Holiday classics with a twist

For the past 22 years, Spokane’s Clarion Brass Choir has carved out a special niche with its unpredictable interpretations of holiday classics. Featuring original arrangements by founder William Berry and led by conductor Adam Wallstein, this 13-person ensemble (a dozen brass players and one percussionist) takes classic carols and Christmas traditionals and reinvents them from the ground up.

On its newest full-length CD “Reindeer Games,” Clarion gives such standards as “Good King Wenceslas,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “Silent Night” a musical facelift; you’ve heard these songs countless times before, maybe even to the point of exhaustion, but you’ve never heard versions quite like these. They’ve polished up these old chestnuts, making the overly familiar sound brand new.

Take Clarion’s riff on “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” which borrows the familiar melody and gives it a complex, almost jazzy makeover. Or the playful rearrangement of “Jingle Bells,” which makes you sit forward and listen with its combination of elegiac passages and trumpet lines of “Flight of the Bumblebee”-style immediacy. Even the group’s inspired take on the campfire staple “Kum Ba Yah” could conceivably become a Christmas favorite.

To purchase Clarion’s CDs, and for more information on its “Reindeer Games” tour, visit www.figarotunes.com.

Nathan Weinbender