The Musical Box

donna boyd of the center for old music in the new world in rehearsal at st. michael's episcopal church. photo by herald-leader staff photographer mark cornelison.

It has long been designed as one of the final holiday celebrations in Lexington, a performance staged on the closest available Monday before Christmas. But this year, the Center for Old Music in the New World is really coming down to the yuletide wire.

On Monday, a mere three days before Christmas arrives, the organization devoted to the performance of early music presents a holiday concert of traditional carols and songs that has become a tradition unto itself.

For more than three decades, the center has presented A Handefull of Christmas Delights. The program defines “old music in the new world” by presenting medieval and Renaissance music that celebrates numerous aspects of the season. Lutes, recorders, viola da gambas and more bring the music to life. And there are voices. Many voices. They sing of the season, of the solstice and of celebration.

As such, A Handefull of Christmas Delights has become one of the most lovingly unspoiled of Lexington holiday celebrations. But squeezing it in with so little breathing room before Christmas itself - a time when seasonal stress seems to reach its zenith - is both a challenge and a reward for the performers.

“The fact we are almost always one of the very last events before Christmas is a challenge,” said Donna Boyd, director of the Center for Old Music in the New World and a veteran of all 30 previous Christmas Delights concerts. “Things get so frantic, and there is always so much to do. But people tell me when this concert comes around, it feels like it’s time to step back from all that and become part of a more peaceful celebration of the season.”

This year’s Christmas Delights concert will have a broadly European feel with emphasis on early carols and winter festival music composed from the 12th to the 15th century. “There is Czech music, Spanish music, Italian, German, Scandinavian, Scottish, French. … We just love to do a great mixture of things.”

The concert is rehearsed in sections. A band of five medieval instrumentalists rehearses separately from Boyd and a group of about a dozen vocalists. Soloists round out the performance. Several are Lexington professionals. Some even spend weekends delving into sounds vastly removed from the early music of Christmas Delights. Among that pack is John Hedger, who has been a featured lute soloist for more than 25 years with the center. But he is also one of Lexington’s most established blues guitarists. He leads Johnny Roy and the Rub Tones and is a guitar instructor at Transylvania University, Berea College and Centre College.

Hedger brought up one of the more immediate but unavoidable obstacles in performing music - any kind of music - at the heart of the holiday season: winter illness.

“Respiratory illnesses around this time of year can sometimes knock out a key singer in the group,” he said. “They become so ill that they absolutely cannot sing.

“Actually, two Christmases ago I was working hard, preparing my lute solo for the program, and came down with pneumonia. I had to cancel about two weeks before the program because I couldn’t continue practicing and preparing.”

But even in the mildest winter weather, a substantial level of chance surfaces in bringing the instrumental and vocal groups of Christmas Delights together. While each practices extensively on its own, joint rehearsal time is minimal.

“What we finally put together for the concert happens in one or two rehearsals,” Boyd said. “The ability of that to work really depends on people who are devoted to making music in any situation. You take a big risk doing things this way.”

Adding to the danger element is that Christmas Delights isn’t like The Nutcracker in that it doesn’t enjoy an extended run or even a repeat performance. It happens once.

“It’s not a tour,” Hedger said.

“There is only one chance for us to perform this music,” Boyd added. “Of course, that means there is only one chance for the audience to hear it, too.”

But above the physical and rehearsal demands of performing so close to Christmas is the motive for making the music in the first place. Boyd doesn’t want Christmas Delights to be viewed, as she terms it, as “an antiquarian kind of thing.”

The sounds and songs might be centuries old, but she is devoted making the music alive and in-the-moment.

“This is living music to us, and I think that is communicated to the audience,” she said. “After all, they are there. They are part of this living thing.

“Music exists in the performance and in the connection between the audience and the performers as it happens. That’s a real creative synthesis right there. All of this comes together, especially at Christmastime. But that’s partly because the audience brings such a special spirit of its own.

“What we’re presenting isn’t a religious celebration, although there is a spiritual aspect to the music that everyone responds to. Our audience is wonderful in that respect. It’s an incredible representation of a lot of differences in the makeup of our community. To me, that’s just a really special thing.”

The Center for Old Music in the New World presents “A Handefull of Christmas Delights” at 8 p.m. tonight at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, 2025 Bellefonte Rd. Tickets are $5 (students), $8 (seniors) and $10 (public). Call (859) 269-2908.

manhattan transfer: alan paul, cheryl bentyne, tim hauser, janis siegel

In order to bend tradition, to fashion it into something even remotely your own, you first have to know it like a family member. That’s what the Manhattan Transfer, with its blend of jazz, swing, gospel and pop, has done over the last 38 years. Last night at the Singletary Center for the Arts, the veteran vocal troupe simply adjusted the scope of its music rather than the intent. With its own popular material taking up less than one-third of the 90 minute concert, the Transfer designed an immensely spirited program of seasonal music with help from a solid backup quartet and an orchestra comprised of University of Kentucky faculty and students.

It was a pretty natural alteration, mind you, as so much popular Christmas material maintains strong connections to the Swing Era that has always been a prime inspiration for the singers. Once those styles were fully embraced, the Transfer ably moved on to other restorative turf. For instance, the show-opening swing of Irving Berlin’s Happy Holiday was a prime fixture of the 1942 movie musical Holiday Inn. That film also introduced the world to White Christmas. So, the Transfer tackled that one too. But instead of treating it as a tired, sentimental warhorse, the group transformed it to a light, balmy and thoroughly convincing bossa nova.

While the group’s obvious harmonic agility was on generous display, the singers’ individual personalities were also given considerable room to roam. Alan Paul, who displayed the group’s strongest vocal range, had a field day singing lyrics he wrote to the melody of a Paul Desmond saxophone solo during Santa Claus is Coming to Town. By channeling idol Eartha Kitt a bit, Cheryl Bentyne had plenty of vampish fun on the 1953 holiday hit Santa Baby. And in an earthier blues turn, group founder Tim Hauser set up the hearty r&b foundation of Charles Brown’s Merry Christmas Baby. Best of all was Janis Siegel’s exhaustive, but thoroughly unforced swing serenade on Sleigh Ride.

So arresting was the holiday spirit that when Birdland erupted late in the program, you forgot how similarly absorbing the group’s own music was. To be fair, the tune was composed and initially recorded as an instrumental work by the late Weather Report keyboardist Josef Zawinul in 1977. But the Transfer’s 1980 vocalese arrangement did more than simply unveil the group’s greatest performance dynamics last night, including a tireless lead from Siegel. It also displayed a load of luscious drive from the horn section, which revamped melodies Zawinul had originally written for synthesizers. It was as rich a display for the brass and wind players as The Christmas Song, which immediately preceded Birdland, was for the string section.

Two mainstay Transfer hit revisions, Operator (again with Siegel in the driver’s seat) and Java Jive, were served as encores, sealing the show’s unavoidable sense of pop nostalgia, its scholarly jazz command and, most of all, its honestly inviting Yuletide vibe.

heartless bastards: dave colvin, erika wennerstrom, jesse ebaugh

As of last night, Christmas was a mere week away. But there wasn’t any holiday slant at all to the thick power trio charge Erika Wennerstrom designed with her newest Heartless Bastards lineup at The Dame.

Though the singer/guitarist was a congenial host, flashing broad smiles to the sizeable crowd between songs, her music was spun from a dark, dense yet often hopeful fabric. Vocally, emotively and, at times, instrumentally, the trio recalled the muscular attitude Johnette Napolitano fashioned two decades ago on her first albums with Concrete Blonde. Wennerstrom’s music wasn’t quite that anthemic. But the husky authority of her singing and the band’s assertive rhythmic drive, particularly the tight, thunderous support drummer Dave Colvin summoned on Searching for the Ghost, brought more than a few Blonde moments to mind.

Though it wasn’t openly flaunted, there was also a pronounced power pop undercurrent to Wennerstrom’s songs, from Jesse Ebaugh’s opening bass stutter during the Ramones-like New Resolution to the crankier Neil Young guitar colors of Blue Sky.

Not everything could be so quickly pegged to past influences, though. Gray hitched a theme of personal restoration to a pop assault the Bastards could rightly call their own. A similar sense of personal rediscovery (”things are coming into focus”) propelled Into the Open, where Wennerstrom lightened the volume for an introductory keyboard melody but not the show’s inherent drive and restlessness.

the manhattan transfer: tim hauser, janis siegel, cheryl bentyne and alan paul

The most humbling aspect surrounding the Manhattan Transfer’s ongoing international popularity is the fact its members initially counted themselves lucky just to have a fanbase here at home.

Take singer Tim Hauser, the one-time Madison Avenue marketing executive who started the first Manhattan Transfer group in 1969. That ensemble didn’t last long. But when a second lineup began to establish itself with a blend of robust jazz harmonies, pop appeal and, eventually, scores of stylistic inspirations and variations, the world came calling.

When we caught up with Hauser earlier this month to discuss Manhattan Transfer’s final concert of the year - a Saturday performance of holiday music and more that will team the group with 25 members of the University of Kentucky Orchestra - he was out of town. He was way out of town. Hauser, in fact, had just arrived at his hotel in Tallinn, Estonia following a flight from the group’s previous destination: Tel Aviv, Israel.

Before making its way to the Singletary Center next weekend, the Manhattan Transfer will play Finland, Slovakia and Russia.

“It never occurred to me when we started that we would be an international band,” Hauser said. “Never. My visions back then as far as popularity went were very limited. Now, musically, they weren’t limited at all.

“What I was looking at then musically was what we’re doing now. It’s grown since then. But the various styles we address were already there - vocalese, rhythm and blues, swing, big band, four part harmonies and gospel harmony. I thought it would be great just to get steady work in the United States with that.”

The second Manhattan Transfer was formed in 1972 when Hauser was paying bills as much by driving taxis in New York as he was through performance work. Save for one lineup change - Cheryl Bentyne for Laurel Masse in 1978 - the membership of the Manhattan Transfer has remained consistent through the years. Janis Siegel and Alan Paul complete the group.

“There is a very high level of communication when the four of us are onstage,” Hauser said. “Of course, it helps that we really like each other. We’re friends offstage. But when we’re onstage, the communication becomes pretty linear. By that, I mean, we don’t falter. It’s a sacred place for us.”

While the Manhattan Transfer’s music may be rooted in jazz, undercurrents of pop, in almost every sense of the term, are strong. Hauser absorbed the music of vocal greats like Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra in his youth. But it took a voice from his generation to make the prospect of a professional singing career seem real and possible. That voice belonged to Frankie Lymon, the African-American soprano from Harlem that found stardom at the age of 14 in 1956 with the Teenagers hit Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

“I listened to Frank Sinatra and Dinah Washington. But they were adults when I was a kid. I couldn’t grasp the idea of singing like them because they were just on another level. But when you’re a kid listening to another kid, you go, ‘I can do that.’ I mean, it’s all still incredible, but at least you can aspire to it.

“Franklie Lymon was one of the greatest singers I ever heard. At his age, he was singing and phrasing like (Swing Era bandleader and vocalist) Billy Eckstine. He was remarkable.”

The links between jazz and pop quickly became a multi-generational - and, in some cases, multi-cultural - journey for the Manhattan Transfer. The group brought lyrics and vocal life to a celebrated jazz fusion instrumental (Weather Report’s Birdland) and crafted pop hits out of everything from vintage doo-wop (a cover of the Ad Libs’ The Boy From New York City) to TV themes (Paul’s Twilight Zone/Twilight Tone). It revived standards (a 1981 a capella version of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square), devoted entire albums to specific jazz styles (1985’s Grammy winning Vocalese and 1997’s Swing) and even diverted into Brazilian music (the 1987 album Brasil) and children’s songs (1994’s The Manhattan Transfer Meet Tubby the Tuba).

So it should follow that the Manhattan Transfer would visit holiday music on 1992’s The Christmas Album and 2005’s An Acapella Christmas. The latter, true to its title, put exclusive emphasis on the intimacy, playfulness and swing of the group’s harmonies. The odd sleigh bells and finger snaps served as the only accompaniment.

“Music is always a challenge,” Hauser said. “I mean, that is certainly true when it comes to performance. But that’s a given. You also have to develop arrangements that are either fresh enough to put a new spin on a tune or, by virtue of the voicings, are able to make it sound so rich that someone might say, ‘This is the one of the best versions of that tune I’ve ever heard.’ No matter how good you sing, if you don’t have a good arrangement, nothing else will make any difference.”

The challenge awaiting the Manhattan Transfer in 2009 will be a recording devoted to the music of jazz keyboardist and composer Chick Corea. Hauser hinted that Corea himself may even make an appearance on the project.

“You know, I never used to think about how far this band would go,” Hauser said. “That just never occurred to me. I was always thinking of it in the now, if you will. It wasn’t until we became really successful that we started wondering how long all this would last.”

The Manhattan Transfer performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, December 20 at the Singletary Center for the Arts. Tickets are $45, $50, $60. Call: (859) 257-4929.

neil young

The years come and the years go, but I still count myself a Neil Young fan.

From his artfully morose albums of the ‘70s to the often infuriating stylistic shuffles his music underwent in the mid ‘80s to the mix of triumphs and curiosities that have peppered his career ever since, I dug it all. From the folk hippie elegance of Comes a Time to the monster feedback of his mightiest barnstorming with Crazy Horse (which, for my money culminated on 1996’s underrated Broken Arrow and its subsequent concert record Year of the Horse), Young has always been a constant for me. Elemental. Cranky. Vital. At age 63, he remains an artist who matters.

Young wrapped up a late fall tour earlier this week with a two night stand at Madison Square Garden in New York. Just as grunge greats Sonic Youth were wooed to open for him in the early ’80s after Ragged Glory revealed his artistic clout to an incoming rock generation, so did Young persuade Wilco to open much of the fall tour, as well as the MSQ shows.

Envious? You bet. The rest of the country gets an arena tour by Young and Wilco (Death Cab for Cutie opened a few dates, as well). We get the promise of another Rascal Flatts date at Rupp Arena in 2009.

Several “amateur” recordings exist over the internet of shows from Young’s fall tour. In listening to an unexpectedly clean sounding chronicle of a Worcester, Massachusetts concert from last weekend, the tune that struck me most was the song that also seemed so electric at the 23^rd Farm Aid broadcast back in September. It wasn’t one of Young’s classics, but a cover of The Beatles’ A Day in the Life.

It was sounded like a typical electric Young excursion: unapologetically scrappy, irrepressibly vital and full of rock ‘n’ roll reverence. It made you want to sing along with that prized, wordless chorus John Lennon patched onto the version The Beatles fashioned for the climax of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 31 years ago. Thousands were doing exactly that in New England with Young’s version last weekend.

For those with a similar, ongoing fascination with Young’s ageless music, here is a link to Nate Chinen’s review of the first MSQ show in yesterday’s New York Times.

members of the bluegrass area jazz ambassadors performing at the lexington opera house on december 10, 2007. photo by phillips mitchell photography.

This is the point in the pre-holiday rush where we can all use a break. The members of the Bluegrass Area Jazz Ambassadors concur.

If seasonal stress has you down with Christmas a mere week away, then take a BAJA break. The 18 member ensemble of community jazz professionals and eager amateurs overseen by artistic director Miles Osland and musical directors Raleigh Dailey and Mark Clodfelter will offer a free holiday performance of, as Osland puts it, “the swingin’ist versions of your holiday favorites” tonight at the Singletary Center for the Arts’ intimate recital hall.

Can’t make the gig? Then invite BAJA over to your place for the holidays. Seriously. The concert will be taped by a three-person camera crew and broadcast, in edited form, on WTVQ-TV on Christmas night.

Santa - who, as we all know, digs bebop big time - really wants you to take in this show.

Seem a pity to disappoint the guy this close to Christmas.

+ The Bluegrass Area Jazz Ambassadors perform at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Singletary Center for the Arts Recital Hall. Admission is free.

+ Tonight’s performance will be broadcast at 11 p.m. Dec. 25 on WTVQ-TV.

tony bennett:

One comes to us as an iconic pop presence, a singer rooted in a jazz tradition though he sounds fully inventive today in the company of small combos and orchestral settings. His modus operandi this time is swing, though his fine new holiday album is by no means married exclusively to it. Still, the resulting music sounds undeniably American.

The other comes from folk stylists largely unknown in North America that command a Christmas sound of another time and place. By mixing traditional carols, comparatively contemporary songs and narratives that speak both to the traditions of the season as well as to what we might hope to learn from them as we face the new year, a distinctly British - almost Dickensian - air emerges.

In the American corner, is the great Tony Bennett, who has taken stabs at holiday music before. But A Swingin’ Christmas succeeds without the usual celeb-heavy guest list of duet partners invariably unsuited or unqualified to match musical wits with the great Bennett. Instead, we hear the singer’s boundless holiday spirit wrapped up in the swing of the season with 13 horns from the Count Basie Orchestra cheering him on during the album opening I’ll Be Home for Christmas.

There is a spot of age in Bennett’s singing here (at 82, he’s entitled) that blemishes ever so slightly his vocal tone. But if anything, that only adds to the sort of unforced familial feel of the more swing-savvy moments of A Swingin’ Christmas. In fact, the cover portrait says it all about the collaboration, with Bennett and the Basie boys gathered around the dinner table as if they were at a board meeting. But there’s one difference: everybody is grinning to beat the band. Maybe even their own.

Fine as the brassy holiday feast sounds, Bennett is even more arresting when he lets the brass takes a breather. A quartet led by pianist Monty Alexander, who all but channels Basie’s spry piano sound here, provides a more subtle joy on Silver Bells. The music is pared down even further for O Christmas Tree, which provides the light, solo piano of Lee Musiker as Bennett’s only accompaniment. The orchestra charge is a blast, but nothing warms up a room like Bennett relishing the company of a small band setting.

the albion christmas band:

The Albion Christmas Band is the product of Ashley Hutchings, the bassist, singer and folk revivalist who formed the groundbreaking Fairport Convention 41 years ago.

Snow on Snow continues a sound formulated over two previous Albion holiday albums. It integrates British folk-dance instrumentation (specifically, melodeon, fiddle and percussive morris dance melodies accented by bells), traditional folk tunes with a seasonal air (as in the Cherry Tree Carol, which the Albions pump up into a polka) and more modern fare (James Taylor’s Frozen Man, reprised by longtime Fairport-er Simon Nicol, who recorded with it the group in the ‘90s). While the production is a touch safe and slick at times, the old world charm of Snow on Snow is bounteous.

Hutchings sobers things up, though, with a reading of the W.H. Auden poem Well, So That is That. It’s a somewhat scolding narrative that takes us all task: “Once again, as in previous years, we have seen the actual vision and have failed to do more that entertain it as an agreeable possibility.” Christmas cheer colored by humility. Now there’s a switch.

university of kentucky graduate and current wilco drummer glenn kotche recently performed with the kronos quartet in new york.

One tme Lexingtonian and University of Kentucky graduate Glenn Kotche has been a not-so-little drummer boy this holiday season. With his mainstay band, Chicago’s Wilco, Kotche recently opened a series of shows for the ageless Neil Young. A mere two days before a Wilco/Young performance in Detroit, the drummer/percussionist (this time without the Wilco brigade) teamed with the famed Bay Area string innovators of the Kronos Quartet at New York’s Zankel Hall to show off his composition Anomaly.

The adventures will extend into 2009. In early January, Kotche and several Wilco pals - including group leader Jeff Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt and guitarist/keyboardist Pat Sansone - will head to New Zealand to collabortate on a new 7 Worlds Collide album with Crowded House headmaster Neil Finn.

And somewhere in and around all that will be work on a new Wilco album.

Sadly, none of the these projects wil put Kotche back on Lexington soil anytime soon. In the meantime, check out this New York Times review of Kotche’s performance with Kronos along with a few more details on 7 Worlds Collide.

hugh hopper

We send supportive and positive thoughts over the Atlantic this weekend. Convening at London’s 100 Club on Sunday will be collaborators, co-horts and musical friends playing a benefit concert honoring bass guitarist Hugh Hopper.

A signature member of the most influential lineups of Soft Machine, Hopper has long provided a happy meeting ground for prog, free jazz, fusion and psychedelia within his music. Since June, he has also been battling leukemia.

As jumping on a plane overseas for the Sunday benefit isn’t exactly a luxury even his most devout fans can afford, we instead suggest a spin or two of Hopper’s recordings this weekend in his honor.

Not familiar with Hopper? Lots of folks aren’t. Here are a few essential albums:

+ Soft Machine: Third (1970) The defining record by the classic early ‘70s Softs lineup with Hopper’s monstrous “fuzz bass” sound rounding out the band’s ensemble drive.

+ Hugh Hopper: Monster Band (1978): A tough one to find, but well worth a search. The half studio/half live recording compiles wonderfully organic sessions from 1973-74.

+ Soft Mountain: Soft Mountain (2007): A live 2003 recording of two extensive improvs between Hopper and saxophonist/one time Soft Machine mate Elton Dean (who died in 2006) along with a keyboardist and drummer from Japan.

+Hugh Hopper: Numero D’Vol (2007): Another brilliant return to quartet form with the spirit of Dean channeled by Simon Picard. Hopper colors spaced out ambience, jazz jams and lean, meditative grooves.

Hopper’s spirits and outlook seem high as his lengthy convalescence continues. In a late November posting on his website, the bassist said:

“Hospital says I’m clear of bad cells. Thanks to everyone who has sent healing vibes, best wishes, postcards from all around the world, cash. I’m still getting my strength back slowly. But it’s coming…”

More reflective of Hopper’s animated spirit was this Nov. 15 posting/comment regarding his benefit concert’s performance roster, which includes Soft Machine alumni John Etheridge, John Marshall and Roy Babbington: “Almost worth getting leukemia to be able to assemble a line-up like that.”

ben sollee performing last night at the dame. photo by rich copley, herald-leader staff.

At various times during his homecoming concert last night at The Dame, Ben Sollee allowed the cello to become a brittle melodic tool built for pop, a vehicle for jawbone-flavored country and a playground for keenly agitated string-driven funk. And yes, there were moments - brief ones, like the arpeggios that bloomed into the show opening blues-soul romp How to See the Sun Rise - that referenced classical traditions.

Suggestions of chamber music stopped there, however. Sollee employed cello during the performance the way most singer-songwriters might use acoustic guitar. It serviced the heady songs, like Panning for God, that were inhabited by weary gods and even wearier mortals. But Sollee also took full advantage of the instrument’s orchestral abilities even when the lyrical framework of his songs became a bit thin.

In some instances, he would tighten the cello’s sound around the neck during improvisations to give the instrument the deeper echo of a double bass. During others, most notably Bury Me With My Car, the sound loosened to offer the country flexibility (and fierceness) of a fiddle tune.

Sollee has been playing predominantly solo cello concerts this fall. Last night, however, marked only the second time he has played in a trio setting with Lexington guitarist Justin Craig (of The Scourge of the Sea and These United States) and drummer Jon Moore (from Louisville’s Chemic). Among other neat tricks, Craig favored electric slide ambience during A Few Honest Words, I Can’t and several other tunes that created a curious harmony with the cello.

Last night’s repertoire favored most of Sollee’s Learning to Bend album and both songs from his even newer EP disc, Something Worth Keeping. But there were also a few intriguing covers that included works by Gillian Welch (a revivalistic Everything is Free), Gnarls Barkley (what else? - the mega hit Crazy, where the chorus unfurled into artful screams) and Sam Cooke (a funkified A Change is Gonna Come).

The highlight was saved for last when whisper-quiet show opener Daniel Martin Moore finally broke the sound barrier for the snakehandling spiritualism of Rattlesnake Gospel. But when the tune morphed into Tom Waits’ Chocolate Jesus to end the concert, the tired gods that figured so prominently in Sollee’s own songs cast off their robes and surrendered to the boogie supreme.