n December 1998, a small record company in New York had approached me to record a Christmas album in which I was to create original arrangements of the Christmas warhorses. I wasn't enthusiastic at first, but my cynicism soon dissolved when valid ideas began to take form and I realized that Christmas music doesn't deserve the bad rap it usually gets; it's just the context that grates.

Before I was done, the record company lost interest, leaving me alone with a collection of seven incomplete pieces of which I was now single parent. But when I played them for a new student of mine, David Lieber, he immediately offered to produce a CD "before the paint got dry." Not too far in the back of my mind, I knew that an impending recording session would force the polish the songs needed. And David's enthusiasm was boundless, so we went into studio immediately, never suspecting that the recording process itself would bring entirely new life to the project.

Somehow the two soulless electro-magnetic eavesdroppers hanging over the piano drove me to develop and stretch some songs in entirely new ways, completely liberating them from their standard arrangements. Sometimes that meant going entirely outside form, as in Frosty the Snowman, which follows the title track. But the new elasticity also occurred within traditional forms, as in Silent Night, the most standard of Christmas standards, where the melody remains undisturbed but is gently pulled along over a lullaby ostinato in 5/4 meter, giving it a completely new context. In the next session were added O Little Town of Bethlehem, Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer and The Christmas Song, each one an adventure in itself. Something was happening here, but I wasn't quite sure what it was.

A mutual friend of ours, illustrator Hervé Blondon, quietly dropped by the studio, made some sketches as he listened and then left. A few days later, he showed us his graphic interpretation of the title track. I was so stunned to cast eyes on what so closely approximated my mental images of the music that it immediately inspired two new arrangements, Adeste Fideles and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, the latter coming to epitomize the very soul of the project for me. It then dawned on me that a true suite had been born. Only Carol of the Bells (here's to you, Rachmaninoff!) and Adeste Fideles (you too, Busoni) had been completely written out, without improvisation. But each piece had created a mood within itself, found its place among the others and was gently rubbing shoulders with the ones on either side.

Gabriel's Message had quite literally taken on a life of its own, the hybrid offspring of a collaboration among friends, which is to say, a natural one.

Matt Herskowitz