WED., DECEMBER 05, 2007
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Charlie Brown Christmas: The Story Behind the Classic
by Michael Azerrad
When you're a kid, you don't have much of a frame of reference — whatever happens, you just think, well, this must be the way the world is. So I didn't give too much thought to the fact that jazz as exquisitely tasteful as Vince Guaraldi's adorned the great Peanuts specials of the '60s. Maybe it's because Guaraldi's contemplative, even autumnal tunes tapped straight into Charlie Brown's downbeat mien. That might seem odd in music for children, but then the great expectations of the holidays sometimes remain unfulfilled; the saving grace was that Guaraldi took care to redeem those moments with passages of lyrical, practically avuncular swing. Just check out the way "O Tannenbaum" begins tentatively, but soon shifts into the kind of shuffling elegance and gently crowd-pleasing melodicism that not only characterizes Guaraldi to a tee, but echoes the spirit of the story it adorns.
Or maybe I didn't think twice about Guaraldi's music because it was just so wonderful. His soundtrack to the first Peanuts special, 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas, is pretty much universally beloved; it's never been out of print. It is, well, an evergreen.
CBS initially balked at A Charlie Brown Christmas. After all, it addressed some challenging themes: Besides the frank expressions of alienation that Peanuts had embraced from the beginning, the show raised questions not only about the commercialization of Christmas — "A racket run by a big eastern syndicate," Lucy confides to Charlie Brown — but about faith itself. And the network execs just didn't think jazz and Christmas mixed.
But Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz was a man of quiet but deep faith, and he stood firm on Linus' moving speech from the Book of Luke, which can give you a lump in your throat no matter what your religious inclinations. And although Schulz generally disliked jazz — his Beethoven-loving character Schroeder was clearly an alter ego — he dug Guaraldi's music. It was an alternative to the holly-jolly likes of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, who'd arrived on TV the previous Christmas, helping make the Peanuts Christmas special a thoughtful oasis in the hurly-burly of the holiday season, not to mention the frantic, mindless rush of network television itself.
According to Schulz himself, Peanuts wasn't for kids anyway — his characters were precocious little existentialists.
It was also 1965, of course, and the hormonal juggernaut of rock & roll was detonating not only American music but the very tempo of American life — the Beatles were going supernova, Bob Dylan released "Like a Rolling Stone" and youth culture seemed destined to revolutionize the entire world. Guaraldi's gentle, genteel jazz leapfrogged Schulz's show out of the frenzy, perfect for the story's anti-commercialism theme. More subtly, jazz provided a light, safe allusion to the existential alienation of the hep-cats and beatniks of just a few years prior, a precursor to Charlie Brown's eternal "why me?"; the music's Latin and African-American influences reflected an increasingly cosmopolitan society.
In his liner notes for the original album, legendary San Francisco music critic Ralph J. Gleason described the pixieish, mercurial Guaraldi as a "flip and funny, salty and serious" man, and it's just such dualities that animated not only Guaraldi's music, but Peanuts too. So Schulz might also have recognized that Guaraldi's score embodies the contrasts of the story it was written to accompany: Both share a child-like innocence and precious pocket-sized epiphanies about playfulness and pensiveness, worldliness and naïveté, spirituality and pettiness, elation and melancholy, all manifested in the pathos of children's simple but uncannily prescient reactions to the adult world. According to Schulz himself, Peanuts wasn't for kids anyway — his characters were precocious little existentialists. Guaraldi's elegant score was another tip-off that this Peanuts stuff was a little more sophisticated than it appeared, full of foreshadowings of things we kids would be feeling later in life.
At any rate, all reservations by the CBS brass went by the wayside when the special got nearly half of that evening's TV audience and won rave reviews. Guaraldi would go on to score 15 Peanuts specials until his untimely death in 1976 at age 47.
A classic Bay Area hipster, Guaraldi was already a respected musician by the time he met Charlie Brown and friends: he'd played with legends Woody Herman and Cal Tjader, as well as the beloved Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete; his song "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" was a hit in 1962, reaching #22, going gold and winning a Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz Composition. One day, Peanuts TV producer Lee Mendelson heard "Cast Your Fate" while he was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, decided Guaraldi would be perfect and tracked him down through Gleason. "Cast Your Fate" has a lot of the ingredients of the Charlie Brown material: an airy piano-bass-drums trio doles out a swig of boogie-woogie, a dash of samba, a sweet spoonful of pop. With his trio, Guaraldi wrote and recorded the music for a never-aired TV special about Peanuts, and then recorded some jazz Christmas songs for kids and adults; most of ACBC is culled from those two sets of recordings.
Guaraldi knows just how cool it is, because he repeats the lick many times.
Guaraldi could swing with the best of them, but like any good pop musician he also knew the value of a hook, and even his improvisations boast some great ones, always cleaving close to the melody. Listen to the way the brilliant turnaround in "Greensleeves" adds a note of mystery to a familiar, indeed centuries-old, tune; and Guaraldi knows just how cool it is, because he repeats the lick many times.
It's in roughly the same pocket as contemporaries like Mose Allison, Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck — piano jazz that's smart, breezy and cool. His left hand doles out echoes of Guaraldi's early boogie-woogie heroes Albert Ammons and Jimmy Yancey, as well as the Brazilian and Afro-Cuban sounds that signified urbane, bachelor pad hip in those days. ("The Girl from Ipanema" was a massive hit that year.) In the right hand, he's usually got a catchy, swinging little melody; he often steps on the sustain pedal for even more of a burnished, wistful effect. It's enlightening to note Guaraldi's adroit, playful touch on the original score and then endure the heavy-handed atrocities committed by smooth-jazz butcher David Benoit on the 1992 TV special It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown.
Of course the masterpiece of the album is the immortal "Linus and Lucy," a sublime tour de force that achieves its ambitions — interpolating bossa nova, abrupt shifts in meter, key, and color — so gracefully that they become invisible. The original album version (and this is very confusing but it's actually here) is a composite of two different takes; the alternate version is one of those takes in its entirety. You can get a sense of what made Guaraldi so good by comparing the two: on the alternate, Guaraldi plays the first section like he's late for a train, while on the version on the original LP, it sounds like he's nonchalantly sauntering aboard at the very last moment, sporting sunglasses and a beret. (But listen closely as Guaraldi commits a minor and yet charming clam at the start of the second verse, 50 seconds into the track.)
"Christmastime Is Here" is all over the TV special, and it's an acutely wistful piece of music. Even the dry rustle of Jerry Granelli's brushed snare summons up the bleakness of bare trees and the desolate winter ahead. Mendelson himself wrote the lyrics in fifteen minutes, using a crude system of long and short lines to indicate the duration of the notes; the vocals are by his son's sixth-grade class.
When you're nostalgic for the nostalgia you felt when you first heard this music, the effect is magnified tenfold..
Songs like "What Child Is This" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" obviously do reflect the Christian nature of Christmas, but the music itself more strongly evokes the winter season itself; the instrumental version of "Christmastime Is Here" conjures up wet mittens and glowing fireplaces with astonishing clarity; the cascading thirds of "Skating" are the most vivid representation of falling snowflakes one is likely to find in music, short of Vivaldi (and they're followed by one of the most joyous solos in the Guaraldi oeuvre).
Composer Ned Rorem once wrote, "Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future." I never really understood what that meant until I started thinking about A Charlie Brown Christmas. Somehow, the holidays rarely measure up to what one hopes they will. The score for A Charlie Brown Christmas both acknowledges that feeling, embraces it and holds it close to its heart, really, and holds out hope that one day, that ideal Christmas will happen. And when you're nostalgic for the nostalgia you felt when you first heard this music, the effect is magnified tenfold. Guaraldi's score is timeless.
Who knows how many kids — and I'm sure one of them — A Charlie Brown Christmas has turned on to jazz. In fact, I'd bet ACBC introduced more people to jazz than Miles Davis' ubiquitous, iconic Kind of Blue. Just like Charles M. Schulz's cartoons, Guaraldi's music doesn't condescend to kids one bit. Children — and people in general — have significantly better taste than the media often give them credit for, and that realization is one of the many joys of hearing this music. (Fact: this quintessential Christmas album has absolutely no sleighbells on it.) Today, those Peanuts cartoons would be saddled with vapid synth diddling by some cynical, tin-eared hack with a Pro Tools rig. "Thank God the kids get to hear something good on television," Guaraldi drummer Colin Bailey told the Dallas Observer's Robert Wilonsky in 1998. "The shit they listen to now is all brain-dead. It's good to have something that may jolt them toward a better life."
Or maybe I didn't think twice about Guaraldi's music because it was just so wonderful. His soundtrack to the first Peanuts special, 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas, is pretty much universally beloved; it's never been out of print. It is, well, an evergreen.
CBS initially balked at A Charlie Brown Christmas. After all, it addressed some challenging themes: Besides the frank expressions of alienation that Peanuts had embraced from the beginning, the show raised questions not only about the commercialization of Christmas — "A racket run by a big eastern syndicate," Lucy confides to Charlie Brown — but about faith itself. And the network execs just didn't think jazz and Christmas mixed.
But Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz was a man of quiet but deep faith, and he stood firm on Linus' moving speech from the Book of Luke, which can give you a lump in your throat no matter what your religious inclinations. And although Schulz generally disliked jazz — his Beethoven-loving character Schroeder was clearly an alter ego — he dug Guaraldi's music. It was an alternative to the holly-jolly likes of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, who'd arrived on TV the previous Christmas, helping make the Peanuts Christmas special a thoughtful oasis in the hurly-burly of the holiday season, not to mention the frantic, mindless rush of network television itself.
It was also 1965, of course, and the hormonal juggernaut of rock & roll was detonating not only American music but the very tempo of American life — the Beatles were going supernova, Bob Dylan released "Like a Rolling Stone" and youth culture seemed destined to revolutionize the entire world. Guaraldi's gentle, genteel jazz leapfrogged Schulz's show out of the frenzy, perfect for the story's anti-commercialism theme. More subtly, jazz provided a light, safe allusion to the existential alienation of the hep-cats and beatniks of just a few years prior, a precursor to Charlie Brown's eternal "why me?"; the music's Latin and African-American influences reflected an increasingly cosmopolitan society.
In his liner notes for the original album, legendary San Francisco music critic Ralph J. Gleason described the pixieish, mercurial Guaraldi as a "flip and funny, salty and serious" man, and it's just such dualities that animated not only Guaraldi's music, but Peanuts too. So Schulz might also have recognized that Guaraldi's score embodies the contrasts of the story it was written to accompany: Both share a child-like innocence and precious pocket-sized epiphanies about playfulness and pensiveness, worldliness and naïveté, spirituality and pettiness, elation and melancholy, all manifested in the pathos of children's simple but uncannily prescient reactions to the adult world. According to Schulz himself, Peanuts wasn't for kids anyway — his characters were precocious little existentialists. Guaraldi's elegant score was another tip-off that this Peanuts stuff was a little more sophisticated than it appeared, full of foreshadowings of things we kids would be feeling later in life.
At any rate, all reservations by the CBS brass went by the wayside when the special got nearly half of that evening's TV audience and won rave reviews. Guaraldi would go on to score 15 Peanuts specials until his untimely death in 1976 at age 47.
A classic Bay Area hipster, Guaraldi was already a respected musician by the time he met Charlie Brown and friends: he'd played with legends Woody Herman and Cal Tjader, as well as the beloved Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete; his song "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" was a hit in 1962, reaching #22, going gold and winning a Grammy for Best Instrumental Jazz Composition. One day, Peanuts TV producer Lee Mendelson heard "Cast Your Fate" while he was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, decided Guaraldi would be perfect and tracked him down through Gleason. "Cast Your Fate" has a lot of the ingredients of the Charlie Brown material: an airy piano-bass-drums trio doles out a swig of boogie-woogie, a dash of samba, a sweet spoonful of pop. With his trio, Guaraldi wrote and recorded the music for a never-aired TV special about Peanuts, and then recorded some jazz Christmas songs for kids and adults; most of ACBC is culled from those two sets of recordings.
Guaraldi could swing with the best of them, but like any good pop musician he also knew the value of a hook, and even his improvisations boast some great ones, always cleaving close to the melody. Listen to the way the brilliant turnaround in "Greensleeves" adds a note of mystery to a familiar, indeed centuries-old, tune; and Guaraldi knows just how cool it is, because he repeats the lick many times.
It's in roughly the same pocket as contemporaries like Mose Allison, Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck — piano jazz that's smart, breezy and cool. His left hand doles out echoes of Guaraldi's early boogie-woogie heroes Albert Ammons and Jimmy Yancey, as well as the Brazilian and Afro-Cuban sounds that signified urbane, bachelor pad hip in those days. ("The Girl from Ipanema" was a massive hit that year.) In the right hand, he's usually got a catchy, swinging little melody; he often steps on the sustain pedal for even more of a burnished, wistful effect. It's enlightening to note Guaraldi's adroit, playful touch on the original score and then endure the heavy-handed atrocities committed by smooth-jazz butcher David Benoit on the 1992 TV special It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown.
Of course the masterpiece of the album is the immortal "Linus and Lucy," a sublime tour de force that achieves its ambitions — interpolating bossa nova, abrupt shifts in meter, key, and color — so gracefully that they become invisible. The original album version (and this is very confusing but it's actually here) is a composite of two different takes; the alternate version is one of those takes in its entirety. You can get a sense of what made Guaraldi so good by comparing the two: on the alternate, Guaraldi plays the first section like he's late for a train, while on the version on the original LP, it sounds like he's nonchalantly sauntering aboard at the very last moment, sporting sunglasses and a beret. (But listen closely as Guaraldi commits a minor and yet charming clam at the start of the second verse, 50 seconds into the track.)
"Christmastime Is Here" is all over the TV special, and it's an acutely wistful piece of music. Even the dry rustle of Jerry Granelli's brushed snare summons up the bleakness of bare trees and the desolate winter ahead. Mendelson himself wrote the lyrics in fifteen minutes, using a crude system of long and short lines to indicate the duration of the notes; the vocals are by his son's sixth-grade class.
Songs like "What Child Is This" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" obviously do reflect the Christian nature of Christmas, but the music itself more strongly evokes the winter season itself; the instrumental version of "Christmastime Is Here" conjures up wet mittens and glowing fireplaces with astonishing clarity; the cascading thirds of "Skating" are the most vivid representation of falling snowflakes one is likely to find in music, short of Vivaldi (and they're followed by one of the most joyous solos in the Guaraldi oeuvre).
Composer Ned Rorem once wrote, "Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future." I never really understood what that meant until I started thinking about A Charlie Brown Christmas. Somehow, the holidays rarely measure up to what one hopes they will. The score for A Charlie Brown Christmas both acknowledges that feeling, embraces it and holds it close to its heart, really, and holds out hope that one day, that ideal Christmas will happen. And when you're nostalgic for the nostalgia you felt when you first heard this music, the effect is magnified tenfold. Guaraldi's score is timeless.
Who knows how many kids — and I'm sure one of them — A Charlie Brown Christmas has turned on to jazz. In fact, I'd bet ACBC introduced more people to jazz than Miles Davis' ubiquitous, iconic Kind of Blue. Just like Charles M. Schulz's cartoons, Guaraldi's music doesn't condescend to kids one bit. Children — and people in general — have significantly better taste than the media often give them credit for, and that realization is one of the many joys of hearing this music. (Fact: this quintessential Christmas album has absolutely no sleighbells on it.) Today, those Peanuts cartoons would be saddled with vapid synth diddling by some cynical, tin-eared hack with a Pro Tools rig. "Thank God the kids get to hear something good on television," Guaraldi drummer Colin Bailey told the Dallas Observer's Robert Wilonsky in 1998. "The shit they listen to now is all brain-dead. It's good to have something that may jolt them toward a better life."
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