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Mick Kolassa works hard for the blues—and also makes fine blues records himself. He has just
released his seasonal album—“Uncle Mick’s Christmas Album” on Endless Blues MMK102021,
and he gave me some background about this lovely, rather different but undoubtedly blues set:

What made you decide to release a
Christmas album?

The idea for the album came about
because for the past few years I’ve been
putting together bluesy arrangements of
Christmas songs, recording them on my
phone, and sending them to friends and
family members. I love to do “uncovers”,

finding the blues song hidden inside
popular songs (I once did an album of
Beatles songs done as acoustic blues,
called “You Can’t Do That”). After putting
together blues versions of a few songs I

thought it would be fun to do it as an
album. I bounced the idea off my co-
conspirator, Jeff Jensen, who jumped at
the chance.

It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun making it…

I do believe we exceeded the fun limit several times while doing this. Although we aren’t a band,
per se, in that we don’t tour together—we all work our own gigs—we have worked together often
and each of the other musicians has been on several of my previous albums and there is a
camaraderie and comfort in the group, so we all felt free to do what felt right. Because it is a
Christmas album, we decided to incorporate some of the classic Christmas music sounds instead of
blues standards, such as using a Fender Rhodes organ instead of a Hammond B3. We were working
in a studio (Hi Low) with so many “musical toys” that complemented our own collections we just

cut loose, bringing in actual sleigh bells, a glockenspiel and, to my great delight, we not only had
access to a vintage Mellotron but a man who has played one for decades—Rick Steff, who has played
keys on many of my albums.

Some of the songs just made us have fun, playing with different sounds and ideas, and I think that
shows up in the tracks. And, just the act of recording Christmas songs in 95-degree F heat is
ridiculous in and of itself made this a jolly endeavour.

How did you pick the songs—were there any you rejected?

I searched for songs that could either be easily worked into a bluesy feeling, of course ‘Merry
Christmas Baby’ is a blues standard so that was easy. Some, such as ‘All I Want For Christmas Is
You’, ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Frosty The Snow Man’, fell easily into the structure (variations on the
classic 1-4-5). One was simple for me—my favourite version of any Christmas song is Lou Rawls’