A Musical Christmas Miracle

The Dec. 4 performance of "O Holy Night" by a pickup band of New Orleans musicians on the NBC drama "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" has developed a life beyond prime time.

After it aired, curious viewers who clicked to a streaming video clip of the sequence on NBC's Web site were referred to the Tipitina's Foundation, whose executive director, Bill Taylor, helped assemble the band at the last minute and accompanied the players to Los Angeles.

The link caused the foundation to be "bombarded" with calls and e-mails from people wanting to own an audio-only version, Taylor said.

Late Friday, NBC met that demand by making the song available as a free music download.

To find it, go to www.nbc.com, then click on "shows," then click on "Studio 60." There are two different links on that page for the audio download, one for a video replay of the scene.

Monday, the full episode was iTunes' No. 7 most popular video download.

Finally, NBC will rerun the episode next week. It's scheduled to air Monday at 9 p.m. on WDSU-Channel 6.

How the series, which is a backstage drama about a "Saturday Night Live"-type show, came to employ Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, Mervin "Kid Merv" Campbell, Kirk Joseph and others in the production of its Christmas episode was the subject of an earlier column (click on "A Crescent City Christmas Carol" at http://www.nola.com/living/t-p/walker/index.ssf?archive), but here's a recap anyway:

Andrews plays a displaced New Orleans trumpet player subbing for a member of the house band on the show-within-the-show. When a producer discovers that Andrews' character is working because L.A.-based musicians have been surreptitiously calling in sick so that relocated New Orleans musicians can earn some extra cash near the holidays, he cuts a sketch and replaces it with a performance of "O Holy Night" by a band of the trumpet player's hometown peers.

The episode-concluding sequence, in which the band performs in front of projected photos of post-Katrina flooding and snapshots of recovery, struck an appropriately emotional chord with many fans.

Online chat-boards saw brisk traffic in rave reviews, questions about the song and its performers, and even requests for a full album of Christmas music from the ad hoc band.

The freshman series is far from a hit otherwise: Nielsen's No. 50 rated show for the season, it averages 9.3 million viewers. A rerun of "CSI: Miami," Nielsen's No. 6, clobbered the "Studio 60" Christmas episode, which only 7.4 million viewers watched.
But NBC's posting of the download link confirms that many of them want to hear more of "O Holy Night" and/or The City of New Orleans -- the clumsy name given to the band in the show's script.

"I had a feeling it was going to be that way," said Taylor, who was contacted by producers looking to cast real musicians for the roles. (The musicians' travel expenses were paid by "Studio 60" co-executive producers Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme.)

"Bringing the guys out there was such chaos," Taylor said. "They called me on a Friday or a Saturday and the shooting started on the following Wednesday."

In addition to trumpeters Andrews and Campbell and tubist Joseph, the band included saxophonists Roderick Paulin and Frederick Shepherd, and trombonist Stephen Walker.

Taylor said that the show had already done enough research to know that Campbell and Shepherd had been displaced to Arizona by the storm, and their inclusion was a specific request by the producers.

"When they called, they said they needed a group of musicians, mostly brass-playing musicians, and they said there needs to be a younger musician who could potentially take on a speaking role," Taylor said. "Obviously, the first person who came to mind was Troy. I told them, 'Honestly, I think you're going to love this kid.' "

The first stop in L.A. was a recording studio, to lay down the music.

There, W.G. Snuffy Walden, "Studio 60's" music composer, had already done a chart on "O Holy Night." (NBC also credits his colleagues Patrick Rose and Randy Kerber for arranging and producing the tune.)

A Baton Rouge native, Walden has scored a long list of TV shows, and wrote the opening themes to "thirtysomething" and "The West Wing," among others.

Walden said that Sorkin asked for an arrangement of the song akin to one he knew by the Canadian Brass.

"I know what Aaron's tastes are," Walden said. "What he wanted was a hymn. What he was looking for was classically oriented, and yet it needed to be New Orleans."

Walden's original music "was a very kind of classical, almost rigid arrangement," Taylor said. "Very, very somber and, really, the New Orleans musicians took hold of it and kind of adapted it and moved it in a direction that was undeniably New Orleans."

"As much as anything, primarily it's Troy," Walden said. "So much of it is what Troy brought to it."

At one point, the musicians tried the song with a much more upbeat second-line rhythm, which "bent a little too New Orleans," Walden said. "It just wouldn't have flowed under the scene. We went for something a little more somber."

Walden said he's delighted that the sequence and the song have sparked additional fan interest.

More important, he said, is that it might engender "a sense of urgency, a renewed sense of compassion" about New Orleans' recovery. "I was down there for Jazzfest and drove around and I couldn't believe the devastation," he said.

Next stop was the Burbank soundstage that holds the massive "Studio 60" set.

Andrews, who studied a download of Aaron Neville's version of "O Holy Night" en route to L.A., delivered his dialogue like a pro, though the production was ready for him not to be such an accomplished thespian.

"They had a Hollywood actor standing by to do that role," Taylor said.

After watching Andrews do a run-through, "Tommy Schlamme came up and told the other guy he could go home," Taylor said.
The band performance scene took hours to shoot, and was an eye-opener for all involved.

"It was a wild experience, seeing the whole L.A. thing, and the Warner Bros. lot," Taylor said. "The glamour that we often see of that lifestyle, I think that applies to only a few people at the top of the heap. That was grueling work. Both days were over 12 hours long."

The preview column I wrote about the episode mentioned drummer Bob French as one of the imported players, but he was nowhere to be seen in the final cut. The band on stage performs drummer-less.

As it turns out, French, who helped Taylor assembled the band, was actually stationed with the show-within-a-show's "house band" in the balcony of the theater set during the performance sequence.

"He wasn't with the other guys, though they were filming him through the whole thing," Taylor said.

It's an old story: French's on-screen performance was left on the cutting room floor.

"It's all right, they paid me, I got my check," said French, contacted after his Friday morning disc jockey shift on WWOZ FM-90.7. "I wondered why they would put the band downstairs and me upstairs with the other band, but it was cool. They were working downstairs while I was just sitting around. I said, 'Damn, you're sure making this money easy.'

"They must've done that tune about 30 times. Each time, the director would say, 'Great! One more take!' I thought, 'It can't be great if you want another take!'

"Troy is in his early 20s, and after a while even he was bitching. I was tired and I was just sitting around."

Despite the Hollywood hardship for the musicians, Taylor knew he was witnessing something special.

The feeling started during the recording session -- "I knew everybody was playing fantastically," Taylor said -- but grew when he saw how the scene was constructed from the sweet and somehow triumphant combination of the musical arrangement, the dignity of the musicians themselves, the falling fake snow and the pictures of home.

"You sometimes hear a song and feel it deep down inside you, and it moves you on this level," Taylor said. "I knew that everybody who hears this was going to have a reaction. I knew immediately.

"All those images. It was unbelievably moving."

Article from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 12/13/06.
Written by TV Columnist Dave Walker.
Click here to view the article as it originally appeared on nola.com

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
Monday, December 18th, 9pm CST on NBC (encore presentation)