Cole Brothers

Cole Brothers is the soul-and-jazz corner of NovelGrooves - a project written in the lineage of warm-vocal classic soul, trio-jazz holiday standards, and the kind of seasonal record that still gets played fifty years after it was made.

The sound is unapologetically traditional: warm horns, brushed drums, walking bass, vocals that lean into the melody instead of around it. There's no winking irony here, no genre subversion, no contemporary production tricks. Cole Brothers is a project that takes the great American songbook tradition seriously and tries to write a new entry into it - specifically, a holiday entry.

The catalogue is small but focused. The premise is simple: write the kind of Christmas record that families put on while wrapping presents, with a producer's eye for arrangement and a writer's ear for which clichés to honour and which to leave alone. It's the Cole Brothers project at its purest - soul and jazz as comfort food, made with care.

A Cole Brothers project by Lars Curfs. For fans of Nat King Cole, Michael Bublé, Vince Guaraldi.