Hot on the heels of her breakthrough jazz EP, Smoky Nights, internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter Jennifer Saran is revving up holiday spirits with a smashing new single, “(Don’t Let It Be) a Sad Ol’ Christmas,” to be released December 6 on Tarpan Records.

The track is yet another winning collaboration between Saran and superstar producer Narada Michael Walden (Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey). As Saran points out, she and Walden had strikingly similar ideas concerning the title: “We had just finished Smoky Nights, which had a fair share of melancholy tunes, so when I was talking to Narada about doing a Christmas song, I said, ‘I don’t want anything sad, not this year.’

“And then Narada recalled how his grandmother, whenever something went wrong, used to say, ‘It’s going to be a sad ol’ Christmas.’ The two of us laughed and said, ‘Well, that’s it then. We’re not going to have a sad ol’ Christmas.’ We had our title.”