Dave Koz talks Cory Wong collaboration, Christmas tour and two new albums

Back in fall 2019, as Dave Koz was readying himself to do his annual holiday tour, he was already having thoughts about making an ambitious new album.

“In the beginning the idea was to make like a double album or maybe a double EP that would reflect a little bit about where I’d been and then where I’d like to go,” Koz recalled in an early November phone interview. “I remember even, ‘Yesterday and Today’ was the working title of that.”

Of course, within a few months, the pandemic hit and this turned everything upside down, including Koz’s plans for a double album. But Koz, who has always been one of the busier artists in music, didn’t let the unexpected interruption keep him from being productive.

As a result, Koz has not one, but two, new albums under his belt as he embarks on the 24th edition of his Dave Koz and Friends Christmas tour, which stops at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts Dec. 17 and 18, the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert Dec. 19 and the Balboa Theatre in San Diego Dec. 20.

The first of those albums, “A New Day,” arrived in October 2020, and it’s Koz’s first album of original non-holiday music in a decade. To an extent, it follows through on the idea of making an album that stays true to the musical style of the 10 non-holiday studio albums Koz has released since 1990 (all of which have gone at least top 5 on the contemporary jazz chart). Like his previous albums, “A New Day” is largely in the instrumental R&B-accented smooth jazz realm.

The pandemic, though, did influence the upbeat feel of the music and how “A New Day” was made.

“Immediately kind of when the pandemic hit, this is March of 2020, after the initial shock wore off, I was like, well, this is what I noticed about myself. I was really fumbling toward, trying to make myself feel better,” Koz said. “And I noticed it was really through music that I was able to accomplish that, my feel-good music from people I could count on. So it kind of dawned on me that maybe I should get my ass into gear and record some music hopefully to do the same thing for other people.”

Of course, the next question was how would Koz be able to work with his co-writers and musicians when they couldn’t get together in person? To his surprise, Koz found working virtually using the internet was a viable way to get things done.

“It (the album) was amazingly easy to make because everybody was home (and available),” Koz said. “I would have loved to have gotten together with people and written in person. But in this situation, it had to be what it had to be. So these guys would send me fragments of songs, maybe like a verse, chorus, saying what do you think of this? Either I would hear something immediately or not.”

Koz didn’t have that issue with writing for the second album, “The Golden Hour.”

In February 2020, Koz had gotten together with producer/co-writer Cory Wong to compose songs for that album. “The Golden Hour,” which was released in June, is a different venture for Koz. It pairs the sax player and guitarist Wong with a big band playing, in many cases, songs that are more energetic – at times even rocking – than Koz’s other albums.