A few weeks ago, I was listening to an Internet radio station that played nothing but oldies. My daughter was visiting and she said the problem with music back then was that the singing was weird. I explained to her that the reason she feels that way is because most vocals today are processed through computers, and that Millennials aren’t used to a natural singing voice. She just rolled her eyes as if I was out of touch.
“Silent Night,” from 1998’s Chicago XXV: The Christmas Album, opens with a nice horn passage that sticks very close to the melody. It’s followed by Walt Parazaider’s flute that leads into one of Jason Scheff’s finer vocals. He sings without Autotune, doesn’t scream, and isn’t trying to sound like Peter Cetera. He is not pretentious. It is so un-’90s sounding that the former Chicago bassist should be proud of the work he did here. It’s quite an unusual for performance for him.
Getting back to the horns, they play the exact same lines, note for note, to close out the track as they did for the introduction. James Pankow and friends could have improvised it a little or turned the arrangement on its head. What seems obvious is that they just took the already-recorded opening and pasted it on top of the basic track to end the song. They took the lazy way out.
Despite that complaint, the horn arrangement is pleasant and “Silent Night” is such a good song that it is hard to ruin. It’s one of the world’s most beloved carols and, in the end, Chicago did a nice job.
