Million Dollar Quartet Christmas

Million Dollar Quartet Christmas returns to the cramped recording studio where four young musicians famously ended up around one piano in December 1956, and reimagines that night as a holiday session. The songs are theirs, the room is cold, and the carols arrive in their idiom rather than anyone else's.

The four spend the evening circling each other as much as playing: rivalry over who is selling records, unease about contracts and what comes next, old grudges surfacing between takes. In between, they play - rockabilly, gospel, country, and a run of Christmas standards reworked in the sound they were busy inventing. The music is played live by the performers rather than piped in behind them.

The pleasure is in the playing. It is built as a concert with a story wrapped around it, and it lands best with anyone who loves the period: the slapback echo, the stand-up bass, the piano taking a beating. It sends a room out warmer than it found it, which is the point of putting a Christmas frame around a rock and roll session.