Nice Vince Guaraldi/"Peanuts" Article

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/12/harmonious-balance-vince-guaraldis.html

A harmonious balance: Vince Guaraldi's score for "A Charlie Brown Christmas"

By Steve Garmhausen

Try imagining A Charlie Brown Christmas without Vince Guaraldi's jazz-piano trio score. It's as difficult as imagining good ol' Chuck successfully kicking Lucy's football.

Guaraldi is in the pop culture and music pantheon thanks to his music for that inaugural CBS Peanuts feature in 1965 and the 14 ensuing specials he would work on before his death in 1976 at age 47. But the shows owe as much to him as he does to them: The writing and playing of the San Francisco native dubbed "Dr. Jazz" by his friends make A Charlie Brown Christmas and its brethren hip, just deep enough and multicultural. They animate the animation. Watch the special this year, or dig out your copy of the soundtrack if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people who own one, or better yet, get the new CD reissue, which features four outtake tracks. You'll hear complex music that's deceptively accessible.

Easily identified by his handlebar mustache and thick plastic glasses, Guaraldi was a relentlessly upbeat character, almost childlike in his enthusiasm. Lee Mendelson, who produced the Peanuts specials and recruited Guaraldi to score them, once said, "I used to have to pat him on the head and say, 'Relax." Sure enough, the pianist who came up through the clubs and colleges in and around Beatnik San Francisco loved kids, and he was a Peanuts fan before collaborating with Mendelson, comics creator Charles M. Schulz and animator Bill Melendez on the specials.

Guaraldi's sunniness comes through in the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. His performances are full of fanciful arpeggiated chords and bouncy vamps, and are sprinkled with sudden flourishes and little blue grace notes: Here was a man at play while playing. But he was also a formidable if unpretentious composer, channeling an array of influences, from straight-ahead cool jazz to its hot Latin variety to pop. Indeed, the biggest contribution of Guaraldi's music is how its ethnic roots--black and Latin music--colorized Peanuts' white bread world.

An overnight success long in the making, Guaraldi honed his chops and developed his style for years, mostly at gigs throughout the San Francisco Bay area. His formative period included a couple of valuable apprenticeships--one with Woody Herman's big band and one with Cal Tjader's Latin groups. The Latin bug stuck; Guaraldi's breakthrough album was 1962's Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus, based on the popular movie's soundtrack by Antonio Carlos Jobim that helped launch the Bossa Nova craze. Guaraldi also sought out collaborations with the brilliant Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete, fine recordings of which are still available. And he composed some bona fide gems in the style. Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus was the first album with the fully realized "Guaraldi sound." All Music Guide describes it well as having a "madly swinging right hand and occasional boogie-influenced left hand, and a distinctive, throat-catching melodic improvisational gift."

Guaraldi liked to refer to himself as a "reformed boogie-woogie pianist," and his best-known composition, "Linus and Lucy," borrows from the style with its bouncy, infectious bass line. But it's more: Guaraldi gently shifts the key back and forth to create a modern profile. Then he and his trio set the boogie bass line aside for a Latin interlude, and later, some relaxed, straight-ahead swing.

Guaraldi's tunes were little structures in which he propped styles, rhythms and colors against each other in ways that seem perfectly obvious, but only in hindsight. The simple-seeming complexity of Peanuts was not so different: It is a world built of earnestness, irony, slapstick and pensiveness, serious themes and whimsical one-offs. If the Charlie Brown Christmas score jibes so well with the Peanuts universe, maybe it's because both comprise disparate elements that somehow achieve a harmonious balance. Consider the celebratory "Christmas is Coming": It moves from jazzy pop held in place by an insistent bass note, to Latin and back; then it explodes into a blues with a wonderful walking bass line, before finally working its way back to the opening theme.

It was the radio gods brought Guaraldi and Peanuts together. The Black Orpheus soundtrack featured a wistful Guaraldi composition -- somewhat corny really -- called "Cast Your Fate to the Wind," that became a gold record. It caught the ear of Mendelson as he drove his car over Golden Gate Bridge following a meeting with Schulz. Mendelson's selection of Guaraldi -- first to score a Peanuts documentary that never aired, and later the specials -- now seems inevitable, but at the time it was as iconoclastic as Peanuts itself. No Christmas special had ever been scored with a jazz trio, and by the mid-1960s, the very idea was risky, because jazz itself had grown esoteric and experimental enough that most record buyers were wary of it. But Guaraldi had the common touch, and it was this relaxed, inviting quality that bewitched Mendelson when he first heard the composer's work. True, "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" was jazz, he explained later, "...but it was melodic and open and came like a breeze off the bay."

If Guaraldi's music was accessible, it was also sufficiently complex and counter-cultural to suit Charlie Brown, a character adrift in suburbia and baffled by a commerce-crazed modernity. For a composer with a such a buoyant soul, Guaraldi found just the right colors to capture Chuck's seasonal melancholy. It's all encapsulated in two chords in "Christmas Time is Here": The children's choir sings "Christmas time is," over a bright chord. The next chord, rolled out fluidly under the word "here," is dark and suspenseful. Having proferred a taste of exotic harmony, Guaraldi leads the listener into the comfort zone of a graceful resolution.

This tasteful approach, sophisticated but without airs, was Guaraldi's calling card in the Peanuts franchise and elsewhere. His jazz mass, performed at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral in 1965, used a mature minimalism to scaffold the service and lend it joy. The music doesn't sound like someone striving under the glare of Bach's ghost. It sounds, actually, like a Peanuts soundtrack, as Guaraldi's trio plays Latin vamps and straight-ahead grooves with bluesy piano flourishes. Guaraldi was evidently as comfortable in his own skin as Joe Cool was in his.

 

Nice of you to post this fantastic article Planbee. Thanks kindly.

i love this line...You'll hear complex music that's deceptively accessible.

 

I constantly marvel at and feel very fortunate for the fact that my childhood in the early 70s was filled with jazz from shows like the Peanuts specials, Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Peanuts was obviously the first of these. Great stuff.

Jason

 

Jason, I couldnt agree more. Peanuts music opened my ears at a very early age to jazz, something my parents didnt' listen to, but i clearly responded to. I had this album as a kid and its the first steps to my now major love with jazz, and lately trio's in general. 2006 has become such a "trio year" with tons of purchases this year of the Nat King Cole trio, Shelly Manne (someone I discovered yesterday, thanks to this threads creator planbee), Lester Youngs Trio, Oscar Petersons Trio, Vince, etc.

I'd forgotten about the music on some of those PSB shows I also watched in the early 70s. interesting to ponder really. Thanks.

 

Just reading that article made me smile! Thanks for posting it.

 

Much appreciated after a long day.


Mike

 

Here is an interesting link of all the Vince tracks appearing on each of the peanuts specials...some great bits of information here....

http://www.peanutscollectorclub.com/cuesheet.html

 

thank you for the post...

 

A nice plug at the end for Guaraldi's recording of his jazz writing of an Episcopal Mass,available on Fantasy as VINCE GUARALDI AT GRACE CATHEDRAL. Recorded in May,1965(just a few months before the cartoon show),it is everything the reviewer says about it. A track from the performance, "Theme To Grace", recieved airplay on a Philly MOR radio station at the time and,though I had heard the Sounds Orchestral version of "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" and knew a little bit about the "Black Orpheus" music(though I had yet to hear Vince's take on it),this was my introduction with Guaraldi playing. Much of it is indeed a fitting companion to the Peanuts music. George Winston included "Theme for Grace" on his Guaraldi tribute album,a nice gesture,but alas,George couldn't make it swing like Vince could.

 

I'm not aware of this album. I'm going to check this one out.

 

Here is another nice article from the Washington Post titled, Charlie Brown, an evergreen treat. This was actually reprinted in our local paper here with colored pics of the Peanuts gang and a photo of Guaraldi.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/08/AR2006120800317.html

 

thanks man.

 

A little early, I know, but I just played A Charlie Brown Christmas and thought I'd bump up this thread.

Amazing to see in the Penguin Guide to Jazz that this album received a mere 2 1/2 stars. Or whatever **(*) means. And Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus got exactly two stars, which by their definition means "Not good. There are many better records to listen to." Yeah, o-kay...

 

It is NEVER too early to listen to this album.

 

Great article! Thanks for the post. I really dig Guaraldi's style and music, heck I even have "Linus and Lucy" as my ringtone.

 

Great read! Vince's music from those Peanuts specials is definitely a part of the soundtrack to my childhood (and most of ours I'm sure). Having grown up in the 80's, it was about the only jazz that was able to reach me through the mainstream madness of the day.

 

I really dislike Xmas and commercialism and holidays (bah, humbug, yes I know), but I always try to catch "A Charlie Brown Christmas" when it's on. Guaraldi's feel for scoring this is sublime, and there's one moment in it that just stops my breath every time: in his rendition of "Oh Christmas Tree", which plays as Charlie Brown and Linus are getting the tree, there's one passage where Guaraldi inverts the harmony on three of the chords (have a listen -- it sticks out) and it's just a marvellous harmonic effect.

Thanks also for reminding me that there used to be such great jazz on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as well. He may have seemed square but he was a real hepcat when it came to jazz.

 

Thanks for the article. I have always enjoyed Vince's Peanut's music and the Charlie Brown Christmas was a favorite.

 

Actually, the SACD...

Speaking of, the sound quality of "Linus and Lucy" on the A Boy Named Charlie Brown SACD is amazing. Much better than on the A Charlie Brown Christmas SACD or any CD I've heard. Steve explained why a long time ago, but I forget. I'm lucky if I remember something someone told me yesterday...

 

Seems about time for the annual thread bump...

 

Another holiday bump for a very nice article originally posted four years ago by Planbee. Whether you're listening to the incredible Hoffman/Gray AP 45, hybrid sacd, original cd or vinyl, or any of the other reissues out there, the holiday season wouldn't be the same without "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Thank You, Vince.

 

A+ article.

 

Sweet!