This is the 100th episode of The Twelve Songs of Christmas, and I’m spending it with New Orleans' jazz vocalist Meryl Zimmerman. In late November 2022, she released her second album, A Very Meryl Christmas, so we talked about it as a business proposition and chewed on the uncommon song choices she made for it. Some standards are there, but so are some less common choices. As you’ll see, the more familiar ideas are dressed up in uncommon arrangements that take them into interesting places. Her bossa nova version of “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” was compelling enough to make me seriously consider an episode focused on versions of that song to fit in the week after Christmas. It didn’t happen, but maybe next year. In this episode, we talk about her cover of Louis Armstrong’s “Zat You, Santa Claus?” and I mention how Buster Poindexter’s version helped me see the song Meryl’s way. Here’s that version. On this episode, I also draw attention to Attention K-Mart Shoppers, and online archive of digitized albums of background music played in the 1960s and ‘70s in Kresge and K-Mart stores. I’m fascinated by the Christmas albums, of course, but there’s a lot to hear there. After this episode, I’m going to take a week off the start the next hundred episodes with a look back at the best of the first seasons. That will take more listening and editing than I can manage in a week, but I’ll be back with that in two weeks. If you haven't already done so, please do what you have to do to get Twelve Songs in your podcast feed. You can find us at Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Pandora, and Spotify. During our post-Christmas break, we went live on the IHeartRadio platform, TuneIn, Audible, and Amazon's podcast platform. Now, you can ask Alexa and Siri to play the Twelve Songs of Christmas podcast and let them pop it up on your voice-controlled personal assistant.

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related