Jonathan Karrant’s (Childhood to Grown-Up) ‘Christmas Wish’ Sparkles and Shines
Your childhood holiday classics receive a generous update, thanks to guest artists Diane Schuur, the Joe Alterman Trio, Houston Person, and Kenny Rampton
From the Ozarks to Vegas and San Diego, acclaimed jazz vocalist Jonathan Karrant has honed that gorgeous voice of his to a fine, pitch-perfect, timeless splendor somewhere between then and now.
He’s done it again on a new, holiday record, Christmas Wish, released just this Friday, just in time for turkey, pie, and decking those halls.
The album features 13 fancy-free, festive, straight-ahead jazz covers of familiar, beloved holiday classic fantasies, which he takes on from perhaps the perspective of a grown-up looking back fondly on an idyllic childhood, speaking — singing for us all with faith, hope, and good cheer.
Karrant enlists some surprising guest artists for the merry cause: the Joe Alterman Trio, Grammy-winning pianist/vocalist Diane “Deedles” Schuur (title track single release), Jazz at Lincoln Center trumpeter Kenny Rampton, and legendary saxophonist Houston Person.
The thing about Karrant is, he can wrap even the simplest song with velvety goodness, panache, and an innate grasp of technique and feel…style and storytelling — all without overdoing or undercutting a single note.
On Irving Berlin’s 1937 pop standard, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” Karrant relaxes his voice and sinks into the peppy, up-tempo piano punch and jab, without sinking too much into the outmoded cornball matter of it all.
The opening number’s missing the snappy, look-at-me horns from the chic, drawn-out Frank Sinatra, big-band cover. But Karrant carries that brassy section well enough on his own with bright, warm, personality-driven vocals, surrounded by pianist Alterman’s climbing staircase of indulgence.
Get ready to cry a little when Karrant does a fond nostalgic number on “Christmas Time Is Here.” He leaves something magical and poignant on this carefully-crafted, caramelly standard, composed for a children’s choir by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi and lyricist/executive producer Lee Mendelson for the 1965 animated holiday special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Again, Karrant and his Christmas Wish band respectfully shy away from rote-cornball glory days into true, timeless caring — the heart of the matter — all in the human and instrumental vocals that flicker, glow, icicle-shimmer, and arc like rainbows on every forgotten shore…loosely following the original, from the gauzy brush strokes simulating a muffled wintry scene in a silent movie and that unforgettable melody characterized by the downward movements of a white Christmas, captivating every mother’s child.
The fade is everything, the cherry on top, as Karrant pulls at lyrical heartstrings, leaving nothing but love and appreciation in the final act. It’s not hard to imagine the Charlie Browns, Linus Van Pelts, and Schroeders of our Peanuts gang growing up to perform this retrospective in this very manner.
“I’m not a child, but my heart still can dream.”
In another life, Karrant could easily slip on a little hot and cold Elvis. He does a bang-up job going from low growling to breathy light in the “Blue Christmas – Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me” medley, emboldened on Rampton’s knotty, rag-time, wind-up trumpet, conjuring up Louis Armstrong and impromptu first-line parades.
Karrant and Schuur let it all hang out on everybody’s holiday sleeper, David Foster and Linda Thompson-Jenner’s “Grown-Up Christmas List” — the turning point gently driving home the child-to-adult perspective and riding high on that slow-burning, chill-inducing chorus:
“No more lives torn apart
That wars would never start
And time would heal all hearts
And everyone would have a friend
And right would always win
And love would never end, no
This is my grown-up Christmas list…”
Karrant/Schuur assume the high-low, high-riser dynamic of a proper duet on this early holiday single release, suitably leaking around the spiky edges, pushing vocal boundaries, and faith-moving mountains.
These two also slip in a little snazzy, jazzy, scat-tastic, lazy-river-summer number on the pop-appropriated hit single that grows from a leisurely, cheek-to-cheek country ballad (organ props to Carey Frank) into a triumphant, thrill-seeking (“Go on, Deedles!”), riff-filled encore at the end of every downbeat.
“Diane and Jonathan’s voices weave together with a spiritual cry for peace, breathing new life into this timely message.”
That bluesy-ragtime flurry you hear is the band’s floaty rendition of Frank Loesser’s 1947 pop standard, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”…the one almost everyone’s covered at one point in his/her career, from Ella Fitzgerald, Nancy Wilson, and Diana Krall to The Carpenters, Ingrid Michaelson, and Kacey Musgraves.
Karrant makes the most of those lyrical curves that allow him to scale and slide, conversate and swoon around the Ta-Da! piano swag.
Is that Joe Alterman doing the ole soft-shoe, brandishing and tickling the ivories on each of Karrant’s succulent notes? “Winter Wonderland” benefits as much from the pianist’s cantankerous flirtation with the dark side as the vocalist’s gift for gilded gab.
“Winter Wonderland” becomes positively transported and ensconced firmly in jazz territory with the piano and bass solo, straightforward and straight-ahead.
“Walkin’, slippin’ and slidin’…”
His laugh at the end…boss.
The seventh track enters the program’s hymnal interlude in the “I Wander As – We Three Kings” medley. Karrant does the best he can with such ancient material amidst very little musical movement, punching up the dramatics with mostly his interpretive vocals, a suitable trumpet sounding off in stages, and piano flourishes…as if in a sequel to “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Nevertheless, his impeccable voice ripples and resounds, heavily redolent with the ghosts of Christmas past.
Karrant faintly treads the fine line of retro and reinvention in the bossa-nova-themed “Last Christmas,” a Wham! ‘80s pop throwback.
Rearranged with the vague sentimentality of hindsight and earnest regret, the gently sashaying Brazilian touch raises the stakes of what could’ve been an ordinary pop cover — encapsulated in a lushly lapping piano solo, briefly quoting “The Girl from Ipanema,” the Grammy-winning 1965 “Record of the Year.”
“Singing carols, stringing popcorn, making footprints in the snow…” Time for “Christmas Memories,” the “sweetest ones” Karrant savors as if he were the last man on earth, survivor of pandemics and the big one gone town after town.
You can hear the bittersweet, gilded, golden poetry in every windswept, snow-dusted lyric, as he pours his heart and soul into an entire lifetime’s worth of sepia-tinged photo albums — set to the ever-descending, ever-advancing soundtrack of our collective wintry childhoods, apple-blossom-cheeked faces pressed on glassy windows, dreaming of a White Christmas.
If you can’t right now, you will…when you get older.
“I close my eyes and see shiny faces
Of all the children who now have children of their own
Funny, but comes December
And I remember every Christmas I've known…”
In Karrant’s tender strolling care, surrounded by Alterman’s billowing piano accompaniment, you gain a renewed grasp of the dappled depths in often the simplest, most plain-spoken crescendo when the head meets the heart and we hunker down for a long winter’s nap, sipping, remarking, and sharing what matters whenever the inevitably symbiotic noose of music (Don Costa) and lyrics (Alan and Marilyn Bergman) tugs, grips, and unravels.
Everything rides on what this vocalist does with the material, stark and spare and pregnant with hidden emotion. And this is when Karrant surpasses the slick, hip, hand’s-off Sinatra affair with a revisionist history more intimate, open, and vulnerable for the occasion — when we put down our spiked eggnog and get real with one another.
For time is a fleeting, fragile, precious mistress. So hold on, then softly let go.
Karrant gets that. Just listen to him closing his eyes and basking in the “shiny faces of all the children, who now have children of their own.” Try not to cry.
He gives in and flows with the somber, smell-the-roses tone and filigree movement of the ups and downs of a life well-lived. Defiantly resisting the negative currents of fate and time, trying to rush us to and fro.
This is the prayer in the song you’ll go back to time and time again, a reminder to hug loved ones tight. My favorite.
“This Christmas” brings on Houston Person to smoke out his soulful jazz tenor sax, making merry with the quick-step piano-cluster melody. Person quotes a childhood favorite from the past, “Jingle Bells,” in a clever-quick response to Karrant’s “Merry Christmas, baby.”
“Silent Night – O Holy Night” are paired for a soulful gospel respite, where Karrant gets to play with the ambience of pulling lyrical taffy within the taut, yet vast, tonal registers of his forte.
He deftly eases from the ancient, extracted 1818 dirge-y ballad, as a prelude, into one of the hardest Christmas carols known to man, “O Holy Night,” and that impossibly high, dramatic, range-y note Mariah Carey hits with the greatest of ease — backed by a superstar choir of angels.
“Fall on your knees
Oh hear the angel voices
Oh night divine
Oh night when Christ was born
Oh night divine
Oh night divine…”
Karrant instead goes the truer, humbler route, embodying the spirit of “O Holy Night,” opting to keep it closer to earth, digging in, having his way with texture over flash, the equivalent of sitting in the back pew, head down, shaking with conviction…rather than shoving his way up-front onstage, making an obscene selfie show of raised hands and holy faces…the hypocrisy of mass hysteria we’re now witnessing today with our Monday morning quarterbacking cult of personalities.
The additional choice of piano back-ended against organ extends that focus on the least of these, away from the spotlight and the ego, and going deeper, harder — within.
Karrant and the ambling pianist traipse into “The Christmas Song” as if they have all the time in the world, revving up to hit the all-too-sexy “Santa Baby” where it hurts.
A very adult Christmas song, indeed, sung with swagger, a wink and a nod, and knowing the score. He’s seen Santa, and still believes.
Speak of the devil… Karrant rounds out the album with Carey’s 1994 signature chart-topper, “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” putting his own scat-hopscotch spin over the lyrics, dropping pretenses and upping the ante on the jazz finesse.
In turn, the instrumentalists poke and prod over a bubbly cadence, striking their own ebullient chords…sax swinging, piano ringing…xylophone (?) percolating caffeinated deliciousness.
Jonathan Karrant’s new holiday album is a nicely swinging take on a variety of Christmas tunes, from carols and hymns to jazz standards and pop covers. He and his Christmas Wish band do just enough to make the classics their own, while paying homage to the Great American Songbook with its riffs, quotes, scats, and stylistic, atmospheric movements.
Turn it on, turn it up, and turn off the world.
Merry Christmas.
“Grown-Up Christmas List” quote from one sheet press release.
