The Holiday Mixtape That Wasn’t

In any normal December, I’d be gearing up for one of my Holiday Mixtape shows. As everyone knows, however, life has been anything but normal these past couple years.

Developed in 2012, HMT is one of the most fun events I get to produce. Inspired in part by my own Seasonal Affective Disorder and general “bah humbug” attitude toward holidays, I set out to create a seasonal program that brought the fun, the unexpected, and the unorthodox. A show that was both irreverent and also capable of staring the real-life, less-than-positive aspects of the season straight in the face.

Most important: a program free of the imagination-free schlock that plagues the vast majority of all December music programs.

Launched at Scholtz Bier Garten in 2014, the first installment was a raucous, punk rock collaboration between the Invincible Czars (serving as house band) and Texas Choral Consort (serving as the vocal component), the standing-room-only event doubled as a fundraiser for the SIMS Foundation (of which I’m a proud advisory board member). Leveraging my position as Music Curator for the Blanton Museum of Art, I was able to host HMT in the Blanton’s gorgeous atrium, where it remained each year until Covid shut down all performances.

HTM became a standing tradition for the people who packed the halls each year to enjoy guest artists from the central Texas club scene, heavy metal sing-a-long carols, young musician performers from non-profits like Kids in a New Groove, and — of course — the lovely singers of TCC (which eventually rebranded as Panoramic Voices). In 2019, I developed a touring version of the show, allowing us to start taking the production on the road.

In December 2020, Panoramic Voices and I were able to keep the music alive in the age of Covid, hosting an online-only edition of past performances, new content, and various past musical guests. While it’s been a year and a half since the PV Board of Directors announced it would be dropping me from the PV payroll — and nearly six months since I announced to the board that I’d be stepping away from my artistic director duties until they were ready to re-engage me in the professional capacity by which they hired me in 2007 — I’ve still not heard anything from them about scheduling any future performances.

Meaning that — for the first time since 2014 — there will be no Holiday Mixtape.

All of which leaves me melancholy, as this show was one of the very few things I truly enjoyed about the holiday season. I nevertheless believe that HMT will be back with a vengeance one of these days, and I’ll look forward to bringing the fun, the loud, and the weird another time.

Happy holidays to y’all.

PS for those missing the Holiday Mixtape experience this season and wishing to relive it, here’s a handy link to the 2020 edition: https://youtu.be/n8Yxts-mfDw