Black Music Sunday: O come ye, and hear some holiday harmonies
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 240 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
We’ve got quite a few holidays on the December calendar, including the winter solstice (also known as Yule), Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas Eve, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. There is music attached to all of them, in multiple genres. So come all ye celebrators, and give a listen to a cross section of tunes from each.
Winter solstice is also celebrated as Yule.
As Helen Berger writes for Brandeis University:
Yule will be celebrated by Wiccans and many other Pagans in the Northern Hemisphere on Dec. 21, the day of the winter solstice. For Pagans, the shortest day of the year marks the end of the descent into darkness and the beginning of the return of the light as the days begin to get longer after the solstice. Like many other religious holidays, Yule is a celebration of light.
“In The Bleak Midwinter” is a winter solstice hymn written by Christina Rossetti. This classical instrumental duet, performed by cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and his sister, pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, evokes its sentiment.
Neo-classical pianist Karim Kamar, who built a piano career using social media as his launch pad, composed this delicate tribute to the winter solstice.
But Kamar’s not the only one naming tunes after the shortest day of the year. In the jazz vein, Ralph Towner composed the album “Solstice” for the avant-garde ECM label. Michael G. Nastos reviewed it for AllMusic.
When Ralph Towner burst onto the contemporary jazz scene in the mid-70s, listeners were well aware of his awesome talent as a member of Oregon. But when Solstice was issued on the ECM label, it took the brilliant guitarist's caché to a much higher level, especially as a composer. With the otherworldly curved soprano sax and flute playing of Jan Garbarek, the precise drumming of Jon Christensen, and unique bass sounds of Eberhard Weber, the music on this album lifted the ECM/Euro-styled jazz and improvised music to a new realm of pure expressionism. Simply put -- this music is stunningly beautiful.
Here’s Towner’s “Winter Solstice.”
This year, Hannukah begins on the evening of Dec. 25 and continues till Jan 2.
Hanukkah — also spelled Chanukah or other transliterations from Hebrew — is Judaism’s “festival of lights.” On eight consecutive nightfalls, Jews gather with family and friends to light one additional candle in the menorah — a multibranched candelabra.
In Hebrew, Hanukkah means “dedication,” and the holiday marks the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in the 2nd century BC, after a small group of Jewish fighters liberated it from occupying foreign forces.
RELATED STORY: Black Music Sunday: For Hanukkah, let's enjoy some kosher gospel with Joshua Nelson
“Hava Nagoya” is a Jewish folk song that is sung at many festivities, including Hanukkah, and it has a fascinating history, detailed by Dr. James Loeffler for My Jewish Learning.
Hava Nagila’s Long, Strange Trip: The unlikely history of a Hasidic melody
If there is one Jewish song known by Jews and non-Jews alike, it is undoubtedly Hava Nagila (הבה נגילה), which is Hebrew for “let us rejoice.” From its obscure origins in early 20th-century Palestine, the song has gone on to become a perennial favorite at weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs and Jewish — and non-Jewish — cultural events around the world. With its short lyrics and simple yet distinctive melody, Hava Nagila has been recorded hundreds of times by musicians ranging from Neil Diamond, the Barry Sisters, and Harry Belafonte to the contemporary pop singer Ben Folds and the Serbian Gypsy brass band legend Boban Marcovic. Yet for all of its widespread popularity, few know the history of this global Jewish hit.
Here’s Harry Belafonte’s version:
One of the musicians I featured in 2021’s “Black and Jewish musicians and songwriters forged musical history—together,” was orthodox Jewish rapper Nissim Black. Black, along with rapper Rami Matan Even-Esh—better known as Kosha Dillz—released this remix of Adam Sandler’s iconic “Saturday Night Live” hit “The Hanukkah Song” in 2021.
This isn’t Black music or Black musicians, but I’m a Queen fan, so I had to include “Bohemian Chanukah,” a take on “Bohemian Rhapsody” sung by acapella vocal group Six13.
As History notes, Kwanzaa is the United States’ newest holiday.
Dr. Maulana Karenga, professor and chairman of Black Studies at California State University, Long Beach, created Kwanzaa in 1966. After the Watts riots in Los Angeles, Dr. Karenga searched for ways to bring African Americans together as a community. He founded US, a cultural organization, and started to research African “first fruit” (harvest) celebrations. Karenga combined aspects of several different harvest celebrations, such as those of the Ashanti and those of the Zulu, to form the basis of the week-long holiday. Kwanzaa 2023 begins on Tuesday, December 26, and lasts through Monday, January 1, 2024.
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Seven Principles
The seven principles, or Nguzo Saba are a set of ideals created by Dr. Maulana Karenga. Each day of Kwanzaa emphasizes a different principle.
Unity:Umoja (oo–MO–jah)
To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.Self-determination: Kujichagulia (koo–gee–cha–goo–LEE–yah)
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.Collective Work and Responsibility: Ujima (oo–GEE–mah)
To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together.Cooperative Economics: Ujamaa (oo–JAH–mah)
To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.Purpose: Nia (nee–YAH)
To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.Creativity: Kuumba (koo–OOM–bah)
To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.Faith: Imani (ee–MAH–nee)
To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
Here’s Sweet Honey in the Rock singing the “Seven Principles.”
The late, great soul singer Teddy Pendergrass released ”Happy Kwanzaa” in 1998, on the album “This Christmas (I'd Rather Have Love).” The lyrics celebrate the seven principles.
Christmas Eve is celebrated on Dec. 24, and for most Christians, it’s not just the day before Christmas—it’s a holiday in its own right.
For many Christians, it is a day to remember the events around the birth of Jesus. Some people, especially Roman Catholics, attend a midnight mass at church. Traditionally, the midnight mass started at midnight, just as Christmas Eve ended and Christmas Day started. However, now may churches hold this church service in the late afternoon or early evening of Christmas Eve.
Many Protestant churches also hold special services on Christmas Eve. These are often candle-lit and may be very solemn. Some include the presentation of a crib scene depicting the holy family, with statues or actors representing Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus, the shepherds and various animals thought to be present in the stable where Jesus was born.
The holiday is celebrated as Noche Buena in many Spanish-speaking countries.
My all-time favorite R&B tribute to the holy night is The Temptations’ version of “Silent Night.” Journalist and author Neely Tucker wrote about hearing it for the first time for The Washington Post in 2004.
A Motown 'Silent Night' That Echoes Down the Years
The original five members of the Temptations had grown up in the Deep South and in the church, by which I mean the Protestant black church -- Baptist, really, of the type where it is pronounced "Babdist" -- and it was always one of the group's hallmarks that the gospel influence of their youth had infused the voices of their adult years.
But this was something else entirely. This was gospel emotion over a Motown beat with the lyrics of a classic European hymn. "Silent Night" was written nearly 200 years ago by a Austrian priest and a composer. The first time it was played was on Christmas Eve, 1818, in Oberndorf. By 1900 it had become a sacred classic, narrating the birth of the Christ child, God's son on Earth.
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"It was like magic," recalls Gil Askey, the veteran Motown composer, in an e-mail from his home in Australia. "If you've ever been in the Holiness Church, and seen those sisters scream when they're filled with the Spirit, you will know how I felt, or shall I say how the Temptations felt. They didn't want to stop, just grooved on out."
Pay special attention to baritone Melvin Franklin.
No discussion of Christmas Eve and Black music would be complete without the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Her 1986 “Oh Holy Night” duet, performed on David Brennan’s “Nightlife” show with bandleader Billy Preston, is a classic.
And onto Christmas Day. I have been browsing dozens of lists ranking the top soul, R&B, jazz, blues, or pop Christmas songs. In the end, I did a coin toss to choose just one song. My former classmate at Howard University, Donny Hathaway, won.
From the Grammy Awards:
How Donny Hathaway's "This Christmas" Became An Eternal Holiday Classic
Only five months after his widely adored debut album, Everything Is Everything, Hathaway released "This Christmas" as a single in December 1970. Though it has touched hearts all around the world, the track particularly feels like it taps into the core of the Midwestern Christmases of Hathaway's childhood: the warmth of gathering with loved ones around a chimney fire, the twinkle of a special someone's eye underneath the mistletoe, the streetlights reflecting off the mounds of snow out the window. "Fireside is blazing bright/We're caroling through the night/And this Christmas will be a very special Christmas for me," Hathaway smiles as the horn section roars to life.
This Christmas" was especially important for the distinct leap forward the song took for Christmas music released by a Black artist. "Up until then African American music wasn't represented in Christmas," percussionist Ric Powell told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2009. "There was Nat King Cole and Charles Brown's 'I'll Be Home For Christmas.' During the mid-1960s, James Brown was also cutting holiday tracks like 'Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto,' but they were more in the self-contained funky spirit of the Godfather of Soul than Christmas."
Have a listen and enjoy the wholesome music video.
New Year’s Eve closes out December, the year, and this installment of “Black Music Sunday.” I’ll leave you with my mom’s all time favorite female jazz vocalist, Ella Fitzgerald, singing “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve.” The song, written by Frank Loesser in 1947, and I are the same age.
I look forward to hearing your holiday favorites, so join me in the comments and share them! Over the years, I’ve written over 20 stories here at Daily Kos featuring Christmas music and celebration. I’ll be sharing them below as well.
Happy holidays to one and all!