Various - New Orleans Christmas - album review

FESTIVE JAZZ

Some festive traditions are truly immovable: gluttony, credit card bills, tension between in-laws, you know the script, but others are there to be monkeyed around with. Hence forth, Mum’s Aled Jones carol CD can be tossed onto the fire as world music experts Putumayo provide us with an alternative soundtrack to the Yuletide celebrations. Eleven tracks of righteous soul, jazz and blues reworkings of all your favourite holiday clichés. Woozy Dixieland brass trumpeting in the birth of Christ makes a welcome change and enough of this is stylistically sound and tongue-in-cheek enough to warrant repeated listenings in between the repeats of Only Fools and Horses.