In general, we don’t encourage holiday-themed music here at The Ten Thousand Things, but we are capitulating in a moment of weakness to bring you this beloved classic. Bob Dorough is a true original, and has been lending his singular voice and talents to all manner of projects since the 1950s. This track was recorded with Miles and Gil Evans during the Quiet Nights sessions in 1962.

Bob Dorough has a site here, where you can find his most recent self-released album Bob Dorough - The Houston Branch, among many other things. There’s also an illustrated book (!) Bob wrote about the recording of Blue Xmas. The song is included on the excellent Miles Davis/Gil Evans boxed set Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, which you can find here.

It’s snowing something fierce in NYC today, which must mean it’s time to stay locked up at home and listen to reggae.

This track which combines Ms. Keys 2003 song with the rhythm from Beres Hammond’s Come Down Father feels right on for today. Turns out there’s practically a cottage industry in making reggae re-mixes from this acapella — if you have a look on the internets there are all kinds of dodgy versions of this, with “DJs” mumbling into karaoke mics over the intro. But this is the one you want. There’s even a rumor that this might get an official release.

You can find a 7″ vinyl copy here.

In 1992 Gershwin historian Artis Wodehouse transferred twelve of Gershwin’s piano roll performances from 1916 - 1927 into a Yamaha Disklavier, creating brand-new pristine digital recordings of those performances. The resulting CD, Gershwin Plays Gershwin, is a fascinating historical document as well as a toe-tapping romp, with a somewhat ethereal, outside-of-time quality. It contains several previously unknown compositions, like this track Novelette in Fourths, as well as a 14-minute rendition of Rhapsody in Blue and a piano roll masterwork from Gershwin’s editor Frank Milne which arranges An American in Paris for two pianos over almost 17 minutes.

Gershwin was something of a piano roll virtuoso, creating sophisticated arrangements, complete with over-dubbing, for the medium which was extremely popular in the 1920s. In the CD liner notes there is a quote in which he recalls one of his first musical memories from the age of six:

‘I stood outside a penny arcade listening to an automatic piano leaping through Rubinstein’s Melody in F. The peculiar jumps in the music held me rooted. To this very day I can’t hear the tune without picturing myself outside the arcade on 125th Street, standing there barefoot and in overalls, drinking it all in avidly.’

In fact, it turns out that Gershwin actually learned to play the piano at the age of ten by studying piano rolls, which he would slow down and mimic. While some composers initially dismissed piano rolls as a mechanical gimmick, Gershwin had always embraced the medium, and went on to create 130 carefully crafted rolls, using the finest technology of the era.

Nonesuch re-released the CD along with a second volume featuring not only Gershwin’s own compositions, but his piano roll interpretations of several other composer’s popular works of the time. You can find Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls here. There’s a Volume 2 here. Artis Wodehouse has a site here, which includes several detailed articles describing the process she used to bring Gershwin’s rolls into the digital era.