I would like to thank Dr. Garry Crites of Duke University for this thoughtful and eloquent review of "A Midnight Clear."   Garry is a music historian and offers a fresh and interesting insight. 

To me, one of the best parts of the Christmas season is the combination of the old and the new, the traditional and the up-to-date. There is great joy in the lights, the ornaments, the scents, and the tastes that have marked the Yule season for decades. But if you have your eyes open, there is always something fresh and exciting just around the corner: new sights, new sounds, new experiences.

It is this melding of the time-honored and the contemporary that makes Bill Leslie's most recent CD so pleasurable. In A Midnight Clear, one finds a comfort in the old hymns and carols of Christmas from several different traditions. Because of his previous explorations in Celtic fusion, one would expect Leslie to shine in his renditions of music from the British Isles and Appalachia, and he does not let us down. From the moving opening cadences of the Coventry Carol, to the distantly mountain feel of "I Wonder as I Wander," with its western North Carolina roots, Bill takes his cultural history and makes it his own, with his distinctive arrangements and instrumentation. But he also presents other regional carols with authenticity and insight. Perhaps the most lovely is his arrangement of "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence," which weaves together harp, cello, and Celtic whistle into an utterly haunting study of an old French carol.

But in a unique twist, North Carolina's bard has included a collection of new songs based upon the Mitford book series of North Carolina author Jan Karon. Those of us who have loved the books will appreciate how well the songs reflect the charming mythical village. The faithfulness and aching loneliness of the parish priest, the diverse, but somehow similar, voices of his parishioners, the wisp of Christmas snow falling with increasing volume on the mountain village rooftops, the divine mystery of Word becoming flesh which is celebrated at the midnight Eucharist—all are there for us to experience through these songs. They ring out with such sincerity and depth, that one senses that they have been written by someone who knows the story intimately; the musician from Morganton closes his eyes and can see every path and byway in Mitford.

Bill Leslie has given us a wonderful present this Christmas, a gift of much-beloved traditions and much-anticipated surprises. It is a package filled with all that is good and right and magical about this holy season.

Garry J. Crites

Duke University