The Ed Palermo Big Band Announces It’s An Ed Palermo Christmas! God Bless Us, Everyone!, Arriving November 13, 2026

The Ed Palermo Big Band will release It’s An Ed Palermo Christmas! God Bless Us, Everyone! on November 13, 2026, via Sky Cat Records. The 23-track holiday album brings together the ensemble's wide-ranging musical influences, original compositions, inventive arrangements, narration, and a Christmas performance tradition spanning more than thirty years.

Ed Palermo is a saxophonist, composer, arranger, and band director whose work has long treated the big band as a vehicle for music well beyond traditional jazz-orchestra boundaries. Over more than four decades, he has developed an arranging language capable of moving among jazz, rock, pop, classical music, funk, and Latin influences while retaining the character of a working ensemble built around precision, flexibility, and humor.

Before establishing the Ed Palermo Big Band, Palermo toured and recorded with artists including Aretha Franklin, Eddie Palmieri, Celia Cruz, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Mel Torme, and The Spinners. His arranging work has also included projects for The Tonight Show, Maurice Hines, Eydie Gormé, and James Brown. Rather than functioning simply as résumé markers, those experiences reflect the breadth of musical language that would become central to Palermo’s own writing: an ability to move between idioms without treating stylistic boundaries as fixed.

That approach became the defining character of the Ed Palermo Big Band. Alongside Palermo’s original compositions, the ensemble has developed extensive programs devoted to or drawing from the music of Frank Zappa, Todd Rundgren, The Beatles, The Police, Pat Metheny, Jeff Beck, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Jethro Tull. Palermo’s arrangements do not simply reproduce that repertoire for big band; they place it inside his own orchestral language, where familiar material can change direction suddenly, collide with another musical reference, or become part of a larger ensemble narrative.

The same spirit shapes the band itself. Palermo affectionately describes his musicians as a group of “virtuosic misfits,” a phrase that captures both the individuality of the players and the shared musical personality they have developed together. That combination of disciplined ensemble playing, stylistic freedom, and an irreverent sense of possibility has also sustained Palermo’s long-running Christmas tradition. For more than thirty years, Christmas performances have given Palermo and his big band a setting in which seemingly incompatible repertoire can belong to the same program. On It’s An Ed Palermo Christmas! God Bless Us, Everyone!, that tradition becomes a recorded statement: holiday standards, Frank Zappa, progressive rock, classical repertoire, Palermo originals, narration, family memories, and musical jokes are brought together through his arranging voice. The result is less a conventional Christmas collection than a portrait of how this band hears the season—irreverently, affectionately, and with few stylistic borders.

A brief “Opening Narration” leads into Zoltán Kodály’s “Viennese Musical Clock,” followed by Frank Zappa’s “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black (Ed Palermo’s Misfit Band),” featuring Bruce McDaniel on vocals. “How Can I Be Sure This Is Candy’s Room?” then brings together Bruce Springsteen’s “Candy’s Room,” Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati’s “How Can I Be Sure,” and Zappa’s “Cruisin’ for Burgers.” A short “Narration – ‘Stellar Performance’” resets the sequence before the first Palermo original.

“God Bless Us, Everyone!” turns toward the album’s more personal side. Palermo connects the piece with cherished Christmas memories, establishing an emotional thread that returns throughout the record. “I Believe in Father Christmas,” associated with Greg Lake, Peter Sinfield, and Sergei Prokofiev, features Bruce McDaniel on vocals, while “Little Drummer Boy” places Nina Hennessey at the vocal center. “Sofa / Away in a Manger” joins Frank Zappa with the Christmas hymn tradition and features Robbie “Seahag” Mangano on guitar. “Candy’s Room / Cruisin’ for Burgers (Reprise)” revisits material from the earlier mashup, with Katie Jacoby featured on violin.

Zappa remains part of the vocabulary with “Toads of the Short Forest,” featuring Phil Chester on soprano saxophone and Nina Hennessey on vocals, before the sequence returns to Palermo’s own writing. “Christmas Carol,” written more than forty years ago and given new life here, features Ben Kono on oboe. Ian Anderson’s “A Christmas Song,” sung by Bruce McDaniel, continues the connection between Christmas repertoire and the progressive-rock language that has long been part of Palermo’s arranging world.

“Narration – ‘Rootny and Scrootny’” introduces “Rootny and Scrootny, The Christmas Babies,” Palermo’s composition for his daughters Molly and Sally and one of the clearest links between the album’s humor and its family history; Charley Gordon is featured on trombone. That family thread deepens in “Dustin’s Lullaby,” written in memory of Palermo’s nephew and featuring Ben Kono on oboe. “Narration – ‘Mike James’” then leads into “Dominick the Donkey,” with Mike James on vocals, returning the record to its comic side without separating it from the more personal material that precedes it.

The closing stretch continues that movement between playfulness and orchestral reference. “Narration – ‘Tiny Toy Soldiers’” introduces Darius Milhaud’s “Tiny Toy Soldiers,” followed by “Nut Rocker,” credited to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Kim Fowley and featuring Ted Kooshian on tack piano. “Ending Narration” prepares the final return to “I Believe in Father Christmas (Reprise),” bringing the program back to music heard earlier in the sequence rather than ending with a separate grand statement.

Across the album, Palermo’s originals and arrangements give the broad repertoire a common identity. The humor is unmistakable, but it does not stand apart from the record’s more tender material: the same program that accommodates Zappa, Springsteen, Kodály, Milhaud, Tchaikovsky, and holiday standards also makes room for Palermo’s memories of family, loss, and Christmas tradition. That balance between the unpredictable and the deeply familiar is what ultimately gives It’s An Ed Palermo Christmas! God Bless Us, Everyone! its center.