For hundreds of thousands around the globe who had been youngsters between the mid-’60s and the early Eighties, Vince Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts cartoons is deeply engrained. It was typically the primary jazz music they are going to have heard, though, on the time, Guaraldi’s upbeat, cheerful themes should have appeared an odd option to soundtrack the grim, bleakly comedian world of Charles M Schulz.
Born in San Francisco in 1928, Guaraldi emerged within the ’50s accompanying the vibist Cal Tjader, later becoming a member of Woody Herman’s large band. In 1962 he belatedly jumped on the bossa nova bandwagon with Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus, an album of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa songs from the 1959 movie, though you bought the impression that Guaraldi typically obtained bored of taking part in to a bossa rhythm, as an alternative lapsing again into the comforting world of swing beats and funky piano licks.
He did have a method with easy, catchy melodies, delivered with a bluesy flourish, and a observe on the Black Orpheus album, “Solid Your Destiny To The Wind”, was a shock hit, incomes a Grammy for greatest jazz track. One fan was TV producer Lee Mendelson, who thought that Guaraldi’s model – likeable, barely craving, hip however not too out-there – was an ideal match for the animated diversifications of the Peanuts strip he was making.
You could find variations of Guaraldi’s tunes from Charlie Brown – “Linus And Lucy”, “The Crimson Baron”, “The Nice Pumpkin Waltz”, “Charlie Brown Theme”, “Christmas Time Is Right here”, “Skating” and “Baseball Theme” – on lots of his albums, however that is the primary LP that includes the entire tunes, temper music and “stings” from a single soundtrack. Craft launched a CD of this 1966 soundtrack in 2018 that was, relatively clumsily, taken from the precise broadcast, that includes sound results and snippets of speech, however this model is taken from not too long ago unearthed authentic analogue tapes. It’s somewhat disjointed and irritating to listen to in a single go (there may be loads of repetition, and lots of tracks are lower than a minute lengthy) however, for us Peanuts obsessives, it’s fascinating to listen to a sonically flawless authentic soundtrack recording.
The place most of Guaraldi’s LPs are piano/bass/drums recordings, that is extra lavishly organized in partnership with conductor John Scott Trotter (greatest often known as Bing Crosby’s long-term musical director), that includes Mannie Klein on trumpet, John Grey on guitar and Ronald Lang on woodwind. Lang’s flute is, for a lot of, a signature sound of the sequence. On tracks like “Snoopy And The Leaf”, it’s oddly harking back to Harold McNair’s heartbreaking flute solos on the soundtrack to Kes (one other poignant hymn to childhood).
The cartoons had been common fixtures of community tv around the globe effectively into the Nineteen Nineties, and the royalties made Guaraldi very wealthy by jazz requirements. However he didn’t get pleasure from his way of life for lengthy – in February 1976, he suffered an enormous coronary heart assault and died, aged solely 47. His music, nonetheless, lives on perpetually.
