Dianne Reeves Christmas Time Is Here Performance

On December 1 I returned to the beautiful Max M & Marjorie S Fisher Music Center to hear the renowned jazz singer Dianne Reeves Christmas Time is Here performance. My seat was far higher than the last time I went but luckily my height proved to be useful to see the stage. Running late, the announcer came out and told us his experience with Dianne and the wonderful performance we were about to see. After that the pianist Peter Martin, bassist Reginald Veal, guitarist Romero Lubambo, and drummer Terreon Gully came out to the stage and started set up. They started playing their own warm up melody's, each melody similar in tone and rhythm and as they continued, I realized they were playing a song, This surprised me for I realized that the show
The first song was “Christmas Time is Here” which is,” a popular Christmas song written by Lee Mendelson and Vince Guaraldi for the 1965 TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas.” (Wikipedia ). The song itself felt very familiar to me, like I have heard it before and now I know it is from the classic Christmas special A Charlie Brown Christmas. The sound was not as calm as the originally but instead more fast pace adding this feeling of holiday joy to it. It made remember when I was much younger and how to my young eyes Christmas was much more beautiful with glittering white snow and colorful wrapped gifts. Dianne sung it very similar to the original song but she added this unique singing technique called scat as Roseanna defines,” Scat singing is vocal improvisation with wordless syllables, combining improvised melodies, motifs and rhythmic patterns using the voice as an instrument…” ( An Introduction to Scat Singing). It was a very interesting how these “wordless syllables” added this unique flavor to the song that is hard to describe but overall was very pleasant and fun to
( Wikipedia). The song started with only the drums playing for about a minute. It was unclear to me if he was playing off of his sheet music for he was just ornamenting. Soon he came to the classic part of the song that represents the little drummer boy playing his drums for the newborn Jesus. I could easily imagine a small child dressed in his wool coat playing his drum in the snow. That was when the rest of the group joined in and Dianne started singing with the drummer play that classic part of ‘par rup pa pum, pum’. It was this melodic unison that gave it this nice marching sound of everyone coming to see the newborn king. What I found so amazing about this song was the attention that was given to the drummer throughout the