His ironic “I Bought You a Plastic Star For Your Aluminum Tree” is a signature Franks song that happens to be about Christmas. But his “Let It Snow”, with a killer piano intro that counterbalances a conventional rendition of the song itself, isn’t here–that’s on Warner’s “Jazz To the World”. But I’ll be damned if I can find “Island Christmas” or his pensive treatment of Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here” anywhere but the peer share sites. That’s 4–count ‘em–songs and this dude still ain’t done no Exmass album. Elsewhere on this disc, Bela Fleck does an interesting treatment of “White Christmas”. All in all, this disc is a really decent Holiday collection when you consider the fact that jazz’s improvisational nature can often be at odds with the fact that a Christmas song (even an instrumental) should be played as straight-ahead as possible. So you will notice that a lot of the artists here are from the smooth jazz camp, whose one-foot-in-pop ethic makes it a lot easier.