Holiday Music Favorites (2009)

Yes, I realize that as I post this it is a bit on the early side. However, at least I did wait until after Halloween. I can blame the timing on my wife C., who is a piano teacher and begins working on holiday music with her students once November rolls around. In order for her to be ready, she typically orders new Christmas arrangements over the summer and reviews them in September and October. So the holiday music season starts pretty early around our house.

Anyway, every year she has a surfeit of new arrangements to choose from. Piano pedagogy publishers crank out huge amounts of new stuff constantly. I have a few books of guitar Christmas arrangements, but mainly I am left to make them myself from fake books.

The first two this year are tunes that I’ve done before — I’ll be home for Christmas and We Three Kings — but both get new treatments in keeping with my efforts recently:  guitar/bass/drums trios. The arrangement of We Three Kings is not that much different from the prior version, actually. It’s the same swing feel and I just redid the guitar part so that I could remove the original’s keyboard part.

I’ll be home for Christmas is quite different. It is also a swing trio after a chord melody intro. The prior version is solo finger-style.

Here are the links to listen:

Stream	MP3
I’ll be Home for Christmas (trio) We Three Kings (trio)	I’ll be Home for Christmas (trio) We Three Kings (trio)