Gordon Jenkins Conducts Holiday Music

Gordon Jenkins

Let's take a look at some of the seasonal items that the great conductor-arranger-composer Gordon Jenkins put out from 1942-52, in company with such luminaries as Dick Haymes and Louis Armstrong.

Jenkins began recording for the new Capitol label just a few months after it began in 1942, both in support of vocalists Martha Tilton and Connie Haines and under his own name, with Bob Carroll for the vocal choruses.

It's the last team that made the first record in this collection, a cover version of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," which Bing Crosby had introduced in Holiday Inn that year and recorded for Decca. Carroll was a sonorous vocalist whom I admire and have featured here, but he was a more impersonal singer than Bing. At the time of the recording, he had most recently been with Charlie Barnet's band.

Jenkins began an association with Decca in 1945, and quickly found success with his first recording of his "Manhattan Tower." He soon was providing backing for such stars as Dick Haymes, including our next three recordings.

Bob Carroll, Dick Haymes

The first is a V-Disc of "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!," which came from a December 1945 aircheck of the CBS show Everything for the Boys. Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn wrote the tune earlier in the year, and it had become a hit for Vaughn Monroe.

That same year, Mel Tormé and Bob Wells produced one of the finest of all seasonal tunes, "The Christmas Song," a hit the following year for Nat Cole. Haymes and Jenkins covered it in 1947, a superb version. 

I believe "The Christmas Song" was actually the B-side of the Haymes release. The plug side was one of the new compositions that year: Irving Gordon and Lester Lee's "Christmas Dreaming." It's a superior song but has never become a standard, despite the Haymes-Jenkins recording and the better-known Frank Sinatra-Axel Stordahl competition.

Floyd Huddleston

In 1949, Jenkins produced a two-sided holiday release for Decca. One side was the excellent, and little-known "December." It was a new song written by two vocalists who also wrote music together - Al Rinker (once of the Rhythm Boys) and Floyd Huddleston. The latter is the soloist here; he acquits himself very well. It's an appealing piece in an affecting performance.

The other song was Jenkins' own "Happy New Year," an ironic title if ever there was one. The singer laments a lost love, wishing her a happy new year. It's a beautiful, depressing song, very much in the vein of Jenkins' earlier "Goodbye." The singer is another talented, although unheralded artist, Bob Lenn. (Decca misspells his name as "Senn" on the label.) Lenn worked in New York as a studio vocalist, vocal coach and actor. I placed this song at the end of the playlist.

The final record in this set features a performer today identified with the holidays, if not so at the time - trumpeter-vocalist Louis Armstrong. Decca had paired Armstrong and Jenkins as far back as 1949, and in 1952, the duo came up with a two-sided holiday release - "White Christmas" and "Winter Wonderland." The latter was written as far back as 1934, when it was a hit for Guy Lombardo. It had a comeback in 1946 via releases from Johnny Mercer and Perry Como. Armstrong is in characteristic form for this coupling, and he and Jenkins mesh better than I would have expected.

Armstrong recently appeared here on the blog with some of his earlier jazz records.

The sound on these vintage recordings is generally vivid.

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Louis Armstrong