BWW CD Review: COOL YULE By Liz Mikel Bringing Some Smoky Jazz & Blues To The Festivities

Bringing Some Smoky Jazz & Blues To The Festivities, Liz Mikel's COOL YULE Is Slow Burning Holiday Heat For The Season.

Heigh-Ho, my lovely Rainbow Tribe! Bobby Patrick your RAINBOW Reviewer here. Putting the silent T in CABARET to bring you all the T...

And the T this Christmas is some Texas sweet tea served up by Dallas native Liz Mikel. In her offering for the season, Cool Yule pays homage to the jazz and blues influences that live in Mikel's music. Using lilting phrases that evoke Mel Torme (indeed the Velvet Fog's A Christmas Song is given fine representation here) as well as hot "Ella-Like" jazz and swing beats that shoot her title track out of the speakers and demand some dance, Mikel opts to sing the notes as any jazz artist would, giving it all her own spin, letting us hear her work the notes, and not demanding anything but our simple enjoyment of her artistry. Mikel has grown up as a person and as an artist doing the seemingly impossible; building a solid, renowned acting and singing career from her home base of Dallas, Texas. One would think that a performer of Mikel's caliber would have opted for one of the entertainment capitols, rather than a regional artistic centre. From her home town, Mikel has made a career that has brought her to Broadway, in the wildly underrated Lysistrata Jones, and to your television sets with her recurring character Corrina Williams in Friday Night Lights. Add to that a solid baker's dozen (so far) of parts on the silver screen and what you have is a Southwest regional-based actor who makes a living from her art ... No small feat, I can assure you.

Now back to Cool Yule... For most of the album, as with her Jingle Bell Rock and the gorgeous Mary Did You Know, a song she duets with her fellow Friday Night alum; Broadway's Cedric Neal, Mikel opts to remain in her silky lower register, giving both the happy holiday Santa songs and the spiritual songs of faith a husky weight. Many singers who put out albums for the holidays like to go half and half on the sleighbells to savior ratio keeping one half for each in a separated A-side/B-Side format. Mikel mixes her music, going from a little bit of Santa to a little bit of sacred and back again all in her rich alto range. This is especially effective with Vince Guaraldi's Christmas Time Is Here. You know the one, my little angels. That song from A Charlie Brown Christmas we all grew up hearing in the children's chorus of cartoon Shultzness, but in Liz Mikel's sultry, adult rendition, she evokes cocoa and warm fires at the ski lodge making it distinctly her own while the piano tributes Vince Guaraldi's original. One of the nice little surprises from Cool Yule comes in the song, What Are You Doing New Year's Eve, where the lady opts for a higher vocal placement showing her range to be more than low and slow.

Mikel's pals Yarbrough & Peoples (of Don't Stop The Music fame) produced and co-arranged several tracks for the album. Their syncopated, Silent Night, with its wooden claves, chimes, and other percussion underpinning the piano and vocals, is NOT your usual maudlin fare, but a bright and upbeat hymn of praise and their rousing rendition of Go Tell It On The Mountain with back up vocals, hand claps, and tambourine gives the album some real SEASONing for the saucy Mikel.

In all, Cool Yule gives you exactly what it promises; something cool for your yule and Bobby gives this holiday musical jazz 4 Festive Rainbows out of 5

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