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View ProfilesPublished November 29, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. | Updated December 6, 2023 at 11:10 a.m.
I'll never forget the first time I saw a live production of The Nutcracker. Or, more accurately, I'll never forget forgetting The Nutcracker.
My parents, aggrieved by my assertion that the only Christmas song worth a damn was Run-D.M.C.'s "Christmas in Hollis," decided to (almost literally) drag my 11-year-old ass to downtown Burlington to catch a touring production of the ballet at the Flynn. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's classic tale of a child's imagination running wild on Christmas Eve struck little me as ironic, as the show had quite the opposite effect on me. In fact, I was dead asleep before the Mouse King even showed up in Act I.
I know, I know. I fell asleep during a massive battle scene with giant rodents kicking the shit out of soldiers under a towering Christmas tree. But for all the color and spectacle, I was hopelessly bored with the music. (Don't @ me. That's one of the reasons we have the wonderful Amy Lilly handling most of our classical music coverage: I'm an uncultured lout.)
Turns out I wasn't the only one who thought the soundtrack needed a remix. In 1960, jazz composer extraordinaire Duke Ellington and his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn gave Tchaikovsky's music a makeover on The Nutcracker Suite. They turned the ballet into a hard-swinging hot-house jazz record full of playful reinterpretations: "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" became "Sugar Rum Cherry," and "Dance of the Reed-Pipes" morphed into "Toot Toot Tootie Toot."
"Honestly, if you wanted to sort of 'get' Duke Ellington in one record, The Nutcracker is the one," Darol Anger told me by phone from his home in Nashville.
The violinist and founding member of jazzy bluegrass groups such as the David Grisman Quintet, the Turtle Island Quartet and Montreux has more than a passing interest in Ellington's take on the Christmas classic. Together with his band Mr. Sun, Anger has transmogrified Ellington's transmogrification of Tchaikovsky by recording a new version of The Nutcracker, this time for an acoustic string band. He and Mr. Sun have plotted out a holiday tour to perform their take on the ballet, including stops at the Chandler Music Hall in Randolph and the Richmond Congregational Church next month.
"Duke's version just swings so hard," Anger said. "Like, a million times harder than the original. But people forget how revolutionary those sounds were in 1960 — it sounded like jazz from Jupiter."
Mr. Sun's interpretation was hatched by mandolin player Joe K. Walsh, who heard some of Ellington's album on the radio and brought it in for the group. Blown away by the bold arrangements and the stellar playing of virtuoso saxophonists Paul Gonsalves and Johnny Hodges, the group seized on the idea of adapting the record for string music.
That was no easy feat, according to Anger. He and the other members of the band, including Walsh, guitarist Grant Gordy and bassist Aidan O'Donnell, spent the better part of a year hashing out new arrangements and figuring out how to translate Ellington's famously hard-to-decipher sounds.
"You have to have ears of steel, man," Anger said with a rueful laugh as he recalled the arduous task of transcribing Ellington's music. Fortunately, the band had a secret weapon in O'Donnell, whom Anger described as a "heavy jazz cat." After he graduated from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in the UK, one of O'Donnell's first gigs was touring America and performing Ellington's The Nutcracker Suite.
"Aidan is such a quiet dude, though," Anger recounted. "He didn't mention that for the first two months!"
Taking the various horn parts on the record and matching them up with the right stringed instruments was a large part of the battle. Some of the solos on Ellington's album are both incredibly powerful and notoriously difficult, such as Lawrence Brown's trombone solo on "Dance of the Floreadores (Waltz of the Flowers)."
"We gave that solo to Jerry Douglas, who came in for us to play it on the dobro," Anger said of the legendary bluegrass musician and 15-time Grammy Award winner. "He was like, 'Oh, great, I get to play the guessing stick solo,' because trombone can be so hard to figure out where the notes are. But he absolutely nails it."
Anger was quick to point out that Mr. Sun could take on such a time-consuming project only with the help of a grant from the FreshGrass Foundation. The nonprofit organization partners with institutions such as MASS MoCA and Berklee College of Music to curate the creation of world-class performing arts. It holds the FreshGrass Festivals in North Adams, Mass., and Bentonville, Ark., and publishes the music journal No Depression and online resource Folk Alley.
"There's no way we could have done any of this stuff and spent all this time on a project like this without them," Anger said of FreshGrass. "They're one of the only orgs left still commissioning new string music — not to mention providing a top-notch studio for us to record in."
To me, someone whose first job was in retail, the idea of having to listen to holiday music all year round sounds like a level of hell in Dante's Inferno. But it's all part of the job for Anger, who has recorded his share of Christmas albums in his career — many of them tracked in Vermont for the Windham Hill Records label at Will Ackerman's Imaginary Road Studios in West Townshend.
That's not Anger's only Vermont tie. Mr. Sun got their name while playing a show more than a decade ago in Richmond.
"We were standing near this children's library, and there was a giant picture of a sun with a face on it," Anger recalled. "Someone just said 'Mr. Sun' aloud, and it stuck. So it's pretty cool to come back and play Richmond, especially with a project like this."
When I told Anger that my first attempt at getting through the ballet ended with me sleeping through most of it, he laughed and revealed that he had only very recently seen the original for the first time.
"I'd just never had a chance to catch the ballet, so my girlfriend said, 'Screw it, let's just go,'" he said.
"Did you stay awake?" I couldn't help but ask.
"Oh, my God, it blew my mind," he replied. "It was amazing and so, so bizarre. Much weirder than I was prepared for — there's an acid quality to it all."
So maybe I'll go see two versions of The Nutcracker this holiday season, Tchaikovsky help me. I'll just have to remember to bring a Red Bull to the Flynn.
Mr. Sun play the Chandler Music Hall in Randolph on Saturday, December 9, and the Richmond Congregational Church on Sunday, December 10, as part of the "P.M. Sundays" concert series. Visit chandler-arts.org and valleystage.net for tickets.
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