Christmas, My Father, and the Best Soft Jazz You’ve Never Heard

A growing collection of gifts sit beneath our great shining tannenbaum. Lights are hung in all the windows, tinsel and ornament balls on nearly every surface.

It’s Christmas, y’all.

And at this time of year, so much remains the same: the anticipation, the rush of shopping and parties, the time to reconnect with the people you keep close.

But in Blerd Vision’s world, so much has changed.

The decorations adorn a new home, because we moved to a new town after I changed jobs. The kitchen features a bar, where the stockings are hung with care.

Once Santa Claus bribed Cleo with a treat, she was his best friend

The wife sits on the couch writing Christmas cards as our new dog, Cleo, lies sprawled out in slumber with a Christmas-themed bandana on her collar.

But, like a scene from A Christmas Carol, there’s an empty chair in this Christmas future. It’s the first holiday season since my father died in August.

As you can see, Dad was all about having a good time

I really have no idea what his absence at Christmas will do to me. They say the first one is really hard. The birthday definitely was – a week of doldrums-like sadness hanging on everything.

This Christmas, I don’t want to be blue. I told my wife we’d dress the house and think of good memories. I’ll feel whatever I am going to feel, but I am going to choose what I can. So it is.

I will feel one thing this Christmas regarding my father.

Or, rather, hear it. And that’s soft jazz.

Music was a huge part of my father’s life, and Christmas was no different. He seemingly knew all the major carols, but most of the time we only sing that one line from “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas,” stretching out eeeeeervywhere we gooooooooo.

The same phrase, again and again, like a toddler. Funny every time.

I think it was Dad’s way of indulging his secret love of Johnny Mathis

He didn’t own a ton of Christmas music. I only remember his copy of a smooth jazz compilation from GRP Records feauturing this kick-ass version of “The Little Drummer Boy” with Daryl Stuermer’s slick guitar providing the vocal over the best shopping-mall synths that 1988 had to offer.

Now that’s one cool-lookin’ MFer, right there

We’d play it on repeat.

Why? It was awesome.

And because, y’know, mass-market CDs were about three years old, and playing one track multiple times in a row by simply pressing a button was freaking novel back then.

Dad always skipped over Diane Schuur’s lackluster rendition of “This Christmas Song,” and then mostly I’d hang around for Yutaka’s Japanese-y take on Donnie Hathaway’s  “This Christmas.” That song is good no matter who does it, really, but a koto never hurt.

Now we’re in the sweet spot of the album. A bop-heavy “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” from Chick Corea and The Elektric Band drops dub syncopation into a 19h-century English wassail. Is that Sting playing bass? Maybe? Either way, this is my smooth jazz jam. The parts with brass always remind me of Craig (The Last Starfighter) Safan’s incidental music on Cheers.

Soon enough, Special EFX lands with processed guitars and Latin rhythms. How can music that sounds this cool be made by these guys?

Every girl’s crazy ’bout a double-breasted suit from the ’80s and a bolo tie

Little would you know that those guys are capable of a blissed-out-in-space-Brazil rendition of “Silent Night.”

Now my father’s sleeping, presumably in heavenly peace.

And I’m close to weeping.

Happy tears, I promise.