Holiday Express Part 3 - New Year's

Our friend David Federman has graced the blog with two previous Holiday Express musical compilations - for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. This final installment of 31 nostalgic songs commemorates New Year's. 

Here are David's notes:

One happy holiday eve deserves another. So here as a Christmas Eve present is a New Year's Eve present. This mix is as vintage as I get. But I wanted to take your minds off our troubled present and possibly thwarted future.

The mix is an experiment in inversion. I am imagining a New Year’s Eve no longer possible for me and my wife since Covid drove us indoors and relative penury keeps us there. My wife and I are trying to reconstruct the good times of our parents on this occasion, with records mostly made between World War One and Two. New Years then were manly public and now they are mainly private. Climate change and the rapidly disintegrating politics bring reluctance with every resolution because they are too small and frivolous for the magnitude of this moment.

So we will take leave of the present and celebrate in pub and nightclub and any other gathering place meant for joyful, intimate socializing. Dress for an evening out and wear shoes shined and suited for dancing. And if you drink a little too much, or expect to, take cabs. You'll in a safe place where the future can be taken for granted. So toast a time when forever was an earnest expectation and could be expected to last forever.

The mix remains marginally mindful of the dangers of those times and ours and I call your attention to the sophisticated menace of Charlie Kunz’s masterful version of Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” and the impossible wish for time-suspension in Geraldo’s version of “Let’s Stop the Clock.” Early 20th Vaudeville provided some eternally timely novelty. A British big band songstress, Eve Becke, makes a couple of appearances, as does American expatriate pianist and bandleader Charlie Kunz, who settled in England in the 1920s and remained there all his very popular professional life. I end with the most imaginative and occasion-specific version of "Farewell Blues" I have ever heard. 

Please join me in toasting David for all his contributions to this blog through the years!

LINK to Holiday Express Part 3