Mambo, Santa Claus!

(“Shake your big, fat belly, make it shake like jelly!”)

One of my favorite things about this time of year is the music.  A lot of my favorite music is Christmas themed and you simply cannot listen to it in July.  Also, a lot of the music is simple enough that even I can play it on piano.  I have an extensive collection of Christmas music.  There is a lot of great, interesting, bizarre and not so great stuff that doesn’t always get played on the mainstream “Christmas” radio stations.  For the next 30 days let’s take a look at some of the less traditional work in this genre.

This is an annual favorite in the Firefly household.  On the Steve Allen “Cool Yule” post I mentioned that genre-themed Carols rarely work.  They sound gimmicky, dated, forced…  You can just imagine some Tin Pan Alley exec shouting, “The watusi is all the rage this week.  Write me a watusi Carol, now!”  Well, here we have a mambo Carol, but I contend this one works.  The tie-in with Santa isn’t too forced.  It would be fun to see Santa mambo and Santa’s a fun guy, he probably would mambo if asked.  And that big, fat, Santa belly would look good shaking to a mambo beat.  For those of you following Warren Sapp on this season’s “Dancing with the Stars,” you’ve seen firsthand how much fun it is to watch a big, fat man do the mambo, so we know the premise works.

Christmas novelty songs often imply a Jingle Bell effect; either real jingle bells being shaken, or the first few measures of the song played in the upper register on the piano.  This one does the latter, but it feels right with the mambo beat and the discordant nature of the chord matches the Latin structure.  I also love the slide guitar.  If you’ve never heard this one give it a listen and see if you don’t find yourself singing that you, too, want to see Santa do the mambo!

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