Jingle bell jazz

>> Some bebop with that fruitcake?

by LEN DOBBIN

It's jo jo time again (that's Spanish). Is there a jazz fan on your list? Let's start with a pair of books. The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz is Mark Miller's latest, a long-awaited encyclopaedia that covers Frederic Alarie through Jean-Pierre Zanella. A bit pricier is Whitney Balliett's Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000, a superb collection of articles by this marvellous writer.

Among the new seasonal CDs you might try are Justin Time for Christmas Three, 16 cuts by John Stetch, David Murray, Kenny Colman etc., or Snowflake Season by B.C. singer Karin Plato with Bill Coon, Brad Turner and others. There's also Verve Presents: The Very Best of Christmas Jazz, with folks like Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson, Dinah Washington and Mel Torme; A Nancy Wilson Christmas, where she's joined by a variety of people including the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All Star Big Band; or Together at Christmas featuring tenorman Houston Person and the late Etta Jones.

Box sets are always nice to receive and there are a number of four-CD packages on the Proper Box label. For the bopper on your list there's Bebop Spoken Here, a great look at the entire era. There's The Fats Navarro Story for the trumpet fan, and for the tenor sax lover there's a pair, Coleman Hawkins: The Bebop Years and Dexter Gordon's Settin' the Pace. For the big-band devotee they have The Woody Herman Story and The Stan Kenton Story and there's a set for guitar buffs, Hittin' On All Six--Lonnie Johnson through Jimmy Raney!

In the five-CD set department there's some great Art Pepper on The Hollywood Sessions, where that great reedman is heard on a number of sessions originally recorded for a small Japanese label. Sonny Stitt and Lee Konitz are among those involved.

In the "buy local" department, there's Fragments of a Memory by Sonny Greenwich, Nuage by Jeff Johnston and Shadows by the Loescher Trio. For more, try my top 10 list elsewhere in this edition of the Mirror. Happy shopping and happy holidays!