Christmas does not always find us in the best of moods. Indeed, most of the time we get there tired, sad and a little bruised. Classic Christmas records ignore the possibility of being in a bad mood at this time of year and pour a load of sugary melodies, forced cheer, bells and children’s choirs on you that risks making things worse.
In 1961, jazz singer June Christy (1925-1990) made one of the few Christmas records that take into account how moody, unstable and shady one can be in the holidays. At the beginning of the sixties, the Christmas album was experiencing its peak: after the exploit of White christmas of Bing Crosby, who in 1942, had in fact created a new recording genre, there was the prodigious Christmas of 1957 in which Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, with their respective holiday albums, challenged each other to a duel: the definitive fracture generational of rock ‘n’ roll maybe it happened right under the tree.
June Christy, master of Californian cool jazz, deep and slightly chipped voice, flawless phrasing and a miraculous sense of rhythm, made her bones in the second half of the 1940s as the star of Stan Kenton’s big band. Blonde, graceful and brilliant on stage, she swung with the enthusiasm and flair of an Anita O’Day but was also capable of the sensual and somewhat cynical detachment of a Peggy Lee. The critic Ted Gioia, in his great history of jazz recently reissued in Italy by Edt, describes his voice as “attractive and simple, like talking to a friend”. In fact, Christy finds with the listener that pretty and a little bit conspicuous confidentiality of a stranger that, at a party, tells you everything about herself. Maybe a little more than necessary.
This time of the year is her only Christmas album and, a brave act bordering on irresponsibility, it contains only unreleased material written especially for her by husband and wife duo Connie Pearce and Arnold Miller. No standards and no Christmas classics: the listener is only flattered by the wonderful arrangements of Pete Rugolo, otherwise he is invited to the solitary and somewhat melancholy party of June Christy.
However, it is not correct to liquidate This time of the year like a sad Christmas album. It certainly is, but it is also a record full of irony, of meditations on the changing times and above all full of hope and desire to turn the page. It’s a child-free Christmas, as dry as a dry martini made right and thrown down on your own before getting dressed to go out. But it’s not a joyless Christmas: it’s the luxury of being able to stop and think, as it sings in Ring a merry bell, “The things I’ve lost and the things I’m learning”. This time of the year it is above all a meditation on the passing of time and on renewal. In Hang them on the tree June Christy sings with a little bitterness that all that garbage that has accumulated in the house over the year (garbage of the soul, of course) at Christmas is sprinkled with silver and attached to the tree: “Every worry, every fear I will tie her with a ribbon to each tear and then I will see them dancing under the Christmas lights ”. The key to understanding the disc, however, is in the ending: in Winter’s got spring up its sleeve Christy seems to be singing to herself: “When the curtain falls on this frozen night, you will wake up in a whole new and bright world, because winter has an ace up its sleeve: spring”.
If anything Lana Del Rey, the current custodian of the coolness and of the Californian disillusionment, he will decide to make a Christmas album, he would do well starting from this little masterpiece unjustly forgotten.
June Christy
This time of the year
Capitol, 1961
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