Sunday Muse Day - More Holiday Tunes - Elle Jazz Winter Blue, The Best Christmas Ever . Love Waits - Warped Sky - Stray Clouds

 "Now it's the day after Christmas and my clock is in the red"(lyric from the song, Love Waits by Richard Miceli - Warped Sky Band -'80)

This Sunday Music Muse found us two days after Christmas, but in our household we keep the Xmas tree up until New Year's Day and play holiday music until then, too. Here two annual picks, ELLE Jazz Winter Blue, a collection of various classic jazz performers doing Holiday and winter themed tunes.

The second collection is The Best Christmas Ever, a Virgin Records release. Remarkably, there are only two tunes the show up on both CD. "Merry Christmas Baby" performed by Charlie Brown and "What are you doing for New Year's Eve" performed by Lena Horne. Both are classics so no harm, no foul. One nitpick, the cover design for the CD back cover is bad. the song title info is totally unreadable. Some designer was hitting the spiked Holiday egg nog too much before sending it to the printer. Still it has served us well over the years.

Here is another tune in my Warped Sky: Stray Clouds project, a combination of songs from old tapes and new renditions of original tunes written and played by me, and my ad hoc band Warped Sky Band in the 1980s, with the buddies, Richard Miceli and Rodney Means. Again, in this case, "Band" means three guys screwing around playing in our apartments. "Love Waits" is a tongue-in-cheek "Jazz Noise" or "Art Jazz" as Richard labels are music. The lyrics has a lot of Tom Waits in it, as he was a favorite of Richard's and I aways hear strains of that in his poems/lyrics. I'm amazed at the off-beat and dark insights on personal relationships Richard's lyrics reveals.

The line "...my clock is in the red", alway stuck with me. It seems to say how can't you move forward when your dragging all that old stuff behind you. So, I'm going to start getting rid of stuff, material, and emotional. Mostly these posts are a personal celebration of long friendships that I treasure for life. Enjoy.