Meryl Zimmerman

This is the 100th episode of The Twelve Songs of Christmas, and
I’m spending it with New Orleans' jazz vocalist Meryl Zimmerman.
In late November 2022, she released her second album, A Very
Meryl Christmas, so we talked about it as a business proposition
and chewed on the uncommon song choices she made for it. Some
standards are there, but so are some less common choices. As
you’ll see, the more familiar ideas are dressed up in uncommon
arrangements that take them into interesting places. Her bossa
nova version of “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” was
compelling enough to make me seriously consider an episode
focused on versions of that song to fit in the week after
Christmas. It didn’t happen, but maybe next year. 


In this episode, we talk about her cover of Louis Armstrong’s
“Zat You, Santa Claus?” and I mention how Buster Poindexter’s
version helped me see the song Meryl’s way. Here’s that
version. 


On this episode, I also draw attention to Attention K-Mart
Shoppers, and online archive of digitized albums of background
music played in the 1960s and ‘70s in Kresge and K-Mart stores.
I’m fascinated by the Christmas albums, of course, but there’s a
lot to hear there. 


After this episode, I’m going to take a week off the start the
next hundred episodes with a look back at the best of the first
seasons. That will take more listening and editing than I can
manage in a week, but I’ll be back with that in two weeks.  


If you haven't already done so, please do what you have to do to
get Twelve Songs in your podcast feed. You can find us
at Apple Podcasts, Google
Play, Stitcher, Pandora, and Spotify.  During
our post-Christmas break, we went live on the IHeartRadio
platform, TuneIn, Audible, and Amazon's podcast platform. Now,
you can ask Alexa and Siri to play the Twelve Songs of Christmas
podcast and let them pop it up on your voice-controlled personal
assistant.