Holiday favorites, with a twist
LITTLETON -- The sun is shimmering off Long Pond outside the picture window of the house she shares with her husband and son, and pianist-composer Molly Flannery is sipping hot ginger tea on a kitchen barstool and talking about brandy-laced eggnog and hot toddies. Those two seasonal libations will be on the menu tonight when Flannery performs at the nearby Acton Jazz Café with a quintet she's co-leading with vibraphonist Rich Greenblatt.
It's not the first time that this group -- with trumpeter (and Littleton neighbor) Greg Hopkins, bassist John Funkhouser, and drummer Steve Langone -- have played together, but it's close.
''We did a thing about six months ago at the Café," explains Flannery. ''Rich Greenblatt put it together. Rich composes quite a bit, and so do I, and so does Greg, so we sort of pooled some of our stuff and then did a few standards. And it was just way fun."
This time, at the urging of Flannery, there will be the added attraction of a holiday theme. ''Especially Greg and I like to take tunes and just come up with strange, fresh ways of playing them," she says. ''And so Christmas tunes are cool, because everybody knows them. I'm not jaded. I know a lot of people hate the holiday thing, but I like the Christmas spirit. I'm not a Christian, but I like that whole vibe of celebration and love.
''Rich is Jewish. . ." she adds, laughing. ''He said maybe he'd dig up a Hanukkah tune and do something."
The fact that there will be Christmas music doesn't mean the arrangements will be all that familiar, however.
''Well, I know what I'm throwing in," Flannery says. ''I've got 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,' which kind of segues into a Debussy thing, 'La Cathédrale Engloutie,' and then pulls back out of the water to do more of 'God Rest Ye.' And I'm doing 'Little Drummer Boy' in some odd meters. And 'A Child Is Born' and 'Away in a Manger,' kind of on top of each other -- you can actually play both melodies at the same time, and it's really cool. So I've got the trumpet playing 'A Child Is Born,' and the vibes will be doing 'Away in a Manger.' ''
Not your typical Christmas fare, but Flannery, 47, isn't your typical jazz musician. Her path to living and gigging in this country setting was an unusual one. It began with piano lessons at age 6 in suburban Chicago, but by 11 she was giving piano lessons and steeping herself in her parents' jazz and bossa nova record collections. Later, she took a smattering of music electives while majoring in English at Yale. Then came a Peace Corps stint in Gabon, followed by Flannery joining her singer-songwriter sister Mary for two years in Kyoto, Japan. That's where she and Mary formed their band Kyoto de Mondo Agogo, which focused more on Brazilian and original material than jazz.
Since moving here, Flannery put out her second self-produced CD, last year's arty and wide-ranging ''Riding the Bull," which she sells at gigs and via her website (www.mollyflannery.com). The disc includes covers of Miles Davis (''Solar"), the Gershwin brothers and DuBose Heyward (''Summertime"), and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (''Cool"), along with seven originals, six of them composed alone or collaboratively by Flannery.
''My strength has been more my writing and just having my own sound," she says. ''I'm pretty eclectic, but it's true that my thing is not very traditional jazz at all. My big influences are classical and Brazilian and singer-songwriters and jazz. But that can make it hard to sell, because people want to put you in a niche."
The Molly Flannery-Rich Greenblatt Quintet performs at 9 tonight at the Acton Jazz Café. Tickets $10. Call 978-263-6161 or visit www.actonjazzcafe.com.
