Seasonal Sounds to Shake Up The Holidays

Normally, I avoid commercial music radio at all costs during the holiday season – with one grand exception: Polito Vega's weekend radio show on Mega 97.9 FM. Unlike the Christmas pablum played on most Anglo commercial stations, the Puerto Rican Christmas pop canon is actually filled with some real stand-on-their-own-two-feet-any-time-of-year gems. A big reason is the influence of the rural aguinaldo Christmas song tradition of Puerto Rico. Thanks to this influence, songs you hear on the radio this time of year are actually rootsier than the slick romantic salsa that dominates the playlist the rest of the year.

Perhaps my favorite album is the classic Asalto Navideño by Willie Colon with the late great vocalist Hector Lavoe. Actually, it's two classics, volumes one and two, originally released on Fania Records in the early 1970s. The sessions also featured Yomo Toro, the wonderful cuatro player who has since become sort of a living symbol of the season, especially in the Puerto Rican community. The cuatro, a small four string Puerto Rican lute with Spanish roots, is a defining element of the jibaro (mountain village) sound of aguinaldo.

One of my favorite CD compilations is the 1992 Ryko Records / Archive for Contemporary Music co-production, Mas - A Carribean Christmas. It contains two of my favorite songs of the season. "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" is half sung, half growled by the beloved Bahamian singer-guitarist Joseph Spence. Spence, who died in 1984, makes the song entirely his own with his rambly free-rhythmic reinterpretation of the chestnut. "Soca Santa" is a rollicking uptempo jaunt by the Trinidadian star Machel Montano, front man for the group Xtatik. It's inspired by the parang Christmas song tradition of Trinidad, which is rooted in Trinidad's Spanish-speaking communities and is a cousin to the aguinaldo. As in Puerto Rico, musicians traditionally would go house to house to sing, although nowadays in Trinidad parang has moved to the stage with concert-events called parang fiestas, and a national parang competition.

Scandinavia is a hotbed for neo-traditional music, artists working traditional angles in new ways, mixing with other genres. One fine young group in this vein is the Norwegian fiddle ensemble Majorstuen (named after a famous intersection in Oslo). The ensemble broke in with a splash, winning a Norwegian Grammy winners for its self-titled debut CD in 2003. Majorstuen is strict about its fiddle-only format. But the group teamed up with vocalists (Marit Mattisgard, Gunnlaug Lien Myhr, Gro Kjelleberg Solli and Jon Anders Halvorsen) for a Christmas 2006 CD, Juledrøm (Christmas Dream).

Another excellent European-tinged holiday season CD, Wintersongs, comes from the all-women's vocal ensemble Kitka ("A Bunch of Flowers" in Bulgarian), a San Francisco-area vocal group that draws its repertoire mainly from Eastern European traditions. Wintersongs features not just Christian songs of the season, but also ancient ritual songs of the winter solstice.

The Judeo-Spanish song Ocho Kandelikas has become a seasonal standard almost at the level of the ubiquitous "Dreydl song." It's s a childrens' counting song: "One candle, two candles, three candles, four candles, five candles, six candles, seven candles, eight candles for me." The lyrics are in Ladino, the old Jewish language of Spain, written by the Bosnian-born, Virginia-based Sephardic singer and Ladino revivalist Flory Jagoda.

Hip Hop Hoodios (Hoodios being a play for the Spanish word for "Jews", Judeos) is a self described "Latino-Jewish Urban Music Collective" led by Josh Norek (a/k/a Josué Noriega) and Abraham Velez. It's a very tongue-in-cheek undertaking (a typical Hoodios lyric: "My nose is large and you know I'm in charge"), but they take their sound seriously, bringing some serious musical friends into the recording sessions for their CDs, from Frank London of the Klezmatics to members of popular Spanish-language bands like Jaguares and Los Mocosos.