AUTUMN 2003: A BRIEF HISTORY OF SNOW

As most as you know, for the past two years i’ve been working on an album of original holiday/winter songs. This has been a somewhat episodic endeaver, many of the tunes written during time stolen from others obligations, like touring, rehearsing and painting, with eggshell white, the increasingly transparent siding of our 1791 farm house... This summer I finished the last two compositions and we started recording the album - Watching The Snow – on july 21st.
Since all of you have been so enthusiastic about this project (not to mention patient), I thought you might enjoy a little thumbnail history of the entire process.
To begin with, I studied, with interest, the isolated little genre of (non-traditional) holiday music and found only a handful of compositions which felt like standards. My friend Steve Khan’s father, Sammy Chan, co-wrote two of the best ones, “Let It Snow!” and “The Christmas Waltz”. Nat King Cole’s rendition of Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song” is nearly everyone’s perennial favorite. My own personnal favorite is "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, “the melody of wich has lent itself to many beautiful jazz reharmonizations.
After this initial period of “research”, I started, haltingly at first, to write some wintersongs. Though I wrote two or three of these last year, it was this past Winter, here in the northeast, wich inspired me most (in view of our record breaking snowfall amounts). By early spring, most of the compositions were finished and I had already sent home-studio demos of them to Charles Blenzig, my musical director, who wrote the arrangements as each new installment arrived.
It soon became obvious that we had missed, by a wide margin, the delivery deadline for a Christmas retail release here in the U.S. But, undaunted, we plunged into the recording and, at this writing, the record is nearly mixed and mastered. Though it will be released at retail in Japan by my friend at Columbia Records, it will be available here, this Fall, exclusively online.
Thanks for listening (and waiting)
Health, prosperity, Happiness

Michael Franks


PS. Franks sempre foi um admirador da nossa música - gravou com João Donato, Eumir Deodato e Djavan, entre outros, além de um ardoroso fã de Tom Jobim. Este seu último CD - lançado em novembro no Japão - é um dos mais jazzísticos que fez, apesar de todos os temas trazerem uma ligação com as festas de fim-de-ano. Como curiosidade, dois brasileiros nos créditos: Romero Lubambo, guitar, e Café, percussão. Não há dúvida que seria um presente bárbaro de Natal para os que gostam de jazz. O CD, aliás, é bom do inicio ao fim.