Max Roach

It's Christmas Again is the least typical record Max Roach made for Soul Note: two pieces of more than twenty minutes each, on which the drummer recites his own long poems over music by his quartet and three guests. It was taped in Milan in June 1984, a few days after the quartet album Scott Free, and held back for ten years, coming out only in 1994. Phil Freeman, writing in Burning Ambulance in 2020, called it "fascinatingly bizarre" and described it as an album "on which Roach recites two long poems over music by the band".

The recordings were made at Studio Barigozzi in Milan on June 2, 25 and 26, 1984, with Giancarlo Barigozzi as engineer, Roach as producer and Giovanni Bonandrini as executive producer. The core is Roach's working quartet of the time, with Cecil Bridgewater on trumpet, Odean Pope on tenor saxophone and voice and Tyrone Brown on electric bass. Roach plays drums and percussion and also keyboards and vibraphone, and he is the main voice. On Christina, the second piece, the band grows with three guests: Lee Konitz on alto saxophone, Tony Scott on clarinet and the guitarist Tommaso Lama. The title track runs to twenty minutes and forty seconds, and Christina to just over twenty-one: each is a long spoken and played sequence rather than a theme and solos. The record sits apart from the rest of Roach's Soul Note catalogue of the 1980s, which is made of quartet albums such as In The Light and Scott Free and of the Double Quartet records with strings, and from the percussion ensemble M'Boom.

Soul Note CD 121153-2, the album's first and original release in 1994, with the two long pieces recorded in 1984.