Jimmy Smith - “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” (Trio)
from Christmas ‘64
For Day 1 of Amanda’s Christmas Music Spam, we have, uh, well, I don’t even know. I listened to this on the recommendation of some other jazz fans, and my initial reaction went to Twitter. I said that music rarely puts me at a loss for words, but here we are. That was about twelve hours ago. And…here we still are. I’ve listened to it again, I’m listening to it now, and nothing’s changed.
I can pick out the melody, though I’m not sure I would have recognized it at first without knowing what it was in advance. That’s the only thing I can even come close to wrapping my brain around. On the whole, it just sounds like the bastard love child of “Take Five” and “Green Onions.”
But I suppose this — the lack of a coherent reaction — is to the song’s credit. Between my age and the fact that I listen to centuries upon centuries’ worth of music, nothing much surprises me anymore. What I understand as innovative and risky in an historical context just doesn’t sound all that bizarre to my ears. (Which isn’t to say everything is comfortable to my ears. I can’t listen to avant-garde jazz without getting headaches — though I defended it to death after having to sit through Ken Burns’s mistreatment of it in Jazz — and my hatred for Schoenberg has been well-documented in other places.) This, however, manages to be both listenable and strange to me at the same time.
It’s kind of nice to have that feeling again.
To be slightly more concrete about the song, I can say that if you’re looking for Christmas music that does away with the traditional sleigh bells and cheese, you can’t do much better than Jimmy Smith.
(For what it’s worth, I think the big band version of this piece on the same album is weird, too, but in a way that makes sense, unlike this sentence.)
