It just isn’t Christmas around here without Alexander O’Neal.
“My Gift To You,” the R&B singer’s holiday record from 1988, gets played every year. I’ve long thought it to be underrated and/or underappreciated.
It’s a great mix of late ’80s funk and soul and a throwback big band sound. O’Neal’s smooth, silky high tenor is the icing on the cake.
“My Gift To You” is produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who were O’Neal’s producers when he was in Flyte Time, a Minneapolis funk group*, in the ’70s and earliest ’80s.
Here, their more traditional string and horn arrangements stand the test of time.
Hear them on “This Christmas,” the Donny Hathaway classic widely considered to be THE Black Christmas standard …
… and on “Winter Wonderland.”
Whether the more contemporary-sounding songs have held up since 1988, well, you make the call. “The Little Drummer Boy” is funked-out and drum-programmed by Denzil Foster and Thomas McElroy in the style of the day. But it works for me.
I like this record so much that you get three days of songs from it. Pace yourself.
“My Gift To You” was re-released in America in 1994, 2002, and 2011; in Europe and/or the UK in 1994, 2002 and 2013; and in Japan in 1989, 2013, 2016 and 2019.
* In 1981, Flyte Time became one of Prince’s projects. The band was renamed The Time and its lineup shuffled. Morris Day was in as the front man and O’Neal was out.