When Brownman Ali was younger, he despised the hollow Christmas music he would hear coming out of store speakers.
Not because he dislikes Christmas music, but because the songs being played lacked a certain flair.
Years later, the acclaimed jazz trumpet player from Brooklyn and his Latin jazz group CRUZAO wanted to release a Christmas single around 2014. He ended up writing a Latin jazz arrangement of Frosty the Snowman, which was the unofficial start of his yearly tradition that’s become Brownman’s Holiday Madness.
The madness will be coming to Newmarket for the first time this year, with Nick Maclean (keyboard), Matt Gruebner (bass), and Adam Mansfield (drums) accompanying Brownman as he plays Old Flame Brewing Co.'s Main Street Music Hall on Dec. 14.
The show features several re-imagined versions of holiday classics, like a boom-bap hip-hop version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman and Silent Night as a funk ballad, all specially arranged by Brownman himself.
“I didn’t really like Christmas carols when I was younger,” Brownman said. “I think it was the over-saccharine-filled versions that they play in the malls. It made me crazy as a kid.”
But as a young jazz fan with big dreams, a few of his biggest jazz heroes would put out jazz versions of Christmas carols that really got his ears perking up.
As a result, he became influenced by jazz interpretations of Christmas carols, which he liked infinitely more than what he had grown up hearing in the malls.
When he became a professional touring musician, his interests grew genre wise and he began “cross-pollinating” and learning more about the history of jazz infusing other genres.
“There’s all these other facets where jazz lives stylistically,” he said. “When I became a leader (of his own bad CRUZAO), I wanted to bring in Latin sounds with modern jazz.”
He then started his own jazz hip-hop group, GRUVASYLUM, and from there Brownman Electryc Trio was born. These experiences continued to broaden Brownman’s music interests and every Christmas he would do some sort of holiday show.
“I would arrange Christmas carols in whatever style I happened to be interested in that year,” he said. “For example, after touring with Jay-Z, hip-hop was in my blood so I wrote all these crazy hip-hop versions of Christmas tunes one year.”
After all of those years of different experiences leading him to blend genres, he ended up with a setlist worth of Christmas carols he had reframed in a way that he found interesting and that’s why he started Brownman’s Holiday Madness.
“It was just a fun thing for us to do, but it turns out people like to watch us do it,” he said.
Initially, Brownman and the band would just do one show, but after more and more fans asked for it, they decided they would tour it across southern Ontario this year.
“I’m trying to walk in the same footprints as the guys who came before me and do something similar with my own 2023 twist,” he said.
The madness begins at Old Flame Brewing Co., 140 Main St. S., at 7 p.m. on Dec. 14. Get tickets here in advance or at the door the night of the show.
