Duke Ellington & His Orchestra -- Jingle Bells

 

Songwriter James Lord Pierpont (1822–1893) would probably be marveling right now at how ubiquitous and representative of Christmas his ultimate creation, "Jingle Bells" (1857) has become. Perhaps it may not be everyone's favourite Xmas song but it's most likely the most famous and one of the oldest Yuletide tunes on Earth.

I'm sure that "Jingle Bells" was already insinuating itself into my baby system a couple of months following my entry into the world via radio and TV, but one of the first times that I can remember Pierpont's magnum opus is through the piano scene featuring wunderkind Schroeder and crabby Lucy Van Pelt in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (in the reruns). It was truly a technological marvel how Schroeder could change his instrument from grand piano to organ to toy piano. Maybe this was the inspiration for instruments like the synclavier.😉

From Ebay

To sidetrack slightly, it looks like a whole bunch of families fell under the sway of the television commercial for Ronco's "A Christmas Gift" in 1973 since I've been reading on YouTube how they ended up buying the compilation of Xmas classics. Our family was no exception and I still play it on the TEAC. It's just too bad that I can't find the original ad on YouTube.

And yep, my album can still open up to reveal that Christmas scene. In any case, I've already included one of the tracks from "A Christmas Gift" onto the blog, and that is Tony Bennett's scintillating take on "Santa Claus is Coming to Town". I only noticed a few hours ago that though I wrote it last year at the beginning of KKP's Xmas season, I'd forgotten to include Bennett's name in the Labels. Gave myself a Gibbs slap for that.

Track 2 of Side B is today's special Christmas ROY song. I'll be honest with you, though, and say that when I first heard jazz legend Duke Ellington & His Orchestra's version of "Jingle Bells", I wasn't sure what to make of it. Being less than ten years old at the time, I couldn't be expected to understand the call-and-response that often occurred within a swing jazz orchestra back in the day or the fact that improvisation was an obligation in jazz when handling an established song. But at the time, my thought was that it was "Jingle Bells" and it wasn't "Jingle Bells".

Fortunately, I did get into jazz deeply enough so that I even read into the history and mechanics behind one of America's great innovations, and understood what Ellington and his band were doing here. Now, it's very much a swinging delight which has become my favourite version of "Jingle Bells", thanks to the arrangement of the Duke's son, Mercer Ellington. It was originally recorded for the compilation "Jingle Bell Jazz" album from October 1962.

Thinking it is too difficult to track down which songs from Japan were coming out in that particular month, I'm going back to the Japan Record Awards for 1962. I've already picked some songs from that group when I did a ROY on Norman & Barry's James Bond theme, but there are a few more choices.

Best New Artist: Saburo Kitajima -- Namidabune (なみだ船)

Best Composer: Hachidai Nakamura for Jerry Fujio -- Tooku e Ikitai （遠くへ行きたい）

Special Award: Hideo Murata -- Osho (王将)