Robert Hicks - Winter Awhile (2022)

Liner notes by James Gavin (award-winning journalist and biographer of Chet Baker, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, and George Michael)

This album is a bottomless Christmas stocking of fun and surprise; it circles the globe and surveys a whirlwind of styles. They include the tightly orchestrated coolness of 1950s West Coast jazz as well as rhythm-and-blues, bebop, Far East exotica, Afro-Cuban rhythms, Hawaiian music, and Tchaikovsky. But wherever the album roams, it never loses its Christmas heart.

Winter Awhile came out of the mind and pen of Robert Hicks, a Portland-based singer-pianist known for his sly, insinuating performances of the retro jazz he loves. Among his proudest achievements is the 2000 album Textures in Hi-Fi, a collaboration with the legendary big-band arranger Pete Rugolo, who backed Robert with a dream orchestra of ‘50s West Coast sidemen.

Not even Robert’s staunchest fans, however, could have imagined him creating an album with the remarkable scope of Winter Awhile. Aside from playing piano throughout and singing on two songs, which he wrote, Robert conceived and arranged every track. He contracted 36 musicians, many from Portland’s opera, symphony, ballet, and jazz orchestras. The soloists include Paul Mazzio, Portland’s first-call jazz trumpeter; drummer Todd Strait, who played with Marian McPartland, Tal Farlow, and Woody Herman; and guitarist Dan Faehnle, who toured for three years with Diana Krall.

Robert’s musical eclecticism here recalls that of his idol, Henry Mancini. “Here We Come A-Wassailing” becomes an eight-minute suite that encompasses (among other styles) cool jazz, swing, bop, and the chamber-jazz elegance of the George Shearing Quintet. Samba percolates beneath the overture from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite. To “Arabian Dance,” from the same work, Robert adds the dulcimer-like santour from Persia. “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” is transformed into cha-cha-cha. The atmosphere is churchly and classical in Robert’s chamber-music arrangement, for strings and woodwinds, of “In the Bleak Midwinter,” a Gustav Holst hymn set to a 19th-century English poem about the birth of Jesus.

The album would not have been complete without his voice. Robert wrote himself a pair of groovy lounge tunes to sing: the tongue-in-cheek Hawaiian love song “Hoola” and “Winter Awhile,” whose R&B horn sound and backbeat give it a touch of Louis Jordan.

Foremost in Robert’s mind during the year it took to make this album was the holiday itself. “I like Christmas music to feel like Christmas,” he says. “Christmas should be fun. It also has tinges of melancholy. But I’d like to think that this record can be listened to at any time of the year; that it can stir up all kinds of emotion.

One thing seems certain: With Winter Awhile, Robert has produced an evergreen.