Calling the Carolwauling to Account

These days legislators legislate about everything at the drop of a constituent. This being so, I wonder if they couldn’t slip in a bill that would make it a capital offense to use Christmas music on commercials.

It is thrilling to think how well the national composure would be served if “The Twelve Days of Christmas” did not fall on your ears some time in late October, and “Jingle Bells” did not seek to urge you to a brassiere sale in early November.

I would add a subsection that also barred Christmas carols from the canned music, orchestrated to achieve a unique glutinous blah, that insinuates itself upon you in elevators and lobbies.

I understand the use of the carols in the sales pitches. It doesn’t simply identify the season, it pokes at every guilt cell in your body, reminding you that you have not yet bought a single present or mailed a single card.

(There is another piece of legislation I have considered that would make it against the law to mail Christmas cards before Dec. 15, but I realize this would be unconstitutional and violate First Amendment rights on free speech. It would also make life even more hellish for the Postal Service. But I received my first Christmas card in November, and while I can understand the feeling of unmitigated virtue and righteousness it gave the sender, it left me depressed for several days.)

The trouble with the wholesale expropriation of Christmas music is that there is little enough left of Christmas memory. If the joys of the season survive at all (and of course they do), it is a narrow triumph over distractions, busyness, harassments, bombardments of wheedle and an all-over feeling that the holiday spirit you remember is fading faster than the hair at your brow line or your ability to wear size 34 undershorts.

The lovely, innocent Christmas songs that echo back from childhood recitals and frosty evening choirs fight gallantly against becoming banal, although the arrangements in the commercials are usually constructed, I keep feeling, to force the tune upon you without distracting you from the pitch.

Yet there is hope. The persisting vitality and charm of the Christmas repertoire struck me quite overwhelmingly the other day when Don Waldrop, himself a trombonist, sent me an album called “The Hollywood Trombones: ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ ”

Leonard Feather recently lamented the disappearance of the jazz trombonist. It is now clear that Waldrop and 18 other trombonists were off making this album. The 19 trombones--tenor, bass and contrabass--augmented only by keyboard, string bass and drums, do all the familiar Christmas pleasures, plus a couple of bright extras like the Prelude to Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” and a very short Catalonia carol called “Fum, Fum, Fum.”

The arrangements are all new, naturally, including a rousing version of “Winter Wonderland” set by Bob Florence, who also played keyboard at the sessions. After a brisk, walking-bass introduction, it becomes a crisply swinging big band tune that Stan Kenton would have welcomed into his book. Also Kentonian is Florence’s long and lyrical handling of “Auld Lang Syne.”

You might well expect sonorities from 19 trombones, and the group’s version of “Silent Night,” arranged by Tommy Pederson, has a glorious choral sound, as reverential in feeling as a starry night sky. What you might not expect is the lightness of touch, the chamberlike delicacy of some of the intricate counterpoint. Never were massed trombones lighter on their feet.

The Robert Wells-Mel Torme standard “The Christmas Song” (better known as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), arranged by Dick Nash, presents the melody as a singing, soaring solo.

The enterprise in its freshness, taste (deeply respectful of the songs that now have the status of hymns), its invention and virtuosity, is a real gift--and not a moment too soon, either.

The album is on the HMA label, distributed by Crystal. Information from HMA at Box 1807, Hollywood, Calif. 90078.