Tagged with peggy lee

Ultimate Christmas Cocktails collection cover image

Ultimate Christmas Cocktails – Various Artists

Half the fun of the holiday season is throwing (and/or attending) holiday parties! Here’s a great collection to serve as a soundtrack to your shindig.

In fact, its usefulness as background music might be its best selling point. If you try to pay close attention to the music as you listen, you might grow tired of it by the time the first disc is halfway finished. The music is quite repetitive in sound, partially due to the fact that the same artists are featured and repeated several times over.

Aiming to set the mood for gin-laden cocktails and vodka mixers, it’s no surprise the music is carefully selected to have a mid-60s “ultra mod” feel. Featured artists include the soulful Lou Rawls (someone who doesn’t get the airtime he deserves on HPZ), the sultry Julie London, and famed bandleaders such as Billy May, Guy Lombardo, and Les Baxter. June Christy, Wayne Newton, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mercer, and Al Martino also come together to add to the Christmas spirit. And it would be an utter tragedy if this collection didn’t include Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby.

This is a great collection from which to build a holiday mix tape of your own. When I created mine for friends and family, I yoinked the following tracks (all available on Disc 2):

  • “Warm December” by Julie London
  • “Frosty the Snowman” by The Ventures
  • “Santa Claus’s Party” by Les Baxter
  • “Happy Holiday” by Peggy Lee

And there’s much more to choose from as you build your own holiday playlists. 57 tracks on 3 discs? That’s good bang for your buck. Bring it out at your next holiday gathering to add an extra-cool vibe to your soirée. Surely your martinis will taste even better as these tunes help the gin work its magic.

Available for purchase here.

“Snow” Fight!

.                                           vs.

In honor of December, and HPZ’s annual “White Christmas Pre-Christmas Countdown to Christmas,” I present a head-to-head match-up of music that I hope will inspire just a tiny bit of wintery precipitation to fall before too long. So in a similar vein to HPZ Co-Star Paul Snyder’s “Vs.” music blog series, I hereby present: “Snow” Fight!

The basis for such a debate stems from a contract dispute that kept White Christmas star Rosemary Clooney off of the semi-official movie soundtrack recording. Clooney, a successful artist in her own right by 1954, was signed into an exclusive contract with Columbia Records. Meanwhile, Decca owned the rights to the music used in the film. As a result, Clooney was pulled from the Decca recording, despite being an integral part of the White Christmas cast.  She was replaced by Peggy Lee.

You might remember this scene from the film: Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby), Betty Haynes (Clooney), Phil Davis (Danny Kaye), and Judy Haynes (Vera Ellen) are on a train bound for Vermont, and one thing they can’t wait to see is snow. So of course they sing about it. And in case you couldn’t guess from the fact that Vera Ellen’s voice magically drops an octave whenever she sings, her voice is dubbed by singer Trudy Stevens (Ellen was famous for dancing, not singing).

But what to make of the recordings released after the film’s production? From the Decca label, we are treated to a version of “Snow” that contains the same four-part harmonies as in the film — and even an orchestral interpretation of a choo-choo train — but Peggy Lee magically appears and Clooney is nowhere to be heard.

Meanwhile, Clooney recorded her own solo version of the song with a softer orchestral accompaniment in the background, sprinkled with back-up vocals by an anonymous chorus of male singers. The four-part harmony is lost, but this arrangement has a smoother, more lighthearted quality to it.

Given that there was never an “official” soundtrack for the film, we must settle for alternate recordings. So which do you think is better — a musical arrangement that sticks pretty closely to the original score but swaps one big-name girl singer for another, or one that allows the film’s original star to exercise her talents on a song she’d earlier been barred from recording with her castmates? Is anything lost by plucking Clooney out of the Decca recording and plugging in Peggy Lee? Is Clooney’s solo recording undermined by the absence of Crosby, Kaye, and Stevens?

Take a listen to these tracks & vote for your favorite!

Take 1 — “Snow” – Crosby, Kaye, Lee, and Stevens

Take 2 — “Snow” – Rosemary Clooney

Poll was closed and MP3s were removed on Saturday, December 5, 2009.