Mami Horie -- I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

 

Happy Monday! And yes Virginia, there is snow on the ground right now and areas north of us will be getting pounded with a lot of the white stuff starting from this afternoon, so those odds of a White Christmas have gotten a lot better. Just hope that the drive up north to the lodges and cottages won't be too arduous.

Back in October, "Holly Jolly X'masu" highlighted jazz singer Mami Horie's（堀江真美）2010 album “The Swingin’ Christmas" which I found to be a delightful collection of the standards. If you have a chance, have a listen to Scott's review of the entire album since he goes into the background of Horie's history as a singer. Interestingly enough, I'd forgotten that Horie already has had a presence on KKP through a gushy City Pop song that she provided all the way back in 1979, "Loving You"; the track was part of the "Light Mellow" compilation CDs.

After listening to "The Swingin' Christmas", I immediately searched for anything of the album on YouTube, and I was soon rewarded with the presence of the first track, Horie's rendition of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" which has had the word mommy strangely misspelled as "mammy", maybe as a portmanteau of Mami and mommy. But that aside, Scott said it best when he refers to Horie's version as one of the better takes on the old Xmas song and describes it as a cute and playful tribute. I can say that it does sound like Mami was at a gorgeous Xmas party of friends and she suddenly decided to sing it with a trio of instrumentalists in the living room. Compare this version with the Big Band Swing take on "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" by fellow jazz chanteuse Yasuko Agawa（阿川泰子）who I covered a few weeks ago after listening to her cover on "Holly Jolly X'masu" as well.

Scott mentions it in the podcast and I've mentioned a little bit of it in "Loving You" but just when Horie was about to get her big break in the music business, she and a music publishing company had a dispute in the early 1980s which unfortunately got her blackballed in Japan for several years. However, it seems as if her redemption began in the 1990s and her career has been in fine fettle for the past few decades. In fact, according to the Casio website, a voice training book that she published has become a bible for singers and in recent years, she has even become a tourism ambassador for her native Kochi Prefecture.