Unfortunately, we received Harry Connick, Jr.’s What a Night!: a Christmas Album too late for our Christmas wrap-up in the December issue. Around the same time, Tony Bennett’s A Swingin’ Christmas arrived, with Bennett backed by the Count Basie Big Band, and listening to the two side by side highlights what’s interesting about Connick’s. Not surprisingly, Bennett’s album swings in a typical big band way, and the arrangements are minor variations on the arrangements swinging versions of Christmas songs have received for decades now. They work just fine, just as they always have, and they provide a solid platform from which Bennett can make his vocalese felt. With this group, he’s very in tune with the rhythm, emphasizing the rhythmic elements in his singing. Usually that works, but in the usually lonely “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” – a World War II era attempt to capitalize on the success of “White Christmas” – the meaning of the words seem lost as he and the band motor through with a brisk, cheerful swing. He sings “I’ll be home for Christmas / if only in my dreams” with the same note of triumph that Sinatra hit when he sang, “Lucky me / I’m in love.”

Connick wrote and conducted his arrangments, and they’re more imaginative and sympathetic to the song. Typical of the album is “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” with congas that percolate throughout the song giving it energy and drive so that the other instruments don’t have to. The decks are cleared for Connick’s subtle vocal. Similarly, his version of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” builds, starting with him plinking out a few piano notes, answered by a few horns. Both parts get organized as his piano strings the melody together, punctuated and embraced by a growing number of horns including growling trombones. After almost a minute and a half of this, Connick finally sings while the piano and horns play a variation on the first minute. At the next instrumental break, the horns take over the melody as the piano moves to the support role. Rarely does the band do what you expect it to, nor does it overplay or dominate a song.

There was a time when I wasn’t sure that making space for Connick’s singing was a good idea – not that it was bad, only that he doesn’t handle a vocal in as showy a way as Bennett, for example. He’s more animated on What a Night! but still, he doesn’t seem like a song stylist. But the ease in singing is the sort of ease that Dean Martin had, making it seem as if he’s never working and that his time in the spotlight is an inside joke between himself and the listener. In Connick’s case, that sense is heightened by the subtle Southern-ness of his singing. But just as a broadened vowel here, a dropped ‘g’ there reveals his Southern roots, a pause followed by a hurried phrase or a playful rewrite of a lyric reveals the subtle art in his singing.

This is Connick’s third Christmas album and the strongest, though all are good. I also give him credit for being surprisingly adept at writing Christmas songs. He writes four for What a Night! including the playful “Santarrific” (featuring Lucien Barbarin on trombone and vocals) and the more purposeful “Song for the Hopeful.” The latter’s a little forced, and I won’t quibble with anyone who wonders if we really need more swing Christmas albums (certainly my first thought), but Christmas albums are never about need, and Connick does the traditional Christmas album about as well as anybody right now.