It’s the first Sunday of Advent.  In our house that means the Christmas music has started.  From now through Epiphany, for hours each day, via cassette tapes, compact discs and mp3 files, Christmas music will resound.

A New England Christmas and Feliz Navidad in Santa Fe.  Handel’s Messiah in both its traditional and soulful interpretations. Gregorian chant and rap.  Blues and bluegrass.  Jazz and country.  Rock and gospel.  Celtic and soul.  Calypso and New Age.  Acoustic, electric and electronic.  Sacred and secular.  Vocal, instrumental and a capella.  Devotional, sensual and materialistic.

Yo-Yo Ma and Bootsy Collins.  Doris Day and the Ramones (on the same CD!).  The McGarrigles and the Nevilles.  Gene Autry and Mahalia Jackson.  Ella Fitzgerald and James Taylor.  The London Symphony Orchestra and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  Angelique Kidjo and Papa Wemba.  Sting and Enya.  The St. Louis Jesuits and the Blind Boys of Alabama.  Run-DMC and Rascal Flatts.  Bing Crosby and Ray Charles. The Pussycat Dolls and the Indigo Girls.  Dolly Parton and Stevie Wonder.  Cee-Lo Green and the Muppets.  And more.  So much more.  Read the rest of this entry »

For many musicians, New Orleans is as close to sacred ground as you can get in these United States.

New Orleans holds Congo Square, the only place in the antebellum South where slaves could and did regularly gather to drum and to dance.

New Orleans produced Louis Armstong, whose use of the backbeat revolutionized popular music worldwide and is the basis for his claim to the title of “Most Influential Musician Of The 20th Century”.

Jazz was born in New Orleans.  (The word “jazz” itself is likely derived from Gaelic.)  As was “The Queen of Gospel”, Mahalia Jackson.

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The internet is a wild and wonder-filled place.  This video comes to us courtesy of the combined talents of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir and Msgr. Charles Pope, pastor of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Church in Washington, DC.  It’s an uplifting and almost unimaginably eclectic combination of images—marrying Msgr. Pope’s current pastoral work with his previous experiences as a church musician and computer systems analyst.