" data-original-title="" title="">Wynton Marsalis has explored this format before, with 1989's Crescent City Christmas Card. Only "Jingle Bells" makes a reappearance as do saxophonist Wessell Anderson, trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, bassist Reginald Veal, drummer Herlin Riley and the inclusion of an operatic vocalist on a few tracks, Roberta Gumbel this time around (the band is a ten-piece). But the album's aesthetic draws most directly from the banjo and guitar of guest Don Vappie, giving the album its overt Creole flavor and ability to sound both modern and vintage simultaneously, an appealing mixture. The band is stymied, however, on the vocal tracks featuring Gumbel; her voice is overly dramatic, almost church-like (surely intentional), and lost is the fun and pliability of the purely instrumental tracks.

Trio West—pianist Eldad Zvulun, bassist Neal Miner and drummer/leader Tobias Gebb—present the second volume of their takes on holiday repertoire. The obvious template for this album is Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas in both instrumentation and perky swing. The most successful tracks—and that means combining inventiveness with esteem—are Gebb's overtly named arrangements like "O Tannenbaum Funk" or "We Three Kings Waltz." The others are taken more conservatively without much variation to the original versions. It is an odd choice for a relatively young band to devote two-thirds of their recorded output to Christmas music but the more Trio West does it, the less it comes across as a commercial ploy and becomes more of a sincere exploration.

Unsurprisingly,