Nat & Dean At Christmas

Recording information: Capitol Recording Studios, Hollywood, CA; Capitol Studios, Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA.
This holiday set combines a disc each of Dean Martin and Nat King Cole singing Christmas songs and carols, drawn from each singer's overlapping stay at Capitol Records through the 1950s and 1960s. Both singers had smooth, laid-back, and unhurried singing styles that conveyed a kind of casual warmth no matter what kind of material they tackled, so pairing these two discs has some obvious aesthetic sense. There are some lovely gems here from both, including Martin's uptown croon through the blues on "The Christmas Blues" and his lovely, jazzy, and very love-stricken take on "How Do You Speak to an Angel," and Cole's definitive version of "The Christmas Song," his choir and vocal-only turn at "I Saw Three Ships," and his silly but impossibly endearing "The Little Christmas Tree," which is nothing less than a love song to a Christmas tree -- luckily mostly free of metaphoric inference. Together like this, Martin and Cole make obvious sonic sense, and there's a lot of warmth and seasonal joy in these 25 vintage tracks. ~ Steve Leggett