I was looking a back at my mishmash archive of recorded practice notes and found something that reminded me of where my interest in jazz standards got started.
A few years ago I played with a county band whose lead singer loved doing an annual Christmas show. (This was a new idea for me at the time.) He’d bring well-chosen Christmas songs to our rehearsals – material I’d never heard. One of these was Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heuse’s The Secret of Christmas – one that’s still rarely covered by anyone. And I loved it because it made me feel like we’d really stepped into playing something other than just country music.
More than just three or four chords the lead sheets he payed for online and I took home and studied the chord structure for how my pedal steel could fit in. And recored it to GarageBand (putting together all the backup parts from scratch). And even though the band preformed it as a vocal song I put together my own together study track – hitting the intro, verse, chorus and ending one time each.
And in doing my iTunes research of how it’s been arranged in the past I drew a lot from Ella Fitzgerald’s version from what I found later to be her Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas album. Especially the ending (even though now my approach makes me cringe a bit.)
It’s not perfect but looking back I can see how this was a pivotal moment in my interest and direction. It wasn’t overnight but I did pursue a lot of swing and jazz material later.
And I also began appreciating more obscure Christmas music – perhaps the best takeaway for me at the time.
Woodshed Steel 