This album truly is a delightful surprise. Winter Songs Vol. 2 is simply more fun, it swings harder and is filled with far more freshness than I could ever have expected. There will always be people keen to tell you that Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney said all that needed to be said about the American Songbook Christmas standards several decades ago. But they’re wrong. In this, the most potentially tired of all genre niches, Ohio-born, New York-based jazz singer April Varner and her cohort of singers and instrumentalists really have found some magic dust to sprinkle over every number.
Varner did an EP with six tracks last year with Emmet Cohen’s Trio – with Yasushi Nakamura, bass, and Ulysses Owens Jr., drums – in the wake of her triumph at the 2023 Ella Fitzgerald Jazz Vocal competition. That was called Winter Songs Vol. 1. Someone – maybe the super-smart Cory Weeds of the Cellar Music label – evidently had a plan. Last year’s venture now feels like a nursery slopes excursion to prepare for this far more ambitious outing. The very fine Nakamura and the crisply persuasive Owens Jr. are still there, the latter also as producer. There is a new pianist, Luther Allison (keywords here would be Samara Joy and Grammy), who has also arranged six of the 11 tracks. If Emmet Cohen is not there in person, then the vibe of “Emmet’s Place”, the pianist’s joyful, community-focused and inventive take on the Harlem Rent Party is still very much there in spirit.
I was finding it hard to imagine in the abstract how “Jingle Bells”, the opener, could ever be given new life, having played it no fewer than three times to accompanying sports teams on Sunday... and yet in this clever and tight arrangement by June Cavlan, featuring a three-part vocal ensemble The Sunhouse Singers with Cavlan herself, Kate Kortum, and Joie Bianco, the tune has all kinds of surprising and clever switchbacks, and Owens Jr. makes it really kick with the divine thwack of his backbeat.
It's just a lot of fun. And those three singers have more tricks up their sleeves for later in the album, too: with some deliciously tasty harmonies, they do genuinely start to make you believe the impossible. When it's sung as persuasively as this, Christmas genuinely is (or at least might be) “the most wonderful time of the year”.
There is also one classy, even brilliant arrangement on this album, and it goes a lot deeper: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by Theo Bleckmann, who is also “Vocal Producer” of the whole album. It starts – to my ears anyway – by evoking Heinrich Schütz; the whole arrangement has a tremendous flow and sweep and some very subtle vocal overlay in the mix, and April Varner makes a lot of sense of the skyward-headed solo soprano part at the end. It's a safe prediction that other sopranos/vocal groups will be wanting to get their hands on this arrangement. Winter Songs Vol. 2 has definitely brightened up my 2025 Christmas: it's a surprisingly great album.
