All I want for Christmas is Jose James singing in my family's living room. We'll even have the piano tuned for his accompanist Christian Sands.
Sorry Santa. I had to revise my wish list after experiencing James' homecoming holiday show on Sunday night at the Dakota in Minneapolis. It was an evening that was warm, intimate and elegantly old-school — and just inventive enough to be refreshing.
Now based in Amsterdam, the Minneapolis-born and raised vocalist has been a frequent performer at the Dakota in the past dozen years. This was the first Christmas concert in Minnesota for the inveterate adventurer, who has recorded everything from original jazz-meets-hip-hop to tributes to Billie Holiday and Bill Withers.
This fall, James released his first yule disc, "Merry Christmas from Jose James," on a label he started with his wife, singer Taali.
On Sunday, his second of two nights at the Dakota, James limited himself to material from his secular holiday disc, which was just fine with the sell-out crowd.
He opened with "Christmas in New York," an original that felt familiar in a Nat King Cole/Mel Torme kind of way. "All I want for Christmas," he crooned in this enticing, slow-building ballad, "is your heart." James' arresting new entry was a thousand times more romantic than Mariah Carey's modern-day Christmas classic.
Later, he offered another original, the gently breezy "Christmas Day" about yearning about being together, but the 1 ¾-hour set mostly explored familiar material in unfamiliar ways. He'd change tempos, repeat a phrase here and there, elongate a syllable, sing in different voicings from his smooth baritone to his cuddly falsetto, and allow his three sidemen, especially the accomplished pianist Sands, ample opportunity to express themselves.
In short, James and company made Christmas chestnuts sound deliciously fresh, from the opening original to the encore, an exquisite voice-and-piano reading of "White Christmas" as a slow, quiet, reverent hymn complete with a dreamy, meditative piano break.
