Download aura of self-regard has sullied your
enjoyment of his hits, you'd have to be a grinch to deny his vocal gift.
As a deceptively straightforward rocker with the Faces, Stewart merged
the disparate techniques of Sam Cooke and Mick Jagger to grand, if
short-lived, effect, and his first half-dozen solo albums excelled in
both songwriting and song selection while expanding his interpretive
range and further emphasizing the debt to Cooke. Over the past decade,
Stewart's pitch to aging boomers has included several entries in the Great American Songbook
series, throughout which, if the material occasionally outmatched him,
the singer distinguished himself from other reformed rockers as a
credible almost-crooner.
The Christmas album is, of course, perilous territory, even for real crooners, and that Stewart emerges from Merry Christmas, Baby
relatively unscathed should earn him a moment under the mistletoe with
the Kardashian of his choice. Verve chairman David Foster, who serves as
arranger and producer, demonstrates laudable discernment in choosing
the album's 13 songs, and the same goes for the requisite cameos: Cee Lo
Green, Mary J. Blige, and Trombone Shorty provide little boosts of
energy to Stewart along the way. On "Have Yourself a Merry Little
Christmas," supported by unobtrustive strings and a gently picked
acoustic guitar, Stewart invokes some of Louis Armstrong's phlegm on low
notes at the end of phrases. As ever, the singer goes beyond mere rote
to deliver each lyric with sensitive distinction: Even as the chords of
"White Christmas" wooze into one another, aided and abetted by strings
and a jazzy electric guitar, Stewart himself sounds grounded. Meanwhile,
the two rhythm n' blues-iest songs, the title track and "Red-Suited
Superman," recall in admirable fashion the soul-hit heyday of
ABC-Paramount in the mid '60s.
The boldest move on a generally safe album is a virtual duet with Ella Fitzgerald on "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" Fitzgerald's portions are incorporated in snatches so as not to upstage Stewart, whom otherwise she would outclass by a country mile. The Rat-Pack-once-removed fugue with Michael Bublé on "Winter Wonderland" is an awkward arrangement (Stewart and Bublé should stick with the harmonies), and Stewart's upper-range vibrato sometimes betrays affectations that the rest of the album labors to disguise. The album's high point is "Merry Christmas, Baby," a paean to December spending that Cee Lo enlivens considerably over brass and well-mixed wah-guitar. Stewart's Cooke playacting is very effective here, while Trombone Shorty adds helpful riffs and vocals alike. (Say what you will of Shorty's cameo promiscuity, he's rarely an unwelcome presence.) The arrangement is rather too glitzed-up with horns, but 'tis the season to forgive tinsel, and it's really the rhythm that asserts itself. In context, the song is an anachronism, but unlike Stewart's "Silent Night," it doesn't feel like a newly minted dollar bill crumpled to achieve the effect of age. It's also one of only two songs that shouldn't come with a matching wool sweater.
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