Christmas Memories from Roberta Silva & Stan Owen, Jr.

What great memories I have of recording each of these Christmas Songs and Carols!

Roberta Silva and I collaborated to record twenty-two (22) Christmas pieces during four Christmas Seasons. These recordings are featured in five years of my past Christmas recording projects, and more than one recording was incorporated into other collections and projects.

Home for Christmas – 2001
Home for the Holidays – 2003
The Christmas Rose Is Blooming – 2007
The Spirit of Christmas – 2008
Simply Christmas – 2009

For this Christmas-Project (2022), I collected all twenty-two recordings together for the first time. The combined audio-program is slightly over sixty-three (63) minutes long. I extracted each of these from five CD’s made in years past. I thought I might find some volume tweaking, at least between years, necessary. However, I left audio levels as they were originally mastered by me.

Rather than to debate with myself about program-order, I decided to present the songs in their original order by project and year. There are two exceptions: First, the version of “The Little Drummer Boy” included here is one to which I added instrumentation and “generated” vocal-harmonies that were not part of the original arrangement. Second, because Roberta’s performance of “Some Children See Him” is to me so wonderful, and usually brings tears to my eyes — I positioned it as the concluding work of this collection.

We improvised all of these arrangements except for “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Some Children See Him,” which were arranged by Dave Grusin. I transcribed those using good speakers and ears, a sharp pencil, music-manuscript-paper, and lots of erasers. These two pieces are both on James Taylor’s Christmas Album, for which Dave Grusin arranged several of my favorite selections.

I concatenated all the songs into a single 63-minute-long audio file. For the bitrate-curious, I rendered the mp3’s that were output, at a handful of bitrate settings from 32kbps (32,000 bits-per-second) to 320kbps. 128kbps is “normal” with higher bitrates carrying more audio content that is “left out” in lower bitrate rendering. You won’t want to listen for long to the lower bitrate renderings, but I include them for those who might be interested in an a/b comparison. Be sure to listen to the 320 kbps one, it is the best.

Merry Christmas, 2022 from Stan Owen, Jr. & Creative Minds’ Music