by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago, while Charles was at work, I watched the
first musical Christmas special of the year, NBC’s Christmas in Rockefeller
Center. (The conjunction I would have
expected there was “at,” but they went with “in.”) The fact that it isn’t even
December yet and the networks are already trotting out the stars to sing
Christmas songs is itself a sign of the time and an indication of how little
respite we get from all the holidays, which more or less flow into each other
like a raging stream. The show was two hours long — most of the previous Christmas
in Rockefeller Center shows have been just
one hour — and featured a varied cast of musical acts actually surprisingly sounding quite
a bit more similar than one would think given how many genres were represented. The best singing all night was
done — no surprise — by Tony Bennett and Diana Krall, who just issued a duet
album and who were represented
here by “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song.”
Bennett’s voice (at age 91!) is hardly what it was when he made his
breakthrough records in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but it’s still a surprisingly
musical instrument — and he’s weathered the years better than the much younger
Krall, whose voice has lost the flexibility it had on her early Verve recordings
of jazz material. (I did resent
when the show’s announcers claimed Bennett as a New Yorker; he was born in the
same city I was, the one celebrated in the biggest hit he ever had: San
Francisco.) What surprised me is how much the swing style of Bennett and Krall
carried over to some of the other performers, including Brett Eldredge and
Martina McBride, who are usually considered country singers. Part of that may
be that the singers who didn’t bring touring bands of their own were backed by
the Radio City Music Hall ensemble, an old-style big swing band, but it was
amazing to hear Eldredge follow Tony Bennett (he did “Sleigh Ride” right after
the Bennett/Krall “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and an original called “Glow”
right after the Bennett/Krall “The Christmas Song”) and swing almost as hard.
The show began with John Legend doing a nice but bland song called “What
Christmas Means to Me” — Legend’s voice is pretty but dull (if I really wanted to dismiss him I’d call him the Lionel Richie
of our time) and it’s hard to believe that he’s achieved the quadrifecta of
show-biz awards: Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Grammy. He sounded better later on doing “Have Yourself a Merry Little
Christmas,” on which he sang and
played piano, though Judy Garland remains untouchable in this song. Pentatonix,
the a cappella group that annoys
me with their continued use of drum-machine sounds (at first I thought they
were “cheating” on the a cappella
concept by using a real drum machine, but later I learned it was just one or
more of the Pentatonickers supplying those percussion effects vocally), did
“It’s Beginning to Look Like Christmas” towards the beginning of the show and
“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” towards the end, and they were O.K. but I still want them to lose the drum machine even if that
means they’d have to change their name to Quadratonix. A young country diva named Kellie Pickler did an O.K. version of “Santa
Baby” that compared to Eartha Kitt’s about the way Britney Spears compares to
Madonna, but later she did “Joy to the World” with a Black gospel choir behind
her and acquitted herself a good deal better. Rocker Rob Thomas did an original
of his called “A New York Christmas” which he apparently wrote right after 9/11
as an inspirational anthem to lift up the city’s spirits. Martina McBride did
“Winter Wonderland” more or less along the lines of Aretha Franklin’s bizarre
early-1960’s version for Columbia, and later covered the Andy Williams “Happy
Holidays/It’s the Holiday Season” medley in nice style — she didn’t swing quite
as hard as her “country” colleague Brett Eldredge but she still got into the
jazz spirit. A young Black would-be R&B diva named Ella Mai (I found myself oddly resenting that
she’s copped two-thirds of the name of the great 1940’s singer Ella Mae Morse,
a white woman who could legitimately claim to have been the first white female
rocker) did the Motown song “This Christmas” and “Silent Night,” and would be
good if she’d stop overdoing the “soul” effects — it seems she can’t sing a
sustained high note without “worrying” and ornamenting it to death.
The show
also featured an excerpt from the New York City Ballet’s production of The
Nutcracker as an obvious promo for Disney’s
new movie The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (what is this, The Tales of Hoffmann meets The Lord of the Rings?) and a truly atrocious act from America’s
Got Talent winner Darci Lynne, who turned
out to be a ventriloquist whose dummy, “Petunia,” is a giant stuffed rabbit.
(I’m not making this up, you know!) Her appearance confirmed my nickname for
the America’s Got Talent show: America’s
Got a Lot of People Willing to Make Themselves Look Ridiculous to Get on
Television. The big feature at the end was
a guest appearance by Diana Ross, whose face looks like she’s had a lot of
“work” done and whose hair looks like someone just cooked a plate of jet-black
spaghetti noodles and hasn’t put the sauce on yet (so that’s where Michael Jackson got that look!). She did a
medley of “Somewhere at Christmas,” “Sleigh Ride,” Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful
Christmastime,” “Jingle Bells” and “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,”
and followed that with a nostalgic original called “When I Think of Home.” I’ve
never thought that much of Diana
Ross’s voice, especially post-Supremes — “rougher” woman singers like Aretha
Franklin and her just as great “Queen of Soul” predecessor, Dinah Washington,
are more my taste in Black soul divas — but it’s held up
surprisingly well and, all the diva
bitchiness about her private life that’s been reported over the years, she’s
still a class act.
