Search - Barbara Montgomery :: Noel--One From The Heart

The sultry, smoky-voiced jazz song stylist, Barbara Montgomery has recorded a collection of Christmas songs you would like to find under your Christmas tree. For those only familiar with her many jazz recordings it will probably come as a delightfully different debut. She is accompanied here solely by pianist Tom Lawton, whose leads the brilliant Monkadelphia. Ms. Montgomery has already demonstrated an ability to take her sophisticated song stylings in different directions with her much-acclaimed CD Trinity containing several songs she wrote with collaborator Aaron Graves. Her childhood with her traveling engineer father in Vietnam may have engendered some of the strongly sentimental sides of certain Christmas songs such as the lead number, Ill Be Home For Christmas, in which she sings the rarely voiced verse and which may bring you back in time to another era. There are also several contemplative Christmas hymns that are true to the spirit of the season and evoke a reflective mood. Interspersed with these are several marvelously rendered standards. Oh Little Town of Bethlehem is arranged with a gently implied bossa nova, What Child Is This features the unique harmonizations of Bernard Peiffer, and a gem from the 60s, Peter Paul and Marys A Soalin gets a touch of the blues. The CD ends with Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and in playing this you are sure to have one.