Jingle All The Way: How Béla Fleck Made A Holiday Album For The Ages

Having hosted The Night Before on XPN for over three decades, there are several holiday albums that bubble up to the top of my Best List, and the 2008 release Jingle All The Way by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones is definitely one of them! Last week, I had the honor of hosting Béla in the XPN studios to not only perform a few holiday classics, but also to sit down and chat about the amazing album and how it came to be. Watching Béla play the banjo is a thing of beauty, as you can see in the video below.

When Flecktones’ percussionist Future Man first floated the idea years ago, he told Béla: “If we did a Christmas album, it would all be over.” Béla still doesn’t know exactly what that meant. But by 2008, after the band had done quite a lot together, and they were looking for creative outlets. They decided to give it a shot.

“If we’re gonna do a Christmas record, and everybody really wants to do it, we gotta find a way to really do it our own way,” Béla explained.

The bar for Christmas records is high. Béla knew that. So they started exploring, playing around with holiday standards and seeing what kind of playful attitudes they could inject to make it a real Flecktones record. But there was a catch: “In another weird way, it’s like one of the more commercial things we’d ever done, ’cause everybody knows the songs. It’s kind of like doing a covers album. And we didn’t want that.”

When the album first came out, Béla talked about wanting to avoid guest stars and guest appearances — what he called “the island of cheese.”

“That’s the first thing people go, oh, they’re doing a Christmas record. Oh, a let’s-get-Allison- Krauss thing. Maybe Yo-Yo Ma will come on,” he said. “Luckily in this case, this record was done with no label involved till after we had made the record we wanted to make.”

Most people who decide to do a holiday album, Fleck explained, fall into one of a few categories: They’re at a point in their career where they don’t know what else to do, or they’re just cashing in. Neither was true here.

Béla had played on a David Grisman Christmas record that showed him it was possible to make a holiday album that was challenging and fun, that wasn’t dumbing yourself down. That opened the door to think about what the Flecktones could do.

Listening back to Jingle All The Way after all these years, Béla finds himself thinking: “I’m proud of young us.The young us were working hard trying to do something unique and meaningful.”

For those of us who’ve been spinning this album every December since 2008, that work paid off. It’s a holiday record that adds something to the genre — exactly what Béla set out to do.