The cover of Wynton Marsalis' album Crescent City Christmas Card
Wynton Marsalis is a man who generally stands on his sober-suited dignity, but even the messiah of the classic-jazz revivalist movement once let the Christmas industry unhinge him. The cover of the trumpeter's 1989 album Crescent City Christmas Card features him relaxing in a sleigh wearing a Santa hat and fur boots - though he does slip in a stern reminder of his stature by retaining a concert-hall white shirt and black bow-tie.
Given Marsalis' knowledge of jazz history and his admiration for Louis Armstrong, it may even have been a direct reference to the cover of the Armstrong collection What A Wonderful Christmas. Louis' famous piano-keyboard smile under the Santa hat contrasts with Marsalis' more Mona Lisa version, and his bow-tie sports polka-dots; but both stars prominently cradle their trumpets, as if to say, well, this is what it's really all about.
Jazz doesn't do Christmas very well, and that's a blessing. Few jazz artists are big enough mainstream stars for the major labels to see much economic sense in repackaging them as fireside entertainers come December. More significantly, the majority of jazz fans almost certainly love the restless and unruly artform precisely because the best of it represents a haven from cheesiness and cliches, whether musical or cultural.
Those jazz-rooted performers who are most often invited to tap the Christmas market are unsurprisingly singers, and some of the least wince-making jazz covers of Christmas songs (well represented on iTunes) have been made by Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme and Diana Krall - with Cole the jazz pianist turned superstar crooner the most elegant but also the most pillowed by 1950s sentimentality, Torme and Krall the most laconically grown-up, and Fitzgerald the most sold on the spirit of the thing but imbuing it with a mixture of heartfelt soul and playfulness. And the great singer/pianist Shirley Horn probably delivers a hipper account of the agonising Winter Wonderland than anybody else - a track available (along with Torme's The Christmas Song, the Bill Evans Trio's briskly swinging Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and three seasonal Louis Armstrongs) from iTunes on theJazz radio station's 2007 compilation theJazz Plays Christmas.
My personal jazz favourites to pluck out of this treacly mire? Probably the unswerving gospelly energy and slam-bang big-band riffing of Hammond organ king Jimmy Smith's God Rest You Merry Gentlemen, Louis Armstrong's singing and blazing trumpet sound over a big band on Cool Yule, and a real rarity in Charlie Parker's Christmas morning 1947 radio airshot on White Christmas (on iTunes from the Complete Savoy Live Performances album), which turns from sardonically-prancing fills between the theme statements to a typically skimming Bird bop solo. In its concentration on the blowing and virtual indifference to the song, it takes about the sanest line possible on the majority of commercial Yuletide cringers.
