Happy Omnidenominational Holiday

It's hard for me to imagine that this album is 5 years old! We made it in basements and attics across Middletown, CT, save for the one trip to Boston to get MC Kabir rhymin' on Jingle Bells. Every holiday season I go back to it and am overcome with a wave of sentimentality and love for the people I made it with.

Buru Style was as much a collective as a band; I'm not even really sure how many people passed through in the three or four years we were active. We gigged a bunch but recorded even more. Our Bandcamp page is a testament to what we actually put out (most of it; our tenure with Toussaint Liberator is documented elsewhere), but I have hard drives full of the unfinished tracks, a lot of which I still think are fantastic. Everyone in that group was and is a shining spirit in the world and music is just part of what they all had to offer. The music was unstoppable; there were no quiet dinners, there was no hanging out in a living room that didn't turn into some sort of mini-music festival, even if the only instruments available were thighs and voices. We embraced many styles of music but were mostly obsessed with dub, in particular in using it create stretches of instrumental music that created tension and release without using solos. We're no longer together because the band members shot off in different directions, quite literally around the globe. (Well, Jamemurrell Stanley and I are still a dynamic drum duo actually...). That and for all the joy and music we had in abundance, we had zero sense of how to package and monetize our work. (That's always been my problem: if I love it, I go for it, profit be damned. I was there for every minute put into this bad boy from recording to mixing to making the album cover myself...)

We called this album The Omnidenominational Holiday Experience because, as a band with several Jews, a few distant Christians and a Muslim, that's what a holiday album was going to need to be. Like Kabir says in his rap on Jingle Bells, "Friends and family / The reason for livin' / Holidays, happiness, the season of giving," it's all about all of us. I've never understood this "War on Christmas" thing; I'm a Christmas guy, but I'm so happy to wish you (and you and you) a happy holiday because love and joy are for all of us. And the more of it there is, the better we'll all be.

The music is pretty omnidenominational too. For my money, I'm unaware of a funkier version of Dreidel, Dreidel. Silent Night and Hanukkah, o Hanukkah reference the other-worldly sonic landscapes of dub that Buru Style was so fascinated with. Hanukkah also features two of my favorite drum toys: the jing gong and roto-toms! Jingle Bells is given that old school hip-hop touch by my friend Kabir's original rap, as well as several local kids (including my son who sounds much different now). And that's me playing the dog barks in the background.

It's up there on Bandcamp, spin it for free! And happy holidays, however you celebrate.