| Jazz, Noël |
The Christmas album has long been a treacherous rite of passage for jazz vocalists, a genre weighed down by predictability, sentimental excess and the pressure to deliver seasonal comfort rather than artistic clarity. Most recordings succumb to the familiar trap: warmed-over arrangements, nostalgia polished to a synthetic shine, and a veneer of holiday cheer that conceals a lack of interpretive risk. So when April Varner, one of the most compelling new voices in vocal jazz, turns her attention to the canon of winter standards, the stakes feel unusually high. Her debut album from 2024 demonstrated an artist with uncommon poise and conceptual rigor. The question now is whether she can bring that same discipline to material that has been flattened over decades of repetition.
The answer, on Winter Songs Vol.2, is a confident and resounding yes. Varner approaches the repertoire not as a seasonal obligation but as an opportunity to interrogate form, color and phrasing. She resists the easy clichés. She reframes the familiar. And she reminds us that the holiday songbook, in the hands of a serious improviser, can still yield expressive depth.
Varner’s background helps explain her precision. Initially groomed for opera after beginning classical vocal studies at the University of Toledo at age eight, she later pivoted toward jazz at Indiana University, drawn more to ensemble vocal work than to operatic discipline. That foundational training in breath, diction and line is evident throughout this album: her diction is crystalline without rigidity, her dynamic shifts exact but never mannered. Her artistic development accelerated under the mentorship of Sachal Vasandani, Tierney Sutton and, later, Theo Bleckmann at the Manhattan School of Music, three vocalists known for their intellectual approach to phrasing and their refusal to chase surface-level glamour. Varner’s 2023 victory at the Ella Fitzgerald International Jazz Vocal Competition reinforced her affinity with Fitzgerald’s clarity of swing and emotional restraint, and her debut album April on Cellar Music quickly earned praise from critics across the jazz world.
On Winter Songs Vol.2, Varner turns that rigorous training inward. Rather than playing into the genre’s sentimentality, she seems to analyze what makes a winter song function, its cadences, its narrative pulse, its emotional architecture. One explicitly religious track feels misaligned with the album’s overall conceptual direction, but the rest of the program exhibits remarkable internal coherence.
Her version of “Run, Run Rudolph” is a study in controlled velocity. Instead of leaning into rock-and-roll caricature, she shapes the rhythm with an almost architectural sense of timing. The phrasing snaps into place with precision, but there is a glint of mischief in her attack, a subtle subversion of the tune’s chaotic energy. Her “Winter Wonderland”, a piece so over-recorded it practically resists reinvention, stands out for its cool intelligence. Varner avoids embellishment for its own sake; instead, she rebalances the melody with unexpected rhythmic pivots, creating a sense of lift and luminosity that revives the song’s harmonic logic. It feels less like a cover and more like a recalibration.
Producer Ulysses Owens Jr., a drummer celebrated for his sensitivity to vocalists, plays an essential role in shaping the album’s internal cohesion. His presence is felt in the lightness of the rhythmic textures, the subtle propulsion beneath Varner’s lines, and the insistence on clarity over excess. Owens seems to understand Varner’s artistic temperament instinctively: she doesn’t need ornamentation, she needs space. And the album gives her that space, space to maneuver, to rethink, to articulate nuance where most seasonal recordings settle for charm.
What emerges is not a holiday album in the conventional sense, but a serious vocal jazz recording that happens to use winter standards as its raw material. Varner demonstrates that the seasonal repertoire, often dismissed as trivial, can sustain real interpretive weight when approached with discipline and imagination. And she does so without sacrificing accessibility; the album retains warmth without succumbing to nostalgia, intelligence without pretension.
If April signaled the arrival of a major new talent, Winter Songs Vol. 2 confirms it. This is a vocalist with long-range artistic vision, the technique to pursue it, and the curiosity to keep challenging the boundaries of her genre. Whether one enjoys holiday music is beside the point. This is a record worth hearing because it redefines what such an album can be.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, November 15th 2025
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Musicians :
April Varner- Vocals
Luther Allison- Piano/Arranger
Yasushi Nakamura- Bass
Ulysses Owens Jr.- Producer/Drums
Leandro Pellegrino- Guitar
Theo Bleckmann- Vocal Producer/Arranger
The Sunhouse Singers- Vocal Trio
June Cavlan- Vocals/Arranger
Kate Kortum- Vocals
Joie Bianco- Vocals
Tracklisting:
- Jingle Bells (Ft. The Sunhouse Singers)
- It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
- Holly Jolly Christmas
- Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
- Hallelujah (Ft. Theo Bleckmann, The Sunhouse Singers)
- Run, Run Rudolph
- Christmas Time Is Here
- Christmas Waltz (Ft. Leandro Pellegrino)
- Sleigh Ride (Ft. The Sunhouse Singers)
- It’s the Most Wonderful Time of Year (Ft. The Sunhouse Singers)
- Winter Wonderland