Of a time in 1964 when Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé and Jack Jones kept Christmas well…
By David McGee
THAT HOLIDAY FEELING (Expanded Edition)
Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme
Real Gone Music (2022)
“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”
So promised a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge after being transformed by three spirits overnight, each of whom led him on a journey through all the stages of his life, right up to his impending sad, lonely demise, until, come the light of day, he emerged from his ghostly travails a changed man espousing sentiments he should not have been alone in articulating or embracing.
Call it a stretch, but every time I listen to Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme’s exquisite Yuletide concept album, 1964’s Happy Holiday Feeling, its generous spirit, heartwarming billets-doux and unsullied life affirming joy, all set to the most empathetic of orchestra and chorus arrangements, bring to mind Dickens’s reformed and transformed Christmas Carol villain for the ages, as the loving couple addresses their past, present and future together in songs embodying and embracing the lessons taught them in their real-world relationships. If only for a moment, allow Steve and Eydie to take you away to a beautiful place where life can be lived full measure.
These are not disconnected songs, these dozen tunes comprising the original album’s storyline—a Winter’s Tale, if you will. Herein the opening title track sets the upbeat mood that will dominate the ensuing settings. From there the players make their entrances and their exits to engage in telling duet dialogues taking the measure of nature’s complicity in their celebratory pursuits (“Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”, “Winter Wonderland” and a riotous “Sleight Ride”) or offer thoughtful soliloquies on the state of their hearts (Eydie’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and—illustrating the art of the “subdued tease” definitively–“What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”; Steve’s self-penned heart-tugger “Let Me Be the First to Wish You a Merry Christmas” and his wistful take on “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting by An Open Fire”), all leading up to the finale summarizing the spirit of all that’s come before it in the cheerful sentiments of Irving Berlin’s “Happy Holiday.” In short, within the confines of That Holiday Feeling! the lessons taught by the spirits of the past, present and future are not shut out but rather enlarged and embraced. As their career unfolded, Steve and Eydie made concept albums a regular feature of their musical journey, with this, their lone full Yuletide album, being one of the smartest and most engaging of all. (On her own, Eydie recorded a Spanish language Christmas album in 1966, accompanied by The Trio Los Panchos, now titled in reissue form as Blanca Navidad.)
‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,’ Eydie Gormé solo, from That Holiday Feeling!
That the soundscape animating the couple’s transcendent engagement with songs largely drawn from the Yuletide canon should come as no surprise. The original 12-song long-player was produced by Robert Mersey, who broke into the business as an arranger for Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in their hit heyday. Following a brief, frustrating stab at being a solo artist himself, Mersey was offered a job as a producer and arranger by the pop Colossus that was Columbia Records. During his Columbia tenure Mersey worked with gifted vocalists such as Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, Andy Williams, Dion, Patti Page, Julie Andrews, Mel Tormé and others, including young Aretha Franklin, whose Columbia career, once devalued by critics, is now regarded a productive, if commercially wanting, training ground for the towering soul artist she became after signing with Atlantic. In short, Robert Mersey brought a wealth of experience and musicality to the sessions with Steve and Eydie.
Not the least savvy of Mersey’s decisions was to hire Joe Guercio to conduct the orchestra assembled for the Holiday Feeling sessions. Guercio would become a more familiar name to the average music lover in the late ‘60s when he served as Elvis Presley’s post-comeback musical director from 1970 to 1977. Arrangers, the final element of the production team, were strictly from the top tier of the business, including the legendary Don Costa (three songs), Glenn Osser (three songs), Nick Perito (thre songs), Al Cohn (two songs) and Patrick Williams, Rene Hall and Billy Byers (one song each).
‘Sleigh Ride,’ Steve & Eydie, from That Holiday Feeling!
So with all this Dream Team behind them, Steve and Eydie essentially had only to be their usual engaging selves, get into the spirit of the season and make listeners feel as at home with them on record as they did in concert halls and clubs. The Christmas album came a year after the duo had made their debut as Columbia artists, but by 1964 they had been performing together on record for ten years (having met when both were beginning their recording careers on Coral Records) and they were seven years into what became a 55-years-plus marriage. The chemistry between them was powerful, and every bit as potent on disc as it was on stage. And so they did.
‘Let Me Be the First to Wish You Merry Christmas,’ written by Steve Lawrence and Bert Rotfeld, a Steve Lawrence solo performance from That Holiday Feeling!
On That Holiday Feeling they burst out of the gate at full speed on the title track, written by Guercio and Bill and Patty Jacobs. It’s both brassy and bold, supporting low-key flirtatious vocal byplay—with Steve pursuing a stand-offish Eydie who chooses to change the subject–alternating with high stepping orchestral flourishes, establishing in one fell swoop the intimacy of what’s to come. One of this album’s conceits surfaces on the second cut, a dreamy Eydie solo performance of a string-rich “White Christmas,” after which Steve joins his bride on a “Winter Wonderland” frolic, with some whimsical lyric ad-libbing, Steve shadowing Eydie’s performance with swooning counterpoint amidst a dazzling arrangement featuring strings whizzing through the soundscape, horns bursting forth with tart punctuations between verses or offering silky, muted, very 60s-ish washes of sound. Steve then takes his own solo turn with a smooth, laid-back reading of the Mel Tormé-Robert Wells seasonal evergreen, ‘The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on An Open Fire),” and if you think you’ve heard this one perhaps too often, give Steve’s sensitive rendering a chance. Following a yearning Eydie solo on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” really a master class in understated emotional restraint that gives way at times to powerful belting passages that underscore the depth of anguish the singer has been withholding, and a frisky run through of “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” in which Al Cohn’s alternately brassy and boisterous charts are interspersed among more whimsical, percussive outbursts to add to the lyrics’ playful patter, Steve and Eydie give “Sleigh Ride” such a thorough makeover they practically reinvent the Leroy Anderson-Mitchell Parish classic, with playful, laughing banter about preparing for their imaginary ride, and delightful to-and-fro harmonizing. A Lawrence original provides Steve with arguably his finest vocal on the disc. “Let Me Be the First to Wish You a Merry Christmas,” co-written with Bert Rotfeld, with whom Steve had collaborated during their Coral days on the single “At a Time Like This,” is a lush love song taking place while the holiday “is still some time away,” but sung to someone special to whom he desires to express, preemptively, “what’s really in my heart,” which is “I want you in my arms when Christmas comes along/not only for this year but every Christmas from now on,” all bathed in arranger Rene Hall’s impossibly romantic strings and evocative woodwinds, rising and fading in sync with the singer’s inward longing. Eydie has an answer to Steve’s bravura solo performance in her bluesy, sensuous reading of “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve,” her come-on swathed in Glenn Osser’s evocative small combo-with-strings arrangement—a tantalizing blend of saloon-style melancholy and concert hall grandeur. Add in a spirited sprint through the Jule Style-Sammy Cahn seasonal standard, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”; a sensitive, nostalgic ballad, “That Ol’ Christmas Spirit,” reflecting on Yule symbols and traditions inspiring treasured memories, complete with a luscious orchestral arrangement courtesy Don Costa; and closing with a warm, engaging duet on Irving Berlin’s enduring contribution to the 1942 film Holiday Inn, “Happy Holiday,” another Costa-arranged strings-and-woodwinds gem featuring someone—Steve, possibly?—adding some atmospheric whistling to the track. The only sour note in the whole project came during the very season That Holiday Feeling! was celebrating: At age 77, Robert Mersey passed away on November 14, 1964, with That Holiday Feeling! possibly being his last production to be released in his productive lifetime.
‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve,’ Eydie Gormé, illustrating the art of the ‘subdued tease’ in a solo performance from That Holiday Feeling!
But there’s more. When the album’s original dozen tunes conclude, the expanded edition adds eight more choice tracks described in liner notes by reissue producer David Lawrence–Steve and Eydie’s son, a composer and conductor in his own right—as “some you will know and some that haven’t been readily available for years.” In one case, Mr. Lawrence is guilty of understatement: Steve’s complete soulful immersion in “The First Noel,” produced by RCA’s Mike Berniker in April of 1967, had never been available, readily or otherwise, until its inclusion on this disc. Holy moley! Steve’s performance (with orchestra and chorus and volleys of orchestral crescendos underscoring the heightened emotions the lyrics describe) is so moving in its reverent regard for the sanctity of the moment as to render a listener dumbfounded by the fact of it being stowed away, unheard, for a half-century-plus.
‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,’ Eydie Gormé, in English and Spanish, from That Holiday Feeling!
Mr. Lawrence also retrieves in part another rare, if not lost, gem from the Christmas archives. In 1968 Steve and Eydie, having moved to RCA from Columbia, teamed up with Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler and lyrical spinto soprano Leontyne Price, the first African-American prima donna to open a season at the Metropolitan Opera and to sing a leading role at La Scala, for a holiday long-player titled Christmastime in Carol and Song, with the vocalists backed by Fiedler leading the orchestra and chorus. Steve takes the lead on “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” sharing the refrain with a robust chorus soaring above a propulsive rhythm, whereas he’s almost a cappella in the quiet verses, with the most discreet of orchestral backdrops adding somber ambience; Eydie offers a tender bilingual—English and Spanish—reading of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” that could have stood magnificently on its own, stripped down like a folk song, without the chorus’s aggressive support; Steve, Eydie and Joe Mele co-wrote the duo’s third contribution to the album, a swinging missive to a missing partner, “Hurry Home for Christmas,” with Steve and Eydie loping lovingly through it as the orchestra rather rocks behind them.
‘The First Noel,’ Steve Lawrence solo, produced by Mike Berniker, April 1967 but unreleased until it was included as a bonus track on Steve and Eydie’s That Holiday Feeling! (Expanded Edition) in 2022
Three other bonus tracks come from various Steve and Eydie projects, with Don Costa’s playful arrangement of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” framing the singers’ flirty conversation in terms both brassy and velvety, in a memorable moment from the stars’ Grammy winning 1961 album, We Got Us; Eydie storms commandingly through Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things,” adding some jazzy phrasing and rhythmic twists to the old warhorse arranged by Robert Mersey and issued on her 1965 Columbia album, Sings the Great Songs from the Sound of Music and Other Broadway Hits; and Steve joins the ranks of distinguished “White Christmas” interpreters by dint of a hint of swing in his thoughtful rendering supported by a lush backdrop courtesy another outstanding Don Costa arrangement.
‘’Twas the Night Before Christmas,’ Steve Lawrence solo, from That Holiday Feeling! (Expanded Edition). The recording was first issued on the 1970 compilation, Best of The Great Songs of Christmas.
Saving one of the best cuts for last, the expanded edition concludes with Clement Clark Moore’s “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” set to music and featuring Steve, clearly engaged, at singing clear and sensitively over a light shuffle rhythm, restrained horns and fingerpicked acoustic guitar. The producer and arranger of this track remain unknown, but it made it into the Great Songs of Christmas franchise when it was included on the 1970 compilation, Best of The Great Songs of Christmas. (Those readers interested in the origins of the Great Songs of Christmas series can read about it in Deep Roots.)
Not least of all this expanded edition’s virtues: the value-added component of liner notes by the always reliable, always insightful Joe Marchese of TheSecond Disc.com.
To those who would suggest these good tidings from Steve and Eydie circa 1964 are out of step with our world today, take note of what Orson Welles once observed: “Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit.”
As an antidote to the cynicism of our time, That Holiday Feeling! brooks no humbug from any quarter. Keep Christmas well, and live life full measure. Steve and Eydie might be your Santa Claus.
***
THE JACK JONES CHRISTMAS ALBUM
Jack Jones
Second Disc Records/Real Gone Music
(originally released on Kapp, 1964; CD reissue 2016)
A JACK JONES CHRISTMAS
RCA Victor (1969)
Available online at Presto Music
In 1964, the same year Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme released their classic Yuletide long-player, That Holiday Feeling!, Jack Jones was 10 albums into a recording career that would span more than 50 albums prior to his death from leukemia on October 23, 2024. He was also riding very high on the decade’s pop charts, winning a Grammy in 1964 for his reading of Bacharach-David’s “Wives and Lovers”; scoring three chart topping singles, one each in 1965 (a pop treatment of George Jones’s country hit, “The Race is On”), 1966 (“The Impossible Dream”), and 1967 (“Lady”); and establishing himself as one of the foremost champions of the Great American Songbook. His was a glorious career and a full life, right up to his concluding recording statement, 2023’s brilliant and daring ArtWork, a Deep Roots Album of the Year and acclaimed by critics far and wide.
At Kapp, Jones had the advantage of working with arranger/producer Marty Manning on his lone holiday album for the label, A Jack Jones Christmas. Like the Lawrence-Gorme seasonal offering, Jones’s album is a marvel of warm, spirited, deeply committed vocalizing supported by sensitive arrangements in tune with the nuances of Jones’s clear, ringing tenor and crisp, precise phrasing. In the ‘40s, Manning, then in his 30s, had started his career as a freelance big band arranger before moving into radio, arranging for CBS and NBC programs, which in turn lead him to a position with Columbia Records come the early ‘50s. At Columbia his first success came in 1953, with his arrangement of Tony Bennett’s “Rags to Riches,” a #1 single for eight weeks. Teaming with Bennett again in 1962, Manning won a Grammy for Best Background Arrangement of Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” He went on to work with the likes of Vic Damone, Andy Williams, Barbra Streisand and others before leaving Columbia and going independent, which found him arranging for Harry Belafonte, Brenda Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, among others. In short, Manning was at the apex of his career when he teamed with Jones for the first of three Christmas albums Jones would release over the years.
‘Angels We Have Heard on High/Silent Night/Adeste Fideles’ (Medley), Jack Jones, from The Jack Jones Christmas Album (1964
‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/It Came Upon a Midnight Clear/The First Noel,’ Jack Jones, from The Jack Jones Christmas Album (1964)
They were a great team, Jones and Manning. You hear an unbridled spirit, if you will, immediately when the album opens with “Sleigh Ride.” Manning barely lets the ringing sleighbells establish the ambiance before woodwinds and timpani launch into a galloping rhythm and Jones comes racing in, surrounded by a spry mixed background chorus and all manner of whooshes and melodic flurries by brass and woodwinds, but all as feathery as falling snow. For “My Favorite Things,” Manning and Jones give it a Latin tinge as Jones simply soars vocally, ad libbing a couple of stop-time phrases after the first verse as the horns match the singer’s exuberance with a brassy burst as the song winds down. On the other hand, Manning surrounds Jones’s warm, tender approaches to ‘The Christmas Song” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” with silky strings rising and falling discretely behind and around the vocal, enhancing the intimacy of both performances.
‘The Village of St. Bernadette,’ Jack Jones, from The Jack Jones Christmas Album
‘O Holy Night,’ Jack Jones, from A Jack Jones Christmas (1969)
The album’s most striking moments come on two medleys that, taken together, command nine-and-a-half-minutes of the album’s near-36-minutes length. The first of these, comprising “Angels We Have Heard on High/Silent Night/Adeste Fideles” is slightly marred at its outset by a background chorus too strident for the moment, but Jones diminishes them by the sheer authority of his reading before settling into the quieter, reverential verses of “Silent Night” and, with somber organ and a distant church bell pealing, “Silent Night” leading to a triumphant coda. On the other hand, the closing medley, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/It Came Upon a Midnight Clear/The First Noel,” is about perfect in every respect—chorus and Jones in sync, with the chorus alone taking “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” before Jones returns with “The First Noel,” surrounded by chorus and strings taking flight, the effect being to project both the wonder and the promise of the night in question. Of a piece with these two outstanding cuts, Jones’s measured diction on the beautiful “The Village of St. Bernadette,” a song commemorating the visions of Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, is wondrous in all its components—the chorus’s dramatic intro, the subdued strings, all in service to Jones’s most dramatic vocal on the album. The song had been a Top 10 single for Andy Williams in 1960, only a few years before Manning became Williams’s arranger at Columbia. Alas, Marty Manning, only seven years after steering Jones’s Christmas debut, and only 55 years old, died after suffering a stroke attributed to an undiagnosed congenital aneurism.
‘Jingle Bells,’ a different approach by Jack Jones on A Jack Jones Christmas (1969)
Five years later, in 1969, Jones released his second holiday album, A Jack Jones Christmas, on RCA Victor. Working with producer-arranger-composer-conductor-jazz pianist Jack Pleis and Pete King (whose Chorale and Orchestra had accompanied Jones on his 1962 Kapp album, I’ve Got a Lot of Livin’ To Do, with producers-arrangers Billy May and Marty Paich), Jones delivered a worthy followup to his first Christmas album. Jones’s singing is markedly more mature this time around, with a humble, even awestruck reading of “O Holy Night,” backed by a somber chorus and understated piano repeating an ostinato theme throughout. This, following an intensely bluesy rendition of “Jingle Bells” that is surely as far from what James Lord Pierpoint had in mind when he wrote the song in 1850 to be sung by a Sunday School choir at Thanksgiving. Jones makes it nothing less than a saloon song lament, complete with woozy strings and a lonely piano tinkling and comping tipsily behind him. In short, wonders are there to behold throughout, on mostly familiar fare, as this particular Christmas effort takes some chances with the texts than Jones could or would dare on his ‘64 Yule effort, good as the latter is. Coming at the height of Jones’s mainstream popularity, the ’64 and ’69 Yuletide offerings provide a window into Jack Jones’s artistry as it was evolving into more personal statements even as the hits piled up. And this was only the beginning of one of the longest, most productive careers in mainstream pop history. Jack Jones rested only when he took his final breath.
