Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O
‘The Shape of Christmas to Come’
Palmetto

About halfway through Matt Wilson’s new album, the drummer’s trio, with Jeff Lederer on multiple reeds and bassist Paul Sikivie, launches into a traditional holiday carol, “Good King Wenceslas.” For this number, Mr. Lederer, here playing clarinet, starts poking around the 170-year-old melody, stretching it out, elongating it, and slowing it down to a crawl tempo; this isn’t rubato, though, as it is still in distinct tempo but an incredibly slow one.  

It almost seems like the group, formally known as Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O, wanted to parody the song, in a way that reminded me of Walt Kelly’s lyrics in “Pogo,” his iconic comic strip: “Good King Sauerkraut, look out! / On yo’ feets uneven. / While the snoo lay roun’ about, / All kerchoo achievin’.”

A parody? That’s merely one way to look at it. Another would be that the Tree-O is taking a song from 1853 and showing that it’s still relevant, that it is yet capable of inspiring creative musicians to do something surprising and original with it.

That’s what the Tree-O has achieved on both of their albums, the eponymous debut of the threesome from 2010, represented during an appearance at Dizzy’s Monday by their Coltrane-esque “Christmas Time is Here” and the impressionistic “Snowfall,” as well as the current release. In short, they take very familiar seasonal standards and re-animate them with a uniquely postmodern jazz kind of energy.  

The new album’s title and its cover design are an homage not only to Charles Dickens’s “Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come” but to Ornette Coleman’s early free-jazz milestone, “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” The reeds, bass, and drums trio evokes Coleman’s famous “Golden Circle” recordings of 1965, though Mr. Lederer switches between three B-flat instruments — tenor saxophone, soprano sax, and clarinet — rather than Coleman’s E-flat alto. Their rendition of “Up on the Housetop” (renamed “Rooftop”) seems deliberately inspired by Coleman’s “Ramblin’.” 

The use of the tenor, as well as the often surprising repertoire choices, also suggest Sonny Rollins’s classic trio albums as well as the saxophone colossus’s irreverent sense of humor. The track titled “Mariah Parusha” somehow pays homage simultaneously to one of the more extreme free-jazz players, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, and to one of the least avant garde pop stars, Mariah Carey.

The set is ethnically diverse as well: Mr. Lederer also plays clarinet both on the Puerto Rican “Si Me Dan Pasteles” and the klezmer-styled “Eight Little Candles” from the Ladino/Sephardic tradition. Set in a highly Hebraic minor, “Candles” builds to a climax wherein the ensemble collectively counts to eight as Mr. Lederer throws out a series of printed pages bearing those numbers leading up to the eighth day of the Festival of Lights. 

As a drummer-leader, Mr. Wilson takes full advantage of the holiday mood to make his Tree-O overwhelmingly entertaining in a way that few instrumental modern jazz groups even try to be. At one point he announced that the band’s new uniforms — distinctive bright green velvet jackets — were tailored for them by a designer named “Amma Zon.”   

To enhance the holiday mood and the overall fun quotient, several numbers employ a second trio, listed on the album as the Treedom Singers, featuring Mr. Lederer’s wife, Mary LaRose, Mr. Wilson’s daughter, Audrey Wilson, and baritone Gregory Rodriguez. They performed live on “Carol of the Bells” at Dizzy’s and “Do You Hear What I Hear” on the album, the latter spotlighting Mr. Lederer’s soprano.  

The climax and masterpiece of the Tree-O project is a construct built around “Rocker,” which Gerry Mulligan famously composed in 1950 for the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool Band and then re-purposed a few months later for Charlie Parker’s equally classic “Bird with Strings” sessions. The Tree-O has rather spectacularly re-arranged Mulligan’s melody in a way that brings out its harmonic source material, a relatively recent instrumental composition by Leroy Anderson, “Sleigh Ride,” first heard in 1948, which had not yet received its famous Mitchell Parish lyric when Mulligan wrote his contrafact.

The Tree-O’s mashup of “Rocker” and “Sleigh Ride” combines themes from both compositions interlaced with each other in a way that seems brilliantly constructed and yet completely random at the same time. At Dizzy’s, Mr. Wilson not only brought out the three singers, but also a young trumpeter, Kal Ferretti, and a second percussionist, Aidan Carberry, while he moved to the front of the stage to play a cymbal and conduct what had by now become a eight-piece ensemble. Well, this is a Tree-O and not a trio. 

Mr. Wilson’s own drum solo was remarkably melodic, outlining the notes of Anderson’s theme in a fast, march-like tempo, and he simulated the clickety clack of horse hooves with an oddball percussion device called a slapstick. He further drove the point home by putting on a rubber horse head mask and producing whinny-ing sound effects.

Could anything follow that? The Tree-O ended on a more spiritual if hardly somber note with a new holiday work by Mr. Lederer, “Shine Your Light.” Here, the composer switched to piano — Dawn Clement plays that part on the album — and Ms. LaRose chanted a set of instructions: “Carry an empty bag … go to the top of the hill … for all the light you can …,” and then the singers recited text inspired by “Light Piece,” a poem of Yoko Ono’s: “Shine your light / Shine it where the light as needed.”

Still standing at the front of the stage, Mr. Wilson produced a mischievous-looking Santa’s elf doll, and, in a squeaky falsetto reminiscent of Mr. Hankey in “South Park,” instructed the crowd to sing along. Within a few bars, we were all standing, chanting, and swaying back and forth as we flashed lights either from the candles on the tables or our smartphones.

This was the most joyful holiday celebration I can remember attending. If there’s a band or an album that’s more pure fun than Mr. Wilson’s, I’m not necessarily even sure that I want to know about it.