A jazz musician's final Christmas

Seventy years ago this month, Alfred Burt approached the Advent season knowing it would be his last.

This gifted jazz trumpeter from Hollywood had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. He was making peace with the fact that he would likely die at the age of 33, just like the Jewish carpenter’s son whose birth we commemorate at Christmas.

Sitting in a wheelchair, a weak Alfred Burt sat in a Southern California church conducting Hollywood’s most gifted musicians for a recording session.

They were capturing on tape the composer’s collection of original Christmas carols previously unknown to the world at large. The legacy project would result in a long-play vinyl album titled “The Christmas Mood” produced by Columbia Records and released after his death in 1954.

Alfred, the son of an Episcopal priest, found great meaning in the message of the incarnation.

In fact, each year, after graduating college with a degree in music, he collaborated with his father creating an original carol that was distributed as the family Christmas card. His dad would write the lyrics. Alfred would compose the music.

When his dad died unexpectedly in 1948, Alfred turned to Wihla Hutson, the organist at his father’s church, to write poetic lines for which he would provide the melody.

In that collaboration, the family tradition was able to continue.

A year later, the Hutson/Burt collaboration resulted in a carol that was used to announce Alfred’s wife’s pregnancy.

“Sleep, Baby, Mine” became a lullaby with which the Burt’s infant daughter would be rocked to sleep a few months later. But such an intimate expression would not be limited to young Diane’s ears. In time, it would be celebrated by countless thousands.

Although you might not be familiar with the names Wihla Hutson or Alfred Burt, I’m guessing you know some of the more popular songs they birthed.

“The Star Carol,” “Caroling, Caroling, Through the Snow” and “Some Children See Him.”

That infant daughter, for whom “Sleep, Baby Mine” was written, is now 73 years of age.

Wanting to find out more information about her remarkable father, I found Diane Burt online and reached out to her.

She told me a great deal about the dad she barely remembers. He died when Diane was only 3.

She told me the Christmas card her dad sent out for his final Christmas had a jubilant lyric and melody.

I’m guessing you know the melody even if the words aren’t so familiar. It’s called “O, Hearken Ye.” It’s a carol that calls those who long for a better world to listen to what we might hear on a silent night in the midst of the cacophony of our chaotic world.

The second verse of “O, Hearken Ye” goes like this:

O hearken ye who long for peace, Your troubled searching now may cease!

Gloria! Gloria In excelsis Deo!

For at His cradle you shall find God’s healing grace for all mankind.

Gloria! Gloria in excelsis Deo!

The Hutson/Burt compositions offer a contemporary description of the human condition and the divine solution.

If ever there was a Christmas when the carols of Alfred Burt were most appropriate, it is this year.

As the birthplace of Jesus and so many other regions of God’s world are rocked with division, hate and bloodshed, Hutson’s poetry and Burt’s music offers a balm in Gilead and beyond.

And I might add, because his tunes are not as familiar as the more traditional ones, there is a haunting beauty that gives us cause for pause. The lack of familiarity provides a magnetic pull.

Because Alfred Burt approached the Christmas of 1953 overshadowed by a doctor’s grim diagnosis, his musical offering provided a sense of healing in the midst of personal heartache. His creativity served his hope. His faith sustained his declining health.

As one raised in the church, Alfred was aware that the message of the season is tinged with both joy and sorrow.

He knew the baby’s cry from a cradle and the Savior’s sigh from a cross are part of the same story.

The child in the manger is one who was born to die for our flawed humanity and our broken world. Such a truth is worth pondering this season.

• The Rev. Greg Asimakoupoulos is a former Naperville resident who writes about faith and family.