Dec. 3, 2009

I love Christmas time, I really do, and I don’t mind getting sentimental about it. I can remember coming home late on December Friday nights when I was in high school, after going to see “Kramer vs. Kramer” or something, and plugging in the tree so I could sit there in the dark and marvel at the lights and ornaments while the rest of the family slept. I also drink eggnog every year, even though it sort of makes me sick, and (SPOILER ALERT) I’m not about to tell anyone who still thinks there’s a Santa Claus that there really isn’t one. Let somebody else disappoint the true believers.

But those yuletide stances pale in comparison to my lifelong embrace of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which is a certifiable gas, the very definition of the gift that keeps on giving. Its strange cadences, stretches of silence, and outré Godardian jump-cuts never fail to wake the semi-sleeping child inside of me. This program's 22 melancholy minutes mean "Christmas" to me as much as any ol' midnight Mass ever did.

I remember my dad telling me once that, even 30 years after he quit smoking, he still felt like reaching for a cigarette whenever he watched a football game on TV. Well, when I watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” I still feel like reaching for a Dolly Madison Zinger. The program's iconic jazz score alone is enough to trigger a wide range of Pavlovian responses.

It occurred to me the other day, though, that everyone knows “the Charlie Brown music” - what you probably consider Charlie Brown’s theme is actually entitled “Linus and Lucy” - but few people know anything about the tune’s composer, a funky west coast pianist named Vince Guaraldi.

Guaraldi wasn’t likely to astound listeners with his breathtaking technique; it’s almost impossible to work him into the same sentence as, for instance, a giant like Bud Powell, and still have the sentence make any real sense. And he didn’t bang out dissonant clusters of notes or tumble through off-kilter rhythmic patterns a la Thelonious Monk. All Guaraldi did was play a very catchy form of jazz that swung exactly as much as it needed to swing while generating a gracious vibe that suggested the guy behind the piano was down-to-earth, likeable, and had a sense of humor.

Guaraldi sounded, then, as all jazz artists should, pretty much like himself. His contemporaries really enjoyed him as a person, and were happy for him when he hit it big, even if he wasn’t reinventing the wheel.

Not all that surprisingly, given the catchiness and amiability of his sound, Guaraldi had tasted a considerable amount of commercial success before he was ever connected with that blockhead Charlie Brown. In fact, he was a member of one of the more popular bands of the late 1950s, a Latin-tinged ensemble led by the brilliant vibes player, Cal Tjader.

I once had an interesting conversation with Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen about Fagen’s adolescent passion for Tjader’s band; Fagen said he'd be waiting for the store doors to open the morning Tjader's records were released. The hip kids, then, knew what was up at the time, and Tjader found an unlikely place for himself among the rock & roll 45s of the era.

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In 1959, Guaraldi, who always seemed more comfortable as a leader rather than as a sideman, broke off from Tjader and promptly scored a genuine jukebox hit of his own with a catchy little tune called “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.”

"Cast Your Fate to the Wind"

It’s not very difficult, with the advantage of hindsight, to imagine Charlie and the rest of the Peanuts gang cavorting to just such a song. But something about the track first struck Bill Mendelson, who was producing what would become an unaired TV documentary about Charles Schulz, when he heard it on the radio while driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. Mendelson couldn't really articulate why, but he felt this sort of thing was perfectly suited to Charlie Brown.

So, even though Schulz, a classical music buff, once opined to a reporter that “jazz is awful," Mendelson recruited Guaraldi to score the documentary. It was there that “Linus and Lucy” made its debut, but the song wouldn’t become a part of our collective childhood consciousness until it was re-utilized in “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” along with several more Guaraldi compositions, in 1965.

"Linus and Lucy"

This is simply the coolest music track to ever grace a children's cartoon. Mendelson, as much as Guaraldi himself, has to be applauded for recognizing the possibilities of such a thing. What a sly, joyful piece of music.

As a special bonus for paying attention, here’s another version of the tune that Guaraldi recorded three years later, this time featuring himself on overdubbed electric harpsichord! It’s dated as hell, but is all the more charming for being so insistently hep-cat.

"Linus and Lucy" (alt. version)

The sound might seem quaint at this stage of the game, and I far prefer acoustic jazz over anything that needs to be plugged in to be heard. I'm into organics. But I’d listen to that over “Bitches Brew” any day of the week.

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Guaraldi would work on many more Charlie Brown specials, and release albums of his own, until the sad day in 1976 when he died of a massive heart attack between sets at a club in Menlo Park, CA. He was only 47 years-old. During the funeral, “Linus and Lucy” was played over the sound system in the cathedral, and, it's safe to assume, some angels got up and danced.

Like Charlie Brown, he was a good man.

Download: “Linus and Lucy” by Vince Guaraldi. Album: “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” (1964). You can also find it on pretty much any Vince Guaraldi compilation ever made.

Paul Tatara