JCC The JCC mixtape, Part I (archived - playlist on page 1)

We Three Kings: The first part I can remember in a Christmas play is one of the Three Wisemen. My next was King Herod. I have so many fond memories of playing with friends before and after rehearsal. Anyway Both were part of the same scene. There were very few spoken lines, suiting our age and experience. Instead, there was a lot miming to musical accompaniment. The song for both these characters was We Three Kings. In any case, it has left me with a certain fondness for this song, all the way until I came across this arrangement. Which, actually, was during the peak period of the JCC Hat, which was a very fond time for me. I haven't kept up with social media but I do miss talking to you all on a daily basis. Even, harpuah, Whitey, OZK, Jello. It was good interacting so frequently and intensely, even when we didn't have much in common. On this night in particular Epsy had opened some thread about pitching your own movie, and I was trying to get people behind a Will Smith ancient history epic with this as the theme song. Rogue Ten just had this wonderful, over top rant in reaction that makes me smile to this day. I absolutely think we still have similar moments of comity here now--like Vivec with the Joe Tex reference above--but I love these days bygone. They weren't better, but they certainly weren't worse.

Old Country Stomp: Two points. This is actually my favorite solution to writer's block. Whenever I'm stuck, I throw this on and the words start to flow. I'll also say that this just has a lot going on. In the first place, it is another song about returning to someplace more familiar, which together with Coming Home is apparently a theme of mine. The airy/reedy sound of his pan pipes (or whatever they are?) remind of the recorder I never got very good at it but I learned at least a few songs. I think the thing for me is that it was so effortful, and thus rewarding even if not very skilled. So every time I hear this, I have that same feeling of contingency about whether it can be maintained or not. These ease and complexity of his melody is all the easier appreciated for it. But I also feel like there are multiple tempos to key in on in the song? I am rambling a lot but there are layers to the song and different parts I enjoy about each. This takes time, but once it grows on you it never shakes loose.

 

put this mix on just now for Christmas morning, Merry Christmas all!

 

Christmas Songs: Alright, this may be the last one I get to before my list gets taken down. A lot of you know I love Christmas, and I think I've spoken about the holiday's meaning to me before. Today I'll add an additional wrinkle. My first time really, substantively being away from home was on the border between Ohio and Kentucky. It had been well over a month at that point, and it was just starting to sink how far I was away from everyone I knew. I had some work acquaintances but no fast friends yet. I didn't know the town. I was sad.

As I cast about for something to do, I happened on Nat King Cole on Youtube. Playing a Christmas song. I clicked on a whim, but even the first notes swept me up in memories of past holidays and loved ones. It was genuinely joyous for me, in the ways the holidays always were. In a different way than when I had moved out initially, it was a moment of learning to live with myself. To actively find happiness. That day I embraced the fact that Christmas made me happy, and stopped caring that it was actually only early October. I was just trying to do what has meaning for me. It's been years since then. I figured out a local life and friends. I've moved on quite a ways too--several times--in terms of location, job, and life experience. But I don't know that Christmas has ever stopped.

 

I really liked the playlist Wocky. Nat King Cole was my singing teacher's favorite singer, so you immediately get quality points. And the mood runs throughout, which makes the playlist a superior alternative to the standard pap we're fed on the radio during Christmas.

However.

It got off to a bad start for me.

I thought "Ahh... Finally someone is taping Aretha. Finally I can relax and hang back and get carried away in a way I know and like." Not so! You've given us one of Aretha's, let's say, lesser recordings. It sounds like crap - like she's singing in a toilet - and she just does her basic tricks with the vocals, runs off her scales, hardly inspired. That was a start that took me a while to get over. It took me Nat King Cole to get over it. I had to go back and listen to Mahalia without listening to Aretha first because Aretha would ruin it for Mahalia.

Ken voted for it. Might not have had the same experience.

 

Yes, that track was much more about the song than the artist, or her specific quality in it. I remember my first time trying to sing it in choir, I saw the notation "Refrain" meaning "sing the refrain" but we all mistook the word as part of the lyrics and sang it. Beyond that, I feel like the heart of that song is just letting it rip when you get to the Gloria part. An artist like Aretha Franklin of Mariah Carey that's ready to dish out some huge vocal runs meets the momnet perfectly. But certainly she has much better music, I'll concede.

 

Ken likes it

 

I'd like to take myself off the list.

Everybody below me, I guess that means you move up a spot.

 

As we wait for heels to put on his Christmas slippers and check my PMs so we can wrap up Wocky's list - here is the list of JCCer Christmas songs!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1EgplsxBaMozFaUkuKOfeQ?si=yE1awZDjSVixyGIeAbPyhA

1. Barenaked Ladies – Eli’s Lament
by Darth Duck
I thought long and hard about which Canadian song to bring to this list (because once you've started a bit you have to see it through). "Jesous Ahatonhia/The Huron Carol" was my first choice, being the first Canadian Christmas song but it's super Jesus-y and **** that.

"Elf's Lament" came up on the Christmas playlist I was listening to, and I love the Barenaked Ladies, and I think this silly little song about the beginnings of an Elf labour movement is a lot of fun. And Michael Bublé is tolerable in this one.


2. Count Basie Orchestra - Good Swing Wenceslas
by Ramza
“Good King Wenceslas” has been my favorite Christmas carol for a long time, possibly just out of a mild sense of contrarianism in that it’s technically a St. Stephen’s Day carol but nobody pays attention to that detail. This made it a natural pick for my sole representative track, especially given it has now taken on a kind of amusing multi-layered nuance given the whole “living in Prague” thing despite the actual lyrics being written by an English Anglican priest (Wait, do I only like this carol because I was raised Episcopal? That’d be a twist.) and my boss giving me an odd look the one time I brought the song up.

This left two possible choices as far as I was concerned - an extremely straightforward recording by The Irish Rovers, or this jazz-y reworking by the Count Basie Orchestra. Ultimately, it again came down to this being a representative track - there is not a lot of great instrumental jazz based on Christmas carols, being as it is the domain of Wynton Marsalis, whom some name the Scourge of Carpathia, but Scotty Barnhard’s refined trumpet admirably guides the group through an entire album of exactly that. It also adds to the sort of double meaning of the selection, as I’ve lately been obsessed with the first (and probably only) release of the Sun Ra Arkestra since Sun Ra resumed his astral travels, and this is in the same vein of a talented ensemble carrying on the legacy of a great musician.

These double meanings ultimately give this track a forest of signifiers, all of which you should ignore in favor of just enjoying the vibe while drinking something pleasant.


Wham – Last Christmas
by Coruscant
No anecdote.


Angela Lansbury – We Need A Little Christmas
by Ava G
The anecdote is: https://ava-gardner-museum.myshopify.com/collections/collectibles/products/corgi-puppy


Robbie Williams – Can’t Stop Christmas
by Obi Anne
I had a very hard time to choose just one, but then I heard this and I felt that this is such a good sum up of this year's Christmas. I heard it on the radion first time when I had been doing my last Christmas shopping, and it actually cheered me up a lot, and that will be needed this Christmas.


Ariel Ramirez - Navidad Nuestra 4: Los Pastores
by Ken
My wife performed this once when she sang in a choir.


The Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping
by blackmyron
I kinda already blew my story in the thread - when I worked retail around Christmas, there would usually be an intolerable loop of Xmas standards that was broken up by one or two songs that didn't get on my nerves. This song was a regular, and probably the most "Eighties" of any 80s Xmas song.

Except "Christmas in Hollis" by Run DMC, but I figure someone has to pick that.


LCD Soundsystem - Christmas Will Break Your Heart
by epic
its hard to write a christmas anecdote. basically i wanted to choose something indie that wasn't a typical christmas song, and it was between this, sufjan stevens and julian casablancas. and i already chose sufjan in my other mix. and more to the point, i really love this song as a song, never mind it being christmas related. lcd sound system are generally freaking awesome, and this is a reminder that christmas can actually be a depressing time for a lot of people who may not have friends and family close by. and also a reminder for us that do, to be thankful for it. merry christmas!


Donny Hathaway – This Christmas
by heels
when i was in high school and college, every summer and winter break i worked in the same grungy restaurant. xmas eve was the busiest day of the year, and the only available shift was open to close - for reasons unknown, i loved it and always asked to work that day. 12+ hours of slinging sandwiches and then scrubbing floors, all while the same 10-15 songs played over and over - this was the first song on the playlist, and hearing the familiar first 15 seconds of it takes me back to those wonderful times.


Celtic Woman – O Holy Night
by Autumnlight91
No anecdote.


Sinéad O’Connor – Silent Night
by Watto
Never liked Sinéad. Loudmouth. Weirdo. Angry psycho music.

Then one night, Christmas 1994, I was with a beautiful woman in her house next to a huge medieval Catholic church. The room was lit by candlelight. Outside, muffled noises. I forgot the girl’s name! But I’ll never forget the moment.

She put this on, and now I love Sinéad.


Gord Downie - Christmastime In Toronto
by Pymparticles
This isn’t a true Christmas song so much as Gord Downie’s love/hate letter to Toronto at its coldest and most stressed out, and really… what says “Christmas” more than cold weather, stress, and mixed feelings? The song is catchy as hell, it’s fun to belt out in the car, and it has this absolutely stellar verse, with the quoted bits being closely lifted from the short story “The Wife” by Anton Chekhov.

With your dark epiphanies, your true lines and smoke

Your glistening rails and streetcars all aglow

“Always the wind and the persistent snow

Gets into your eyes and your mouth and every fold of your coat”

And everyone hates you, but they don't know what I know

Besides it's Christmastime, Christmastime in Toronto


Lou Monte - Dominick The Donkey
by xblackout
For a period of time, I worked in a medical billing office with my mom & a handful of other women. One year around Christmas, we heard this song on the radio. Most of us had never heard it before & were instantly obsessed with the silliness of a song about a Christmas donkey & all of the "hee-haw"ing. My mom & I later played it for my sister who I think maybe hates it now because we would since it at her & she HATES us singing at her. I think she finds it embarrassing? Anyway, it became Christmas tradition to sing this at my sister & have her get unreasonably upset with me. This year has been pretty awful for my family & it's my first year being apart from them for Christmas, so getting to call my sister & obnoxiously sing Dominick the Donkey at her is something that I very much look forward to & I think she'll enjoy it for once.


Jonathan Coulton - Chiron Beta Prime
by solojones
This song wonderfully displays how Christmas will be spent in the future: on a mining colony run by robot overlords... I mean protectors.


The Pogues & Kirsty McColl – Fairytale Of New York
by Diggy
I didn’t know that Shane MacGowan of the Pogues was somewhat English and attended Westminster public school. His singing voice is Irish and I assumed he was all the way Irish. But he was born in Kent, he had Irish parents and was raised in Ireland before before sent back to England to go to boarding school.

Poll will be up shortly. Hopefully.

 

I thought a stuffed corgi would cheer you up 'cuz I didn't have an anecdote.

Um. The song is sung by the Murder, She Wrote lady. Which I remember playing in the background when I was a kid. Never watched a single episode. But Angela Lansbury is lovely and we should at least appreciate Mrs. Potts.

And this year... well, we could use a little holiday cheer and togetherness.

 

I agree. But Diggy had already taken it so we all had to pick something else.

Maybe a bit too well-known though?

I spent one Christmas in Dublin, in 2002, and it was wonderful to see everybody in the pub singing along to the tune. From little children to old grannies, "you're a bum, you're a punk, you're an old slut on junk".

 

Fairytale winning would be the most obvious of all the obvious winners in any mix so far. We can do better than that!

 

@PymParticles **** yeah Gord!

 

Dominic the Donkey or gtfo!

 

ignorant too

 

Hang on - where's "I believe in Father Christmas" by Greg Lake?

 

Whamageddon should have continued through the rest of December

YOU RUINED MY EVIL PLAN, PUNK

edit: eh **** it I’ll just blame Wocky

 

No one chose "Christmas in Hollis"?

But it was featured in the opening of Die Hard! (Which I saw for the first time with friends - via Zoom - a few days ago)

 

~votes Christmas Wrapping~

I would've voted Good Swing Wenceslas or Can't Stop Christmas, but I wanted my vote to matter.