Art Christmas
Canadian jazz and dance band musician
Art Christmas (December 22, 1905 – September 24, 1961) was a Canadian dance band and jazz musician. For many years during the exciting dance band and jazz era of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Art Christmas was often said to be Britain's leading saxophone player and multi-instrumentalist. In the 1930s and 1940s, young musicians in their teens and early twenties would follow Art all over Britain listening to him play and trying to copy his style, especially on alto saxophone.
Beginning
Art's professional music career really started when he was 19 years old. He left Canada to play trumpet with the Dumbells Orchestra, touring all over the United States and then on to Britain. While in Britain, he was given the opportunity to play trumpet with Paul Specht's Canadian Club Orchestra in 1926 and really never looked back. The Melody Maker Magazine detailed this orchestra's strengths by saying: "A ten-piece combination, its members, who are all Canadians, between them account for thirty-five different instruments. There are three vocalists in the outfit. Art Christmas, the first trumpet, is also a red-hot 'dirt' sax player."
Still in Britain, Art went on to play with the New Prince's Toronto Band also in 1926. This band was the resident band at the New Prince's restaurant in Piccadilly.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Art Christmas” as canadian jazz and dance band musician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as canadian jazz and dance band musician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4796739. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1905, 1961 and 1926.
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This entry incorporates text from “Art Christmas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.