New songs at Swing Into Christmas 2024

Published: 30 Oct 2024

I'm sat writing this at the end of October 2024, and couldn’t be more excited about our Christmas tour - our largest and most ambitious tour to date!

We’ve been planning this tour for over a year now and even though lots of my time is spent on logistics (I can tell you more about the Travelodge group booking system than any sane person should know), the music always comes first and probably my favourite task is arranging and orchestrating new songs for the Orchestra to perform.

As I write, I’ve finished some of the new arrangements for this year’s Christmas tour, but also have the luxury of having a few weeks to maybe write some new arrangements - so feel free to send in your ideas. You never know, they might make it into the show.

Here’s what you might expect from this year’s Swing Into Christmas shows!

 

Reworked versions of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year and our Christmas Overture 

I spent a lot of time in June completely re-working the two biggest numbers of the show. We’ve performed The Most Wonderful Time of the Year for the last few years, but this year we’re treating audiences to a new version. In years gone by, our arrangement of the song has basically been an “expanded big band” arrangement, but for 2024 I’ve re-written it from the ground up with the full MGM Orchestra sound. I think it’s going to sound epic and I can’t wait to hear it!

You can hear a snippet of the previous version on our tour trailer video:

Talking of epic, my favourite moment of each show is probably our Christmas Overture - written by me in 2022, this is an instrumental medley of several Christmas songs.

However I’ve decided to rewrite it for 2024 and, whilst some bits have stayed the same, there are a lot of changes! For one thing, I was never that happy with the opening so that’s been completely rewritten; and I’ve added more songs in the middle and end of the Overture, plus a sprinkle of “hidden Christmas song quotes” as well.

And finally, even though the Overture is mostly about the instrumentalists in the Orchestra, I've decided to beef things up in 2024... so the Overture will feature an MGM-style choir, which needless to say I’m REALLY excited about!

 

Jingle Bells

Talking of vocal harmonies, we've done this song a handful of times in the past and it always goes down a storm... so we're going to be including it this year. It's based on the Bing Crosby and Andrews Sisters version of the song, but Michael Bublé and The Puppini Sisters take it a step further so we'll do the same!

It also means our percussionists get to dust off their washboards, which they promise me they are excited about. 

 

Let It Snow!

We’ve also got lots of completely new material to perform at this year’s Christmas shows. 

One piece I’m particularly excited about recreating is the Frank Sinatra version of Sammy Cahn and Jules Styne’s Let It Snow. Originally this featured a vocal harmony chorus… and, because we’re having more singers on the 2024 tour than previous years, we can finally perform it!

In case you want to know what to expect, here’s what our vocal harmony group sounded like towards the end of our first rehearsal together last week.

 

I Know Why (And So Do You)

A beautiful new tune for us, coming right from the heart of the big band era, is I Know Why (And So Do You). This was performed by Glenn Miller on the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade - we've expanded it to feature strings but otherwise we'll be sticking pretty close to the original arrangement. It's a winter song, but not an overly Christmassy one, which makes a nice change - even though we love Christmas songs we always make sure that about half of the show is non-festive, so that we cover as many musical bases as possible.

 

 

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Judy Garland)

We've been performing the classic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas for the past few years, but this year we're doing a completely new version - an original arrangement written by me, it's going to be strings-heavy in the style of Judy Garland (who memorably introduced the song in the film Meet Me in St Louis).

 

 

Other new songs...

With a few weeks to go until the tour, who knows what other new arrangements might emerge from my mind! I've got ideas for a brand-new version of The Christmas Waltz - it's usually performed by a male vocalist (the song was written by Sammy Cahn and Jules Styne for Frank Sinatra) but I'm planning to adapt it for female vocal. I'm also planning a super secret audience participation number...  as it's super secret, I can't tell you what it will be, but if you've seen us perform Little Liza Jane in recent ideas you'll have an idea what to expect: 

And a final song that might make it onto the list is A Cradle in Bethlehem. As a general rule we steer clear of carols, sing-a-long songs (with the possible exception of the encore) and songs with a religious context... but if you listen to Nat King Cole singing this tune, you'll understand why I'm tempted to include it!

 

Non-Christmas songs

Of course, it's not just about our Christmas tunes! We've introduced loads of non-Christmas songs this year. You might hear Crazy He Calls Me, It's Been a Long Long Time, How About You, I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry or The Girl From Ipanema... and if you've been following us on social media, you probably won't be surprised to hear that Luck be a Lady will be featuring in the Christmas shows - here we are performing it live at Cadogan Hall earlier this year, with Marvin Muoneké on vocals and Tim Rabbitt on screaming lead trumpet.

 

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