Midnight Clear
The surprise here isn't that Andreas Vollenweider has recorded a Christmas CD.  The surprise is it took him this long to do it. He's never recorded covers before, but his mixture of fantasy and exotica make him a perfect candidate to score a Yuletide album. At his best, he makes these carols sound like they fell full-blown on his harp. He completely reworks the familiar themes not the way a jazz band might, improvising solos off the main melody, but completely recasting the melody itself. On the best songs, including "The Holly and the Ivy" and "Yorkshire Wassail," he fragments and inverts the tune, often using only the seed of the carol for his explorations. Vollenweider goes beyond the traditional repertoire with songs like "Over the Hills and Over the Vale," an adaptation of the medieval "In Vernale Tempore" that he turns into a chamber music jaunt with recorders, cellos, and percussion. Although he makes meticulously crafted music, it's easy to forget that Vollenweider creates most of his work through improvisation. That is the key to these personal interpretations of Christmas carols on. Longtime but occasional collaborator Carly Simon turns up on several tunes, and--helped by greeting-card instrumental versions of "Carol of the Drums" and "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (on which she does not perform)--threatens to push the album into maudlin terrain. That's the nature of the Christmas beast, but despite these lapses, they still don't sabotage the often simple charm of Vollenweider's inventive, nostalgically gilded instrumentals.--John Diliberto