by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
stayed in and watched TV, including the Jeopardy! episode and some other shows that were on NBC.
There was the annual Christmas at Rockefeller Center mini-extravaganza that combined an all-star
concert with the famous tree lighting — the tree isn’t that big a deal but the
concert was a lot of fun even though some of the performers weren’t necessarily
the ones I would have picked. The show opened with a women’s chorus singing a
rather sappy version of “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” offered in honor of the
San Bernardino shooting victims (though I presume the program had long since
been determined when that event happened) but got a lot better as it proceeded.
First Michael Bublé came on and did “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like
Christmas” — apparently from a Christmas CD he just released specifically
focused on Christmas songs written for holiday-themed movies — his isn’t a great voice but it’s still nice to hear him and think
the standard repertoire has a future and there are going to be people still around to sing it once
Tony Bennett croaks.
Then a sensationally successful guy named Andy Grammer
(I’d never heard of him before, but he is cute!) did a version of “The Little Drummer Boy” that at first appalled
me, less because of him than the din going on behind him. “It’s supposed to be
the little drummer boy, not the
little drum machine!” I joked — but as the song progressed I started to get
into the infectious spirit of his rendition even though I’d have preferred him
to have done it with a flesh-and-blood drummer. Afterwards they brought in the
aging James Taylor — wearing a ball cap to hide the pate the top of his head
has become (I’m sure a lot of the people who bought Sweet Baby James 45 years ago were at least initially attracted to
the album because of that magnificent head of hair on the cover, and so to see
him develop male-pattern baldness big-time was more of a shock than it should
have been) — to do “Winter Wonderland” with Chris Botti playing some
Miles-esque trumpet behind him. Then The Band Perry, one of my favorite current
bands — mainly due to the incredibly soulful and infectious voice of lead
singer Kim Perry rather than the two brothers who play instruments and do
backing vocals behind her decently but unspectacularly — tore into “Santa Claus
Is Coming to Town” (using a tastefully updated version of the Phil Spector/Jack
Nitzsche arrangement that was also what Bruce Springsteen covered), and they
were followed by what was billed as a modern-day a cappella group called Pentatonix. I wish they had done their song, “Joy to the World,” totally a
cappella instead of backing
themselves with yet another one of those infernal drum machines, but aside from
that noise in the background it was a quite capable rendition, featuring yet
another soulful blonde white woman singer who was giving Kim Perry a surprising
run for her money.
Afterwards Sting came on with a sort of neo-folk ensemble
doing a song I hadn’t heard called “Soul Cake” (though with enough of his
trademarks it’s almost certainly an original) — at first I misheard the
announcement and thought Chris Botti was playing on it, too, but the secondary
voice turned out to be a violin instead of a trumpet, and a quite capably
played Irish folk-fiddle style violin at that. Then the announcers said that
Carly Rae Jepsen was about to come on and sing “the Wham! classic, ‘Last
Christmas’” — “Wham!” and “classic” are two words I never thought I’d hear in
the same sentence, but the song itself was fun and nice to hear. After that
Andrea Bocelli did “Adeste Fidelis” (we know it as “O Come, All Ye Faithful,”
but Bocelli sang it in the original Latin), after an unctuous announcer had
informed us that Bocelli had sold 100 million records, more than any other classical
singer in history (more than Pavarotti? Somehow I rather doubt it!). Bocelli
has a nice voice, and of course the fact that he’s blind has probably built up
a lot of sympathy for him among the people who’ve bought some of those 100
million records, but I can’t help thinking of Willie Johnson, Willie McTell,
Art Tatum, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, José
Feliciano and all the other musicians who’ve shared Bocelli’s blindness but not
his blandness! Then the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes came on with a dance
routine to a song called “Let Christmas Shine,” and after that, in yet another tie-in to NBC’s promised live
telecast of the musical The Wiz tonight, Mary J. Blige, who’s playing the Wicked Witch in their
production, came out and did a quite good soul version of “Have Yourself a
Merry Little Christmas.” Very clever, these hypesters at NBC: have a major star
who’s going to be in your production of The Wiz sing a song originally written for Judy Garland!
