For indie-label owner John Maria, Christmas is a gift that keeps giving.
Three years ago, Maria, who runs the Upper West Side-based music publishing company Joma Music, pressed a record of Christmas songs performed by an assortment of little-known Brooklyn musicians. Since then he’s watched in surprise as the disc, “A Very Joma Christmas,” earned critical plaudits, scored airplay on Sirius and the BBC, was licensed for TV and movie use and picked up for in-store play by Starbucks.
This year, the record took yet another step forward, getting picked up for national distribution by MRI/Sony Red, placing it in Barnes & Noble, Best Buys and other stores across the country.
“It keeps going and going,” marvels Maria of his little-holiday-record-that-could. “Every year it’s grown.”
Maria’s primary business is publishing — he manages a catalog of vintage songs from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, and also represents a number of songwriters from Brooklyn’s indie music scene.
The seed for the Christmas record was planted several years ago, after Maria heard that Amy Winehouse was planning to make a holiday-themed CD. “I thought, that sounds fantastic — who wouldn’t want to buy that?” says Maria, who pictured something “Motown-y, fresh and cool.”
As it happened, Winehouse never made the record, but Maria still had that notion in his head — so he decided to enlist his artists to make one, combining new songs and updated classics.
“I said, why don’t we step out of our indie-rock boxes and mindset and try something new?” he says. “My thought was, let’s make Phil Spector’s ‘A Christmas Gift for You,’ but do it in 2009 in Brooklyn.”
The disc that resulted is divided between retro stylings (the ’60s girl-group vibe of Mia Crosby’s “Santa Forever,” A Girl Called Eddy’s hushed, jazzy ballad “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot”) and modern ones (Brandon Wilde’s Radiohead-influenced take on “Silent Night,” Us’ infectious punk-pop “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”).
Maria pressed a bunch of copies and stuffed them into mailers.
“It was completely DIY; we just mailed out this thing and had no idea what to expect.”
A week later he was “totally shocked” to see it make No. 3 on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s list of this year’s best holiday records, alongside Andrea Bocelli and Bob Dylan. Then USA Today gave it a rave, citing the record’s “charming arrangements and winning originals.”
More acclaim followed, and Maria’s surprise continued as subsequent holiday seasons brought TV placements, radio play, interest from Starbucks and MTV (which licensed the entire record), downloads from Germany to Japan, “featured album” status on iTunes and, finally, national distribution.
“Every year something happens that surprises us,” Maria says. “We joke that every year, for this record, there’s a holiday miracle.”