Holiday concerts highlight of year for Paiges

Courtesy Kevin Paige

Kevin and Bethany Paige

For its first 10 years, the only people who got to see Kevin and Bethany Paige's annual Christmas concert were the lucky congregants at Midtown's Lindenwood Christian Church where the couple front the W.O.W. praise band.

But for the first time, the Paiges are taking their holiday spectacular out on the town on Friday with two performances at the Bartlett Performing Arts and Conference Center.

"This is a whole 12-piece band and huge horn section and really elaborate arrangements that I've accumulated over years of working on Christmas shows for our church," says Kevin Paige. "We're really got some lush arrangements for this thing. It's not your average Christmas pageant."

You could say that Christmas music runs in the Paige family.

According to family history, Kevin Paige's father, the late University of Memphis music professor Richard Paige, was the first person to sing the holiday classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" publicly as a Chicago-based NBC radio performer in the late 1940s.

"He was a huge radio star back then. He didn't really get to go into the recording side of it, but everybody was a fan of his, from Frank Sinatra to Dennis Day," Paige recalls of his father, who passed away in 1998. "He told me he felt totally ridiculous (singing that song). ... He didn't see it going anywhere."

Kevin Paige and his wife have continued his father's Christmas crooning tradition. He's released several holiday themed albums, including 1999's It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year and most recently, 2009's The Night Before Christmas with Bethany. In 2004 the couple also released A W.O.W. Christmas, a live recording of the Lindenwood show.

Concertgoers will get to hear a little from all those albums in a show that combines a bit of the traditional and the contemporary, including a speedy, jazzy reworking of "Winter Wonderland."

"I know how people are about their Christmas music," says Kevin Paige. "They want to hear it like Bing Crosby or like Nat 'King' Cole. They don't want you jacking with it too much. But we do a couple of modern twists, particularly on 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.'"

For Bethany, who delivers some of the show's more tender moments with her sentimental readings of favorites like "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," the holiday concerts are the highlight of the year. Preparations kick in around September and dominate activity around the Paige household until show time. The shows have meant the Paiges have had to put on hold production on a new Christian music CD, set for release in the first half of 2012. Even the couple's 10-year-old daughter gets in on the act, with a performance of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" scheduled for the Lindenwood show.

"It's just Christmas, Christmas, Christmas until after New Year's around here," says Bethany. "For me this is where I feel like I get to shine the most. I grew up listening to Patsy Cline and Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand and to have this sort of big band setting behind me is a dream come true."

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Christmas with Kevin and Bethany Paige

2:30 p.m. Friday at the Bartlett Performing Arts and Conference Center, 3663 Appling Rd. Tickets: $20, available at the box office and by phone at 385-6440. For more information, visit bpacc.org.

Dec. 10 at 7 p.m. at Lindenwood Christian Church, 2400 Union Ave. Tickets, $15, are available at the church office from 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday.

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