Holly Cole-A Night Before Christmas

Internationally acclaimed chanteuse Holly Cole has had great success taking a song out of its element and making it her own. With her Christmas program, she does all that and more. Cole will be resurrecting some songs from her perennially popular 2001 Christmas album, Baby It’s Cold Outside. She will also be incorporating material from her critically acclaimed 2008 self-titled release. Her show and song selection also address the multi-faceted nature of Christmas, displaying the often playful subversiveness she has brought to her own music.

“Song interpretation” can mean a lot of things to people. To Holly Cole, it means much more than just rephrasing a timeless melody, or transposing a tune to a different key. She gets inside the songs she sings, making them her own in provocative ways. Over the years Cole has rearranged songs by Cole Porter, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, and The Beatles, and in this project she turns to the timeless Christmas Songbook.

Born in Nova Scotia, Cole was surrounded by music early on. Her parents were both classical musicians, and Holly, like everyone else in the family, started on piano. She moved on to professional voice lessons in her teens, and found jazz on a trip to Boston to visit her brother, a bass player studying at the Berklee School of Music. Upon moving to Toronto, she began gigging regularly and formed the Holly Cole Trio with bassist David Piltch and pianist Aaron Davis. The trio became a mainstay on the Toronto scene, and record deals followed shortly: first with Alert Records, then with Blue Note, who released her breakthrough 1992 recording Blame It On My Youth. More adventurous projects would follow: 1993′s Don’t Smoke in Bed featured a crossover hit in the trio’s rendition of Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now, and 1995′s Temptation featured songs written by Tom Waits.

Cole’s latest record, Holly Cole, puts her in familiar territory, albeit with a bigger ensemble behind her thanks to co-producer Greg Cohen and arranger Gil Goldstein. She turns in her strongest recording yet on tunes by Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, and more.

“Ms. Cole has invented her own niche,” -NY Times

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