Charlie Brown Jazz I



At the moment one of my favorite things in the world is jazz music. While I still consider myself a jazz novice, I’ve had a passing interest in it for a while now. But learning about something as enormous and diverse as jazz is challenging and progress takes time.

But I was delighted to learn early on in my search for jazz that several excellent jazz recordings were inspired by another great passion of mine: comic strips. From the moment they stepped into the animated realm, Charlie Brown and the Peanuts characters were captured in first-rate jazz tracks that showcased both their youthful energy and their somber meditation. Jazz themes completely dominated the musical landscape of the animated Peanuts, despite that the vast majority of musical references in the strip were classical.

I remember the moment it clicked for me – in mid-December several years ago. I was having breakfast in a bagel shop near my house in Massachusetts; things weren’t going great – I was moving out of my house because I couldn’t afford it any more, in fact I was planning on leaving town for good. The preceding months were full of financial setbacks, arguments and betrayals, and many of my remaining friends planned on moving shortly. So as I sat sipping my coffee and chewing my bagel, I listened to the Christmas Carols about how “comfort and joy” were supposed to be the only things I was feeling at that moment.

But one song didn’t assume my mood. One song very literally broke with tradition, it lulled you in with a quite standard piano rendition of O Tannenbaum, suddenly adding the sharp syncopation of a snare drum and the snazzy rhythm of a walking bass. My mind filled with glittering Christmas trees, reaching twenty, thirty feet overhead, covered in baubles, shining, shimmering, maybe painted pink, as spotlights crisscrossed in front, and shone into the heavens. And in the center of it all stood a sad little boy and a tiny, dying tree.

I thought back to my childhood, when I spent many nights under my covers with a flashlight and a copy of an old and ragged Peanuts paperback. I’d developed such an obsessive fascination with the characters that they adorned most of my possessions: lunch boxes, blankets, backpack, sneakers. There was also a soundtrack cassette of the special I was certain to sit down for every Christmas: A Charlie Brown Christmas.

This particular item never really held that much appeal for me – I couldn’t see the characters, couldn’t hear them, the album was almost completely unrelated. However it did quickly become my father’s favorite Christmas music, and while he seldom felt compelled to offer an opinion on many subjects, he was frequently vocal about his choice of Christmas carols, and so he kept the album alive in my mind for many years.

Until that day in the coffee shop, when I’d all but forgotten just how powerful some of those melodies were. I fled to the record store to try and find that album somehow, but I had no idea if it was hopelessly obscure or who the performers were. Lucky for me the clerk at a small hole-in-the-wall record store was not only aware of the album, he found it buried in a box of random insipid Christmas albums sung by everyone from Dolly Parton to Kenny G. The album was A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the composer was one Vince Guaraldi and his trio.

Part II | Part III

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