It's beginning to sound a lot like Christmas with Royal Crown Revue. In their latest release Don't Be A Grinch This Year!, Eddie Nichols, Mondo Dorame and Mark Cally have arranged another swingin', danceable, and joyful CD which this time captures the spirit of the season in their neo-swing style.

The spirit of Christmas can be celebrated in many ways. There is the original religious holiday, of course, and then there is the more secular version, “Kitschmas.” The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. This beautiful new book explores and expounds upon the more commercial aspects of the season with an eye-popping pictorial potpourri of popular Christmas artifacts, icons, toys and imagery from mid-20^th-century, roughly 1940-1970, that continue to inhabit and influence our contemporary culture.

Ray Gelato's latest CD offering Salutes the Great Entertainers epitomizes an ideal that Ray Gelato well represents, a musical letter to the editor rebuking the criticism that some modern jazz enthusiasts seem to have for the performers who were showmen and excitably engaging individuals, rather than the currently more critically popularized laid back big band traditionalists, or bebop hipsters.

Ray Fernandez and his common-law wife, Martha Beck, were known as “The Lonely Hearts Killers.” Between 1947 and 1949, they were believed to have been responsible for the murder of 20 women. Contributor Sal Ortega reviews the three films that are based on the story of their murderous spree.