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Our Review

Dan Crary is a flatpick guitar legend. But his virtuosity as a guitar picker is only one of several high points of this rare recording.

One of the pleasanter aspects of listening to Christmas music is hearing the way a set of familiar tunes, ancient and modern, are conveyed through various musical genres and individual styles. It is a pure joy when the wedding of genre, style, and material yield such a richly textured and novel sound as they have here. Crary plays bluegrass, but his style is so subtly applied that it might easily be mistaken for classical. But for all its subtlety, his playing carries an enthusiasm, an animated complexity that I find compelling and stirring. His rendering of Silver Bells, full-bodied and sentimental, was particularly moving.

In addition to his original Christmas composition-a moody piece called The Last Noel- Crary introduced several unfamiliar riffs into familiar melodies, the surprising inclusion of which breathed new life into otherwise predictable songs. My favorite track was What Child Is This which, in Crary's skillful hands, seemed to become the wise men's wild ride through the badlands, chasing a star, in search of the Christ child. An exaggerated image, but representative of the energy I felt from every song on the record.

This is my very favorite kind of music, on my favorite instrument, in my favorite style. Dan Crary is quickly becoming one of my favorite players.

--Richard Banks
(Reviewed in 1999)

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Dan Crary

Holiday Guitar

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Track List