This week for Jazz Friday, I’m featuring the Bill Evans’ cover of Santa Claus is Coming to Town from 1964. This is a weird track. It’s the only Christmas tune buried on Evans’ Trio 64 album released in January 1964. I’m guessing it is a live recording from the holiday season of 1963. They probably played it for giggles and then decided to put it on the album because what musician isn’t at least a little interested in holiday music residuals?

Anyway, to continue the weirdness, the song starts with this odd, loping, off meter melody. Go ahead and tap your foot to the beginning of this song. I dare you. Then it gets a more straight ahead feel, including a most excellent bass solo by Gary Peacock. The whole thing is quintessential Bill Evans. It’s so easy to cover traditional holiday music. I like it when musicians decide to mix it up a bit and this track does that.

I’m going to cover some more holiday jazz through December but if you’d like to cut to the end, here’s my Jazz Yule Apple Music playlist. Enjoy

This year I’m going to feature some of my favorite holiday-themed jazz music every Friday. One of my favorites Wynton Marsalis’s Christmas Jazz Jam (iTunes) (Apple Music). Wynton, who I’ll cover another day in greater detail, is very much a traditionalist but as he’s got older, he’s also added more of a sense of joy and humor to his trumpet (in my opinion). This album fits in nicely. It’s jazz music that you could just play in the background while eating or, you could carefully listen to and have moments of delight. This album works both ways. 

Some of my favorite parts are Wycliffe Gordon’s wild, reindeer-inspired trombone Solo on Santa Clause is Coming to Town and the Dixieland feel in Jingle Bells. You are going to either love or hate what they did with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer but it makes me laugh out loud every time it comes on. Finally, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is classic, straight ahead jazz, and excellent. If you like Wynton, you’ll also want to check out his 1989 album, Crescent City Christmas Card (iTunes) (Apple Music), which is also pretty an excellent jazz holiday album.

If you’re interested in jazz, John Coltrane is a very big part of the story and this week PBS is running a documentary on his life, Chasing Trane. I haven’t seen it yet but it looks real good. The clip below is about A Love Supreme, which I wrote about in 2014.

This month we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s birth. While I’ve featured some of Monk’s music in the past, I’ve never featured the man himself. It’s time to fix that.

Thelonious Monk was one of the founding fathers of bebop and is a jazz giant. Both his compositions and playing style changed the course of jazz music. Some of his compositions are legendary like, like Round Midnight. Monk was one of the best composers of his time. One song that stands out for me is Crepuscule with Nellie (iTunes)(Apple Music), which is a rare jazz song that does not provide for improvisation. It was a composition written, start to finish, as a love song to his wife. One of my absolute favorite songs is his Pannonica, which I butcher on the Piano with this downloadable track.

Monk also played piano like no one before. I distinctly remember hearing Monk for the first time in the 70’s. I was about ten years old and it floored me. I immediately went to my piano teacher and begged to play Monk music. She preferred Bach but I eventually figured it out on my own.

There are so many great Monk albums that it really is hard to recommend just one. One of my favorites is a two album set of him playing the piano without his band, Thelonious Alone in San Francisco (iTunes)(Apple Music). I also really enjoy his collaboration with John Coltrane (iTunes)(Apple Music).

If you’d like to learn more about Monk, I recommend the documentary, Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser (iTunes)(YouTube).

Anyway … Happy Birthday, Monk.

For Jazz Friday this week, I’d like to feature one of my favorite pianists of all time, Bill Evans (website)(Wikipedia). Evans was one of the pioneers of the modal jazz movement and a significant influence on Miles Davis with the Kind of Blue album (iTunes)(Apple Music), the best-selling jazz album of all time. I once read an article about how Davis used to call Evans just to ask him to play the piano over the phone. I believe it. I think Evans’s collaborations with Davis were some of his best, but Evans also did some pretty remarkable stuff in his solo career. One of my favorite compositions from Evans is “Waltz for Debby” (iTunes)(Apple Music). It has a little lilting melody that just makes you smile.

After leaving Miles Davis, Bill Evans had a solo career including several groups he put together through the rest of his life. No matter whom he played with, however, the music always showed his influence in those wonderful impressionist-inspired modal tones and themes. Aside from his work on the Kind of Blue album, my next favorite album from Evans is The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (iTunes)(Apple Music). That album gets a lot of play in my library.

Joey Alexander, the jazz piano prodigy that continues to surprise me, released a new album, Joey. Monk. Live!, (iTunes)(Apple Music) where he played music from Thelonious Monk. I’ve written it before but I can’t get over how Joey plays with so much fire. I’ve heard a lot of prodigies that are technically excellent but yet their music still lacks soul. That’s not the case with Joey. This is a great album for the weekend.

If you’re building up your library of jazz standards, you definitely need tot add Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (iTunes)(Apple Music) to the list. Maiden Voyage was the name of Herbie Hancock’s 1965 album and the title track. The song has a great sort-of motion feel to it. Herbie explained once that his idea of this song was to capture “the splendor of a sea-going vessel on its maiden voyage.” I can see that.

To me, Maiden Voyage is a bit of sublime modal, post-bop jazz that some days is exactly I need. I particularly like the way George Coleman goes a bit off the rails at the end of the sax solo but, of course, I would.

If you are interested in jazz and you’ve never fallen down the Herbie Hancock rabbit hole (Wikipedia), you probably should. He’s remarkably talented and, by all accounts, a swell guy (and a bit of a geek). 

Recently I was riding in my daughter’s car and she was playing the soundtrack from Baby Driver  (iTunes) (Apple Music) and this song came on that blew my mind a little bit. After a little investigation, I discovered it was a jazz band from the late 60’s and early 70’s from Houston Texas known as the Kashmere Stage Band. Further investigation revealed this was not a band formed of seasoned professionals but instead high school kids. Bandleader and teacher Conrad O. Johnson wrote arrangements for his band that were a unique mix of jazz and funk and he got such a sound out of his band. It just makes you want to dance. It’s a crazy story that eventually became the subject of a documentary film, Thunder Soul, (YouTube) produced by Jamie Foxx. You don’t have to go that deep if you don’t want to, however. Just stream or buy their album, Thunder Soul, and prepare yourself for some big band jazz, unlike anything you’ve heard before. 

Ricky Dover, Jr. tweeted Thelonious Monk’s bandstand notes from 1960. Great stuff … for anybody. You dig?

This edition of Jazz Friday features composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn (Apple Music) (Wikipedia). Billy started his musical career as a classical music enthusiast and wanted to become a classical composer. This never came to fruition, partly because racism. Eventually, however, Billy found a love for jazz and brought his classical music knowledge to jazz. He wrote Lush Life while still in high school!

In 1938 Billy met Duke Ellington which resulted in a collaboration that lasted the rest of his life. Strayhorn’s musical sensibilities fit perfectly with Duke’s vision for his own orchestra. As Duke later explained, “Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine.”

Billy Strayhorn, a diminutive, mild-mannered, unselfish, and openly gay man in a time of extreme prejudice, is a jazz legend. Just a few of his songs are Take the ‘A’ Train (iTunes),Such Sweet Thunder (iTunes), and Chelsea Bridge (iTunes). I love listening to Billy Strayhorn jazz. There is a level of subtlety in it that you won’t find many places. His sense of harmony and syncopation, mixed with that original love of classical music combine to make something special. Billy and Duke also collaborated to write the music score for the motion picture, Anatomy of a Murder (iTunes). This was the first African-American-written score for a motion picture.

There’s a lot of great Billy Strayhorn music out there but if you’d like to just get one album, I’d check out Masters of Jazz – Billy Strayhorn (iTunes).