Haul out the holly, deck the halls — it’s the holiday season. No other season has inspired more music than the Christmas season. And as far as the 20th century goes, no other music genre has quite captured the joy quite like jazz.
Since the 1940s, jazz and pop singers have released an uncountable amount of Christmas albums — which achieved the height of their popularity in the 1960s, when it was almost a requirement for every musician to release at least one Christmas album — a tradition that is still filling playlists to this day. Even in the 2010s and '20s, pop artists like Cher, Norah Jones, Samara Joy, Kelly Clarkson, Clay Aiken, Alicia Keys, Brandy, and The Backstreet Boys have all released Christmas albums like it’s still a rite of passage. This episode, however, we’ll focus mostly on recordings from the 1940s through the 90s — a half-century of seasonal swing.