James Brown

JAMES BROWN'S FUNKY CHRISTMAS

(Polydor)

This disc compiles the best of three Christmas discs the Godfather recorded between '66 and '70. There's not much straight-up funk here, aside from the brilliant-yet-awful "Soulful Christmas," but you do get to hear the greatest soul singer ever doing some of his most deranged material -- screaming his way through "Let's Make This Christmas Mean Something This Year" and facing the endless strings-and-horns of "Hey America (It's Christmas Time)," in which he desperately ad-libs "This is the United States, you know . . . hava nagila . . . volare, volare . . . " Brown's vocal model for Christmas songs was the great blues singer Charles Brown, whom he pretty much channels throughout these songs. The album's highlight, though, is '68's "Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto," a swinging, hard-sung soul number that's something of a standard among bizarro-Christmas-tune aficionados.

-- Douglas Wolk

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