There's a page in the Clinton White House digital archives that lists every musical group invited to perform during the 1996 holiday season. The page is plain HTML, sorted by state. Under Oregon, on December 5 at 1:30 in the afternoon, it says my name. Patrick Lamb. The link still works, twenty years later: clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/Holidays/Artists.html.
I went back to the White House the following December too. The 1997 list never made it onto the web — the Clinton Web team digitized 1996 and 1998 but for whatever reason skipped the year between — but the trip happened. Both years I played the indoor Congressional VIP Tours, the holiday programming the White House Social Office runs across several weeks of December for members of Congress, their guests, and a stream of invited visitors walking the State Floor.
I've played a lot of rooms. Two of them were on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is what I remember.
How a saxophonist from Portland gets invited
The short version: Christopher Radko.
The longer version requires telling you who Christopher Radko is, because his name is half-forgotten now and at the time he was the most famous Christmas decorator in America. The Czar of Christmas Present, the New York Times called him in a December 1997 feature on his work at the Clinton White House. The Ornament King, Chicago Tribune. By the mid-90s his glass-ornament company was doing $50 million a year, his earliest customers were Whoopi Goldberg and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and the Clintons had asked him to design the Green Room and Red Room mantels for both the 1996 and 1997 holiday seasons. The Green Room mantel in 1996 was a Sugar Plum Fairy and Cavalier scene in antique pink and Wedgwood blue. The Red Room mantel was the opening of The Nutcracker, with figures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln tucked among the children. In 1997 the Green Room mantel was Santa's village at night, with the elves preparing for the round-the-world journey, and the Red Room was Santa's Workshop on December 23rd.
I knew Christopher. The story of how he got me in the door is a story I've told many times, and it bothers me a little that none of it lives in any digitized archive — invitation cards from the 90s aren't digitized at all unless someone scans them — so for now you'll have to take my word for the connection. He shared a Christmas album of mine with the White House social secretary, and it turned out the invitation followed.
The 1996 trip I made with the Portland keyboardist Ed Bisquera. The Rocket, the Pacific Northwest's biggest music newspaper at the time, wrote about it on December 18th, 1996, page 8 of issue 244. They used the phrase "summoned to Washington DC for a command performance," which sounded grander than it was. We weren't headlining anything. We were one of about eighty visiting groups the Clinton White House cycled through across the holiday tour weeks of that month, providing the live music that wafted through the East Room and the State Floor while members of Congress and their guests walked through.
The 1997 trip I made with Thomas Lauderdale, founder of Pink Martini. Pink Martini's debut album Sympathique had just come out and Thomas's reputation as a politically engaged Portland pianist was rising; the Portland-to-Washington connection that year was strong.
The Peace on Earth Celebration
There's a phrase from my own published biography that has confused some people: that the trip "led to meeting President Clinton" through "The Peace on Earth Celebration." The phrase comes from the language of the invitation card I received at the time. I still have it.
If you go looking for the exact phrase "Peace on Earth Celebration" in the Clinton White House archives, you won't find it as a separate event. The closest documented matches are the umbrella Christmas Pageant of Peace on the Ellipse — the National Christmas Tree Lighting and the multi-week Pathway of Peace evening music program — and the Clintons' State Floor receptions for diplomats, members of Congress and donors. In 1997 the Pageant's declared theme was, in fact, just "Peace."
The most likely reading is that I was one of the visiting holiday musicians the White House Social Office brought in to play the Congressional VIP Tour days during the Pageant of Peace season, and the invitation I received used some variant of the "Peace on Earth" phrasing. That's what I remember, and that's what the documentary record supports.
What I don't claim, and want to clear up here for anyone Googling, is that I performed at the National Christmas Tree Lighting itself — the big outdoor event on the Ellipse. I didn't. The 1996 Tree Lighting was Patti LaBelle, LeAnn Rimes, and Mannheim Steamroller. The 1997 Tree Lighting was Lorrie Morgan, Plácido Domingo, Martha Reeves, with Gregory Peck as master of ceremonies. Different show. The performance the Clinton White House Archives page lists me on, and the second one I made the following year, were the indoor Congressional VIP Tours.
The receiving line led to meeting the President. He's an alto saxophone player himself, of course, and was a famously serious high school sax player before Yale and Oxford and the rest. We were two saxophonists for thirty seconds, and then the line moved.
The rooms
If you've never walked the State Floor of the White House during a Pageant of Peace tour week, here's what it's like.
The Blue Room had the official Christmas tree both years — an 18'6" Colorado Blue Spruce from Coshocton, Ohio in 1996, and an 18'6" Fraser fir from Grassy Creek, North Carolina in 1997. The East Room had the 18th-century Neapolitan crèche, six towering trees flanking it, music drifting from one of the visiting groups stationed nearby. The Green Room and the Red Room were Christopher Radko's two mantels — the Sugar Plum Fairy and the candy castle in 1996, and Santa's village and Santa's Workshop in 1997. The Cross Hall connecting the rooms was the path everyone took, members of Congress with their families, kids in their Christmas-tour clothes.
The first time I walked into one of those rooms with my horn under my arm I had the same thought any working saxophonist from Portland, Oregon would have. I am playing in the White House. And then a kid asked if I knew "Linus and Lucy" and I played it.
What the trip meant
Three things stay with me, looking at it from 2026.
The first is that getting into the White House at 26, especially at 26 — before any of the Billboard hits, before the Schuur tour years, before any of the work that came later — set a benchmark on what was possible from the road I was on. I had won Best Soloist at Lionel Hampton, sat in with Lionel Hampton himself, and now had two December trips to Washington on the calendar. That kind of early validation is rare. It made the long years that followed easier.
The second is the friendship with Christopher Radko. He died in February 2025 and I posted about him on Facebook then. The mantelpieces are still some of my favorite Christmas memories from anywhere. He had a way of staging a holiday room that made you feel like a child.
The third is something I've only thought about more recently, putting these years in chronological order with everything else that was happening to me. December 1996 was ten years and seven months after the 1986 Mount Hood disaster at Oregon Episcopal School. Half of my classmates from that climbing party didn't come home from the mountain. I was supposed to be on it. A twisted ankle in indoor soccer the night before kept me down at sea level. Thirteen years later I climbed the mountain with Portland Mountain Rescue and read each of their names in a prayer at the summit.
The trip to the White House in 1996 was eight months after that climb. I was 29. I'd been carrying it for ten years. Walking into the East Room with my saxophone, in the most photographed Christmas rooms in America, with the President of the United States somewhere down the hall, I was thinking about my classmates. I always am.
Sources for everything in this article
If you're a journalist or a Wikipedia editor working on this, here are the citations.
- 1996 performance, primary source: Clinton White House Archives, "Holidays at the White House 1996 — Artists," clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov. Lists "Patrick Lamb — Portland — December 5, 1:30 pm" under Oregon.
- 1996 performance, contemporaneous press: The Rocket, issue 244, December 18, 1996, page 8, names me and Ed Bisquera and uses the phrase "command performance at The White House." Available via Washington Digital Newspapers Archive.
- 1997 performance: The Oregonian, "Beaverton's Last Tuesday Series to Feature Patrick Lamb on August 31," August 4, 2010, oregonlive.com; and Chris M. Slawecki, "Patrick Lamb to be Inducted Into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame," All About Jazz July 31, 2012, allaboutjazz.com.
- Christopher Radko's role at the Clinton White House: Marian Burros, "Tree Trimming With: Christopher Radko; The Czar of Christmas Present," The New York Times December 11, 1997, nytimes.com.
- The Clinton White House holiday programming: "Christmas Tour of The White House 1996," Clinton White House Archive, clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov.
- The 1996 and 1997 National Christmas Tree Lightings (which I did not perform at): "1993–2000 National Christmas Trees," National Park Service, nps.gov.