Notes on the Christmas Cavalcade and Harry and the Potters
By JIM SULLIVAN | December 3, 2007
A scene from last year's Harry and the Potters' Yule Ball |
Chandler Travis calls himself “an aggressive agnostic,” but that hasn’t kept him from assembling a Christmas Cavalcade for Cambridge’s Bread & Roses charity, a multi-act benefit featuring two of his own bands, the CHANDLER TRAVIS PHILHARMONIC and the INCREDIBLE CASUALS, along with WILLIE ALEXANDER, ANDY PRATT, the DOWNBEAT 5, and others TBA. “One of the things I like most is that Christmas is the only holiday that comes with its own bunch of music,” he explains. “I always try and have people do as many originals as possible, and certainly there’s some classics. I appreciate the cheesy aspects, too — some people take a song they do all the time and put Santa into it.” It’s a season Travis calls “the most wonderful and excruciating time of the year.” His own favorite song is “If We Can Just Make It Through Christmas,” which deals with “the despair you feel a few days before, wandering around like a zombie at the mall looking for some special knickknack.” What if one of the acts tries to slip in a non-Christmas song? “It’s all-Christmas-all-the-time or I boot ’em the fuck off.”
At the Cutler Majestic Theatre December 13-16, WGBH’s BRIAN O’DONOVAN brings his fifth CHRISTMAS CELTIC SOJOURN to town, with Solas and six other acts . . . JOHNNY CARLEVALE hosts his fifth annual CHRISTMAS ODYSSEY — six bands with the music centering on rockabilly — at T.T. the Bear’s Place on December 22. The DAZZLING DAMES BURLESQUE kick things off at 8 . . . And on December 9 at the Middle East upstairs, HARRY AND THE POTTERS throw their third annual Yule Ball, a five-band affair starting at 5 pm, with proceeds going to the Harry Potter Alliance, which raises funds to combat genocide, poverty, and AIDS.
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