A great holiday song lives forever. Pop anthems like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” are burned into our brains, their melodies reigniting on repeat during the most wonderful time of the year.
Unique among those Christmas hits are the songs from “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the 1965 animated Christmas special starring Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” gang. The movie’s soundtrack might be the most recognizable jazz music in history. Piano player Vince Guaraldi’s renditions of classics like “Christmas Time Is Here” have become the definitive versions, and tunes like “Linus and Lucy” — which the gang jams to onstage — have reverberated through pop culture ever since.
Schulz has close ties to the Bay Area. Although born in Minneapolis, he moved to Sebastopol in 1958, then relocated to Santa Rosa in 1969, where he lived until his death in 2000 (a museum and skating rink were built celebrating his work). But the Christmas special’s soundtrack has uniquely San Francisco roots and, if not for a string of coincidences, may have never actually been heard by the public — let alone hit No. 2 on Billboard’s album chart 57 years later. A four-hour "super deluxe" version was released in October featuring material recently discovered in the Fantasy Records vaults.
Jazz composer Vince Guaraldi plays piano in 1962. Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas" album is filled with holiday hits.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesGuaraldi was born in North Beach in 1928. After a brief stint at San Francisco State and a tour in Korea as an army cook, he hit the SF jazz scene and quickly received a contract from locally based Fantasy Records. While playing live around San Francisco, he picked up nicknames like “The Italian Leprechaun” (he was just over 5 feet tall) and Dr. Funk. He and his trio gained some popularity through covers of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa on their 1962 album “Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus,” then had a bona fide hit with the B-side “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.”
And without “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” there would be no “Linus and Lucy.” “A Charlie Brown Christmas” executive producer Lee Mendelson heard Guaraldi’s B-side hit while he was headed to meet up with Schulz to discuss a potential documentary project, which was tentatively titled “A Boy Named Charlie Brown.” Mendelson then commissioned Guaraldi for the soundtrack. The documentary never aired on TV due to failure to obtain a distribution deal, but the soundtrack was released as an album called “Jazz Impressions of a Boy Named Charlie Brown” in 1964.
When the opportunity to create an animated Christmas special came about the following year, Guaraldi was tasked with expanding the album with some holiday staples. It was a new form for everyone involved. Neither Schulz nor Mendelson had ever done an animated show before, and Guaraldi hadn’t scored a cartoon. Although the snappy rhythms and sublime jazz chords are now inseparable from the Charlie Brown aesthetic, at the time the stylistic choice was a real risk.
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of "A Charlie Brown Christmas," executive producer Lee Mendelson appears at a press conference in Hollywood in 2015. Mendelson discovered jazz composer Vince Guaraldi and commissioned him for the holiday special's soundtrack.
Image Group LA/Disney General Entertainment Con“The executives weren’t a fan of any of this jazz music,” Mendelson’s son Sean told SFGATE. “They specifically said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ And even Charles Schulz was skeptical. He said, ‘Classical music is more my thing.’ Even the animators, when they were done, they were like, ‘I don’t know, we just kind of ruined Christmas.’”
“Then of course, it became a huge classic. I think, in retrospect, it’s because they were doing new things and taking risks all across the board,” Sean Mendelson said.
Those musical risks can be heard throughout the new deluxe edition of the soundtrack, which includes multiple outtakes of each song, including banter among the musicians as they discuss artistic choices. Although the recordings aren’t drastically different from the final cuts, there’s a certain magic to hearing the process of creation.
A jazz festival in Sigmund Stern Grove on Aug. 8, 1966, featured Vince Guaraldi, the composer behind the soundtrack of "A Charlie Brown Christmas."
San Francisco Chronicle via Getty ImagesBEST OF SFGATE
“It’s almost as if you get to hear what it would be like to sit in on a gig at a jazz club in 1965,” Sean Mendelson said. “You not only get to hear a man fiddling with different ideas and trying things out, but you also get to hear what it would be like to hear somebody improvising in a club.”
Piano nerds will enjoy a “hyperspeed” rendition of “Skating,” a song that Sean Mendelson refers to as “a rite of passage” for jazz piano players. There’s also a more experimental version of “O Tannenbaum.”
“It sounds like it’s in the multiverse. It’s so out of whack, even a jazz enthusiast would be like, what is going on here?” Sean Mendelson said. “You can’t even find where the downbeat is because he’s playing in such a strange and unusual way.”
Over the rest of Guaraldi’s career, he never topped the widespread success of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” but continued releasing albums and performing throughout the Bay Area. He jammed alongside Jerry Garcia often (although it's unclear if he ever played with the Grateful Deal). Guaraldi lived in Mill Valley until his death in 1976 at age 47 from a heart attack, which happened just hours after concluding a Menlo Park gig with a cover of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.”
Charlie Brown and Linus appear in a scene from "A Charlie Brown Christmas." The holiday special's soundtrack has lived on, with a super deluxe edition released more than 50 years later.
Charles M. Schultz/APAlthough his name may not exactly be on the Mount Rushmore of jazz greats, he’s definitely in the running for the most listened to piano player. “Christmas Time Is Here” has racked up 130 million plays, biting at the heels of the most popular songs by the likes of John Coltrane (“In a Sentimental Mood,” 144 million) and just ahead of Miles Davis’ “Blue in Green” (125 million). The music’s iconic and unlikely animated accompaniment further cements Guaraldi’s legacy.
“What is particularly great about this music, and how it intersected with the show, was the pathos,” Sean Mendelson said. “At the time, music pandered to children. So not only was it jazz, and a new form introduced to cartoons, but the music is varied in its sentiment. I think it’s reflective of the emotional pathos of the characters that Schulz created.”
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The San Francisco roots of 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' album - SFGATE
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