Percy Faith/Lambert, Hendricks & Ross -- Deck the Halls

 

Well, for the fourth year in a row, "Kayo Kyoku Plus" has managed to reach 1000 articles in a year. I'm pretty sure that we won't be breaking the 1,103-article record that we achieved last year but that's OK. There's no need to push things anymore. Anyways, this year's 1000th article will be dedicated to the weekly Reminiscings of Youth and also we'll be covering Christmas again as we approach December 25th. 

Let's take a look at a Yuletide classic that is literally centuries old. "Deck the Halls" goes all the way back to the 16th century to a Welsh melody when it was a winter carol known as "Nos Galan". The English lyrics were written by Thomas Oliphant back in 1862. My first time with "Deck the Halls" was back probably in kindergarten in the early 1970s when my teacher sang it and then taught it to us moppets.

Then, not too long after, my family got that Ronco album which was making the rounds on TV commercials, "A Christmas Gift", with one of the tracks being "Deck the Halls" as performed by Percy Faith and his orchestra. Faith already has representation on the blog for being the original provider of "Theme from a Summer Place" which was covered by AOR duo The Milky Way in 1979. However, Faith tackles his rendition of "Deck the Halls" with gusto as it sounds like something from a King Arthur movie soundtrack as he and his Knights of the Round Table go forth to celebrate Christmas. Apparently, this version first appeared in 1954.

Of course, there have been tons of renditions of "Deck the Halls" over the years, but one of the most unusual covers was by the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross in 1962. Now, I've heard of Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross as the pioneers of vocalese which involves placing nimbly-delivered words and phrases within the usual improvised arrangement of jazz instruments, replacing those instruments. The Manhattan Transfer also picked up on the hip lingo, even coming up with their 1985 album "Vocalese".

Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' version was something that I found in a Xmas jazz compilation while I was living in Japan, and it was actually titled "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie". Before you could say Weird Al Yankovic, I could tell from the title and the intro that this was going to be a wacky parody of the original "Deck the Halls". I had assumed all these years that Boston Charlie was some near-lethal form of hooch that boozehounds could get in the various dives and saloons in the not-so-nice areas of town but it was actually just a play on the title. However, that fade-in intro where the three start shrieking the chorus in improbable harmony has always had me imagining the sots stumbling around at night trying to get into that hole in the wall.

Then, everything gets set right with a snappy drum and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross plow into the song with some major scatting while a piano player nimbly skates over the keys like a Gold Medal-winning figure skater. But just before the three end up taking us listeners to something far more respectable, we get thrown back into the back alley as Boston Charlie does its thing and the trio shriek their way off into the darkness. So, "Deck Us All" is more scat than vocalese but below you can see them handle the latter.

So, what were some of the big Japanese hits coming out in 1962? I've got three right here.

Jerry Fujio -- Tooku e Ikitai （遠くへ行きたい）

Dark Ducks -- Yama Otoko no Uta（山男の歌）

Yoshio Tabata -- Shima Sodachi (島育ち)

The Milky Way -- Natsu no Hi no Koi （夏の日の恋）

Anyone who has reached my age must have heard the above song "Theme From A Summer Place" at least a few times through television or movies (including the titular 1959 film itself). Not only was the Percy Faith version from 1960 a smash hit on Billboard (stayed at No. 1 for 9 straight weeks), it has been used in a number of other movies and TV shows in the decades since, including one key scene from "National Lampoon's Animal House".

Little did I know that "Theme From A Summer Place" would even be adapted into a mellow Japanese AOR piece. But that's what happened when the band The Milky Way spearheaded by Makoto Matsushita（松下誠）and Kazuo Nobuta（信田一男）concocted their album "Summertime Love Song" in 1979. I already wrote about the album in general several months ago and knew that most of the songs were breezy covers of AOR tunes, but hadn't known about this first track since it was titled in Japanese as "Natsu no Hi no Koi" (Summer Day Love); by the way, it's the first track.

I was accustomed to hearing Japanese covers of American standards from the 1950s and 1960s being released in those same two decades, but I guess this might be the first time hearing something like this made at the tail end of the 1970s. The somewhat dated kitschiness of the original (due to it being used in everything from the aforementioned "Animal House" to the 1989 "Batman" to the 2001 "Ocean's Eleven") has been replaced by a rather smooth sheen here, although admittedly for those who don't like AOR/Smooth Jazz/Yacht Rock, perhaps the arrangement might also be considered a bit kitschy. Hey, I'm fine with it.