MUSIC
BY B R E T T C A M P B E L L
MARK O'CONNOR
AMERICAN
CHRISTMAS
Holiday music of all kinds is
headed to local venues
M
illions of Americans celebrate Christ-
mas, but let’s face it: The Yuletide is
hardly an American original. Some-
times it seems about the only thing
we’ve contributed to a story that be-
gan in the Middle East before it was St. Nicked
by Europeans is our characteristic commercial-
ization of what was once a spiritual occasion.
Actually, Americans have over the years
made the holiday — like so many other cultural
artifacts that originated elsewhere — our own
through music. This season, a pair of institutions
devoted to showing how Americans can take
ideas from the Old World and make something
equally valuable and distinctive present several
very different American angles on Christmas.
Next Thursday and Sunday, Dec. 6 and 9, The
Shedd’s Jazz Kings Christmas rings the bells for
holiday songs with an American jazz accent.
Singers Shirley Andress, Marisa Frantz and
Bill Hulings front the band (with bells on!) in
familiar tunes “Jingle Bells,” “Sleigh Ride,”
“Carol of the Bells,” “Silver Bells,” “I Heard the
Bells on Christmas Day” and other traditional
holiday songs. The show tours to Roseburg, Corvallis and
Newport the following week.
One of the songs on the program is Irving Berlin’s
“White Christmas,” which has become so canonized that
it’s easy to forget that it was written by an American (a
Jewish one at that). Premiered by Northwest native Bing
Crosby as a single, and then used in the 1942 film Holiday
Inn, it remains the biggest-selling single of all time.
And it became the title track for Crosby and Danny
Kaye’s 1954 film, a Berlin jukebox musical featuring a
sleighful of his older hits (“Blue Skies,” “Happy Holiday,”
“How Deep Is the Ocean,” “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me
Warm” and many more).
The American story, involving a pair of World War II
vets turned song-and-dance team pursuing a singing sister
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER
act during a Christmas gig, may not boast the impact of
the babe in the manger, three wise guys and an immaculate
conception, but that didn’t stop the movie from grossing
the biggest box office take of the year.
“White Christmas” completed its sleigh ride from hit
song to hit musical to hit film and back to stage with a
2000 theatrical adaptation of the 1954 film premiered by
St Louis Municipal Opera Theatre that, despite lukewarm
critical reception, went on to successful productions in San
Francisco, Broadway, London and several American tours.
That’s the version that music director Robert Ashens
and director Ron Daum are leading at The Shedd Nov.
30-Dec. 16. The show stars Ward Fairbairn and Eric
Blanchard as the dancing ex-GIs and Lynnea Barry and
Cyra Conforth as the siren sisters.
Another Northwesterner devoted to show-
casing American musical traditions is violin
deity Mark O’Connor, who’s developed an
entire music-ed curriculum that introduces
American kids to music using our own folk
traditions rather than centuries-old European
pedagogy.
Possibly the world’s greatest fiddler, the Se-
attle-born star brings the sound of his popular
“Appalachia Waltz” combo to holiday music
Dec. 12 at the McDonald Theatre, when his
crack band along with singer Brandy Clark
perform the music from his hit 2011 album An
Appalachian Christmas. The Grammy-win-
ning fiddle virtuoso (who’s also won major
awards for his guitar and mandolin skill), com-
poser (nine concertos, two symphonies, three
string quartets and counting), studio musician
and educator may have worked with some of
the world’s most renowned musicians, from
Yo Yo Ma to Earl Scruggs to Wynton Marsa-
lis, but he really enjoys playing with his family
and friends.
What better time to do that than during the
holidays? His O’Connor Band features his
wife and fellow fiddler/singer Peggy, cham-
pion mandolinist son Forrest, national flatpack
champ guitarist Joe Smart, banjoist/bassist
Geoff Saunders giving carols and other holiday
standards given a warm, all-American blue-
grass/folk inflection.
Speaking of American fiddling, one of the
MCALLEN
most acclaimed of living American compos-
ers, John Corigliano, scored an unexpected hit
with his neo-Romantic score for the 1998 film The Red
Violin, whose Twilight Zone-y story chronicled the adven-
tures of a mysterious fiddle and its owners over several
centuries.
Corigliano turned it into a popular violin concerto, and
Chloë Hanslip performs a movement from it with the Eu-
gene Symphony Dec. 6 at the Hult Center, in a concert that
also features music by Buxtehude, Saint-Saëns and Men-
delssohn’s exuberant “Italian” symphony.
Finally, it has nothing to do with the holidays, but J.S.
Bach’s six sublime suites for solo cello are always wel-
come. Yo Yo Ma just released his third recording, which
shows how much depth they contain. On Dec. 9, Delgani
String Quartet cellist Eric Alterman plays and explicates
the first three at United Lutheran Church. ■
THE
POWER OF NO
If you haven’t heard Portland musician Ezza Rose in the past five years
or so, you should know her sound has changed: She’s no longer playing folky
bluegrass string music. “Growing up I listened to a lot of punk,” she explains
over the phone.
Going electric with her band is a return to her roots, she says. “We’ve been
sinking our teeth into a lot of material that’s geared politically.”
If you have any doubt that her music has taken a new direction, check
out the pounding tom-tom intro that blasts her song “No Means No” into the
stratosphere.
That song, off her brand-new album of the same name, is a slightly surf-
rock, Sleater Kinney-style punk manifesto for the #MeToo era. The song’s
video, filmed at various locations around Portland, shows women running daily
gauntlets of male harassment and abuse. These women fight back. One pulls
out her cell phone to take footage of her catcaller, making him look a fool.
While the album echoes issues raised by the #MeToo movement,
Rose says it was largely written before the hashtag exploded into public
awareness. More than anything, she says, it’s an album about the value of
keeping your word.
“Being true to your word,” she explains. “Being impeccable with your word,
and valuing other people’s word. For me ‘no means no’ is the overarching
thematic idea. It’s a liberating idea for me.”
Ezza Rose plays along with The Domestics 8 pm Friday, Nov. 30, at Hi-Fi
Lounge; $5 advance, $7 door, 21-plus. — Will Kennedy
eugeneweekly.com • November 29, 2018
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