinee of the movie A Real Pain at Albany’s Spectrum 8 Theatre.  Here’s a description from a positive review in the New York Times. “Jesse Eisenberg races straight into life’s stubborn untidiness in…a finely tuned, melancholic and at times startlingly funny exploration of loss and belonging that he wrote and directed. He plays David, a fidgety, outwardly ordinary guy who, with his very complicated cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), sets off on a so-called heritage tour of Poland. Their grandmother survived the Holocaust because of ‘a thousand miracles,’ as David puts it, and they’ve decided to visit the house where she grew up. Theirs is an unexpectedly emotionally fraught journey and a piercing, tragicomic lament from the Jewish diaspora.”

Benji points out that David was more emotional as a kid, in a way only family can hone in on. Still, David is a relatively successful businessperson with a wife and a kid.  The cousins have drifted away, yet they still care quite a bit about each other.

While he can be maddening, Benji has a “frenetic exuberance that draws people to him when it doesn’t overwhelm them.” Among them are the British tour guide James (Will Sharpe), Marcia (Jennifer Grey), the sad yet perky newly divorced, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism, and Diane and Mark (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), an older bourgeois Jewish couple.

I believed in the pain these people, especially the leads, felt. A reference to Binghamton made me laugh.
OTOH

The Rotten Tomatoes critics were 96% positive, but the audience was only 80%. An audience poll showed that about half of the 235 responses gave it a five out of five rating. However, about a third of them gave it but one star.

Here’s one example: “The plot is non-existent; it is just some random events that do not tell any story in particular. Characters are flat, with no development whatsoever. The two mismatched cousins are just as flat, inadequate, and unrealistic at the end as they were at the beginning. They didn’t go through any personal challenges or transformation. Just had a fun trip to Poland to goof around the war monuments.” It wasn’t the movie I saw, but many people HATED it.

Two last things. David Oreskes is one of those actors who some used to refer to as “Oh, THAT guy.” He’s been in many things I’ve seen, though I could not have placed any of them.

The other weird thing is that four people remained seated after the movie ended and the lights came up. A  young man in his 20s or maybe 30s explained the story they had just seen. He started, “The story was about these two brothers…” I wanted to interrupt to say they were cousins. Very odd.

Bach Magnificat

In addition to our weekly musical contribution between September and June, the choir of First Presbyterian Church of Albany usually endeavors to take on one or two more substantial pieces during the church year. For the First Friday in December 2024, we performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s Magnificat, directed by our choir director, Michael Lister, in the church’s sanctuary.

The choir had been practicing since September, with three special Sunday afternoon rehearsals. Dr. Lister had also recruited additional vocalists, some from his tenure at the College of Saint Rose (RIP) and from UAlbany. A few of them also came at the end of our regular Thursday night rehearsals to hone their musical understanding of the pieces.

There were two parts to the December 6 program. The first part involved the octet of the choir: Rose, Maria, Fiona, Sarah, Joshua, Nate, Dan, and Tom. They performed:

Ave Regina Coelorum by Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704)

Ave Maria by Tomas Louis Victoria (1548-1611)

Ave Generosa by Ola Gjeilo (b. 1978) with text by Hildegard von Bingen

Blessed Be That Maid Marie, a 15th-century Carol arranged by Susan LaBarr

Magnificat by Arvo Pärt (b.1935)

Bògòroditse Dyevo by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 -1943)

Hacia Belen va un Botrrico, a traditional Spanish Carol arranged by Alice Parker 

Estonian

My favorite piece was the Pärt, pronounced like pear with a T at the end. I’ve been a big fan of the Estonian composer for over two decades when my wife and I were at the house of one of her friends, and they were playing some of his music.

It was good that Bach Magnificat involved additional singers because at least five of our choir members were playing in the orchestra instead.

You may recall from the movie Amadeus when the Salieri character cried, “Too many notes!” This is what the Magnificat felt like for both the singers and the instrumentalists. In the case of the former, there was a lot of melisma, which is “a group of notes or tones sung on one syllable.” My favorite piece, which did not involve the full choir, involved the trio of Rose, Carla, and Fiona. They sang the solos and duets along with Joshua and guest vocalist Kristopher.

I’m using this photo that my friend Annika took because at least three people who attended the Magnificat asked if I had participated. Someone in front of me must have obscured me. But in this picture, I’m just left of the lectern. I was there! Really!

I’m always excited when we do a big piece and relieved when it’s over. Here’s the First Friday performance for December 6, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Albany.

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