Isaiah J. Thompson
‘A Guaraldi Holiday’
Outside in Music

Christmas Month at Birdland
Appearing December 21-25:
Klea Blackhurst, Jim Caruso, and Billy Stritch, ‘A Swinging Birdland Christmas’
Monty Alexander Trio, ‘Monty Alexander’s Holiday Show’
Champian Fulton, ‘Christmas with Champian’

Unlike a frequent co-star, John Pizzarelli, who can keep a crowd more than entertained even without a guitar or a note of music, Isaiah J. Thompson is a man of few words on stage, preferring to let the piano do the talking. Yet he made a very pithy observation during his early show at Birdland on Tuesday: “Sometimes people will tell me that they don’t like jazz much. I say to them, ‘Well, do you like the ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ music?’ And when they say, ‘Yes,’ I tell them, ‘You might want to rethink that.’”

At the very least, Mr. Thompson’s shows this week at Birdland and his new album, “A Guaraldi Holiday,” make the necessary point that Vince Guaraldi (1928-76) was one of the major combo-leaders and composers of the 1960s, with a legacy that matches Dave Brubeck, Herb Alpert, Horace Silver, or any other instrumentalist for staying power — and perhaps exceeds all of them in terms of recognition in the current century.  

In addition to the album, there’s also a new video of Mr. Thompson and his quartet playing live at the Jazz Kitchen in Indianapolis under the auspices of the American Pianists Association, which presented Mr. Thompson with their highest award earlier this year.

When he’s not leading his own trios and quartets — or winning competitions — Mr. Thompson is mostly heard as the pianist with Mr. Pizzarelli’s long-running trio, and the new album is a full-on collaboration, for which Mr. Pizzarelli served as producer and helped Mr. Thompson to fully realize his own ideas. His two shows on Tuesday night served to launch a concentrated week of holiday-centric programming at the Midtown Manhattan jazz shrine.  

Mr. Thompson also stated that, in terms of re-interpreting the classic Guaraldi themes written for the original “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965), there wasn’t much that he wanted to change. As with the music of Thelonious Monk, these tunes seem to come with an instruction manual, and latter-day interpreters rarely mess with them. Mr. Thompson’s major adjustment was to add a tenor saxophone, played by the resourceful Julian Lee, which makes these current performances sound sufficiently different from the originals.

Mr. Lee is a commanding player, and he and Mr. Thompson make a formidable team; well-known Guaraldi holiday “cues” like “Christmas is Coming” and “Linus and Lucy” now sound both fresh and familiar. Perhaps because the tenor makes the themes sound somewhat heavier, bassist Marty Jaffe and drummer Miguel Russel help Mr. Thompson to lighten the mixture; their playing behind the Thompson-Lee combination was even more swinging than usual. 

In addition to which, on “Christmas is Coming,” we hear, in the last 30 seconds, the sounds of a holiday party: cheers, handclaps, and shouts of seasonal joy. The closing track, “Linus and Lucy,” with its unique and highly funky stop-time breaks, is already a party unto itself, and is now even more so with Mr. Lee’s tenor joining in the festivities.

The album has a few exceptional guests, also present at Birdland. Tyreek McDole, who recently won the Sarah Vaughan Jazz Vocal competition, sang “Little Birdie,” which was one of several lesser known Guaraldi pieces in the program, along with “Thanksgiving Theme” and “Great Pumpkin Waltz,” all infrequently heard pieces from later “Peanuts” specials.  

Robbie Lee sang “The Christmas Song” from the Nat King Cole songbook, and trumpeter Anthony Hervey growled entertainingly through “O Christmas Tree”; at Birdland, he prefaced this with “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” as if to awaken the inner child in all of us.

Christmas has been celebrated all month at Birdland; last Monday, veteran vocalist Karen Mason gave us a memorable show and over the weekend countdown to the holiday, no less than three separate shows are playing between December 21 and the holiday on Monday. 

“A Swinging Birdland Christmas” starring Klea Blackhurst, Jim Caruso & Billy Stritch is returning for its 14th consecutive holiday season and pianist Monty Alexander’s Holiday Show, another Christmas must, not least because of the great keyboardist’s spiritual affinity for jazz’s all-time greatest Christmas celebrant, the late Nat King Cole. (We reviewed both of those shows in these pages last year.)  In between, the very talented and charming pianist-singer Champian Fulton is also performing a Christmas show — if you time it properly, and don’t overdo the egg-nog, you can catch all three in one evening. 

I was saddened that at first Isaiah J. Thompson’s “Guaraldi Holiday” show has already moved on; I would imagine he’s back on the road with the John Pizzarelli Trio. But between the new album, the Jazz Kitchen video, and the other holiday shows coming into Birdland, clearly there’s enough Christmas to go around.