Michel Legrand: Noël! Noël!! Noël!!! – review

This 80th birthday album, arranged and conducted for big band by the great French songwriter, movie-composer and jazz pianist Michel Legrand , is a set of Christmas evergreens for singers including Jamie Cullum , Rufus Wainwright , Madeleine Peyroux and Iggy Pop . For jazz listeners there's very little solo variation, and the principal appeal lies in Legrand's accomplished, though at times rather incongruous, arrangements. Cullum's hip timing almost saves Let it Snow, and weaving brass lines and swooping strings work well with Peyroux's plaintive, falling-cadence delivery on Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. She joins Emilie Simon , Carla Bruni , Wainwright and Iggy Pop for a bizarre singalong on Noël d'Espoir. Teddy Thompson and Wainwright's White Christmas exhibits a strange tension between the singers' doleful crooning and Legrand's perky countermelodies. Iggy Pop growling his way through The Little Drummer Boy hints at what Tom Waits might sound like on it. Folk-soul star Ayo does well in an unmannered account of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town with one of Legrand's jazziest swing treatments, but Imelda May 's velvet-toned Silent Night is the standout, against Legrand's brooding woodwinds and clouds of low brass.