The version of “Sleigh Ride” David Gleason’s ensemble plays doesn’t sound like anything drifting from mall speakers this December. It tilts toward Coltrane, and earns that comparison.
About the Show
It’s A Jazzy Christmas has spent 17 years becoming a fixture on the Capital Region’s December calendar, and it returns to Universal Preservation Hall on Friday, December 18, for another 100-minute program that treats holiday standards as genuine jazz material. Gleason, who anchors the Art D’Echo Trio at the piano and has been called “an elegant rocket on the keys,” built the show around Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts holiday music — not as nostalgic decoration but as a structural foundation for improvisation. “Actual jazz,” Gleason calls it, “with plenty of room to stretch out” — full choruses of improvised solos, individual horn features, arrangements drawn from Oscar Peterson’s vocabulary that reimagine standards as everything from mambo to low rumble. By design the show shifts in small ways each year; Gleason has noted that the ensemble aims to “do little things to change the show each year,” while the core concept holds.
The evening frames its music as a live 1940s radio drama, with Mike McCord voicing the announcer role and comedic radio-serial interludes woven between sets. The septet draws on some of the region’s most practiced jazz players: Chris Pasin on trumpet, Brian Patneaude on saxophone and bass clarinet, and Ben O’Shea on trombone, all longtime mainstays of Keith Pray’s Big Soul Ensemble, alongside the Art D’Echo Trio’s Mike Lawrence on bass and Pete Sweeney on drums, a rhythm section that has worked together for decades. Hannah Amigo handles vocals. Past programs have included a Coltrane-inflected “Sleigh Ride,” a soul-jazz reading of “Oh, Holy Night,” and a locally-flavored “Twelve Days of Christmas” with regional references built in. One reviewer described the whole enterprise as “smart, sharp, silly and all kinds of sweet” with “virtuoso all-star quality.”
Venue & Logistics
Universal Preservation Hall at 25 Washington Street in Saratoga Springs hosts the December 18 performance. The Great Hall suits a program that can move between a single muted trumpet and the full ensemble mid-arrangement; the acoustics reward that dynamic range. The concert is all-ages. Showtime is 8:00 p.m.
Tickets
No ticket price for the 2026 edition was confirmed from sources at the time of publication — the Proctors Collaborative event page was unavailable when retrieved. Check the ticket link for current pricing. Buy tickets