Mellow yellow!

No surprise; yet another treat has been announced for this, Peanuts' 75th anniversary year.

Seven years ago, almost to the day, Omnivore Recordings announced the release of The Complete Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Recordings (encompassing Vince’s three Warner Bros.-Seven Arts albums: Oh, Good Grief!, The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi and Alma-Ville), as a two-CD set with four previously unreleased bonus tracks; and the classic Oh, Good Grief! album, on translucent red vinyl. Full details are in this earlier post.

Earlier this morning, Omnivore announced a special "Peanuts Anniversary" version of Guaraldi's first Warners album, Oh, Good Grief, on banana yellow vinyl, along with companion versions on CD and black vinyl. All are the re-mastered versions by multiple Grammy Award-winning restoration and mastering guru Michael Graves.

As a bonus, all three variants include my new liner notes, written specifically for this anniversary release, which will hit stores on May 30.

Check out this cool promotional video and Omnivore's press release, and — while you're at it — place an advance order!

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A few weeks ago, I spent an enjoyable hour chatting with William Pepper, who runs It's a Podcast, Charlie Brown. My episode, No. 139, debuted yesterday; you can find it here. We talked about Peanuts (of course), but with a particular focus on Guaraldi.

William came prepared with good questions, and the resulting discussion was a lot of fun. I hope you all enjoy the listen!

Tidbits from Record World

I recently discovered a searchable online archive devoted to Record World, which — during its reign, from 1946 to 1982 — was one of the three primary U.S. weekly music industry trade publications, alongside Billboard and Cash Box. Record World actually debuted under the name Music Vendor, then switched in 1964, and continued under that new name until its final issue (April 10, 1982).

The archive is an obvious labor of love, with (thus far) most of its content running from spring 1964 to end of publication. Guaraldi likely wouldn’t have been more than an occasional blip until 1960 or ’61, but I’m sure he’d have been mentioned a lot in 1962 and ’63; I hope those issues will be added to the archive at some future time.

 

Meanwhile, a search on Vince turned up a couple dozen results, a few of which are worth noting here.

 

Talk about luck: The sole 1962 issue in the archive — June 23 — includes early mention of Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus, as a coveted “Album Pick.” The brief write-up certainly is encouraging:

Pianist Guaraldi has a cleverly swinging, inventively saleable jazz product here. There is Brazilian music blending Latin African rhythms which were featured in tunes presented in this 1959 Cannes Film Festival winning pic. Proper exploitation could make it a chart album; it has the musical ingredients.

 

Mind you, this was a month before San Francisco’s Melody Sales issued a press release extolling the album, and another couple months before the impact of Sacramento radio station KROY’s success with “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” began to have a national impact. That makes Music Vendor quite prescient.

 

Moving ahead…

 

Now as Record World, the 9/25/65 issue’s “Money Music” column includes this brief item: “Much good music play in S.F. on ‘Theme to Grace’ — Vince Guaraldi, Fantasy — plus other areas.” Two months later, on November 27, the same column amplified the message: “ ‘Theme for [sic] Grace,’ Vince Guaraldi, Fantasy, selling well in Chicago and Detroit off good music play (plus California).”

 

These are the only industry mentions I’ve ever seen, regarding this particular Guaraldi tune’s chart and business activity. Pretty cool!

 

Elsewhere in that same issue, Record World says very nice things about Guaraldi’s just-released soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas:

 

Guaraldi plays the jazz score of the new cartoon coming by for Christmas consumption. Most of the album is Guaraldi improvisations on familiar seasonal standards and carols — all getting fresh treatment from the piano player. The movie should give buyers a big push toward counters.

 

(Given publication lead time, this proves review copies were sent out at least two weeks prior to December 4, which has long been assumed the album’s public release date.)

 

Moving forward to December 3, 1966, reviewer Del Shields waxed enthusiastic about Live at El Matador:

Eastern jazz fans have not had a chance to hear Bola Sete. Out on the West Coast, Bola is the “in thing,” and this album could be one of the big sleepers of the year. Guaraldi, whose “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” was a monster chart item a few seasons ago, lends sympathetic support to this Brazilian guitarist, and the result is pure pleasure. Again, the excitement of the crowd helps so much to project the feeling of “you are there” on quite a session. “Black Orpheus Suite” is particularly outstanding.

 

The 10/7/67 issue includes an intriguing little item, buried within an article which discusses the recent sale of Fantasy and Galaxy Records to Saul Zaentz. In a paragraph highlighting future activity, Zaentz mentions an “eight-LP release for October and November, featuring new albums by,” among others, Guaraldi. That never happened, and there’s no indication that Guaraldi had a new album ready to be released on such short notice. (Guaraldi’s final Fantasy album was the aforementioned Live at El Matador, released a year earlier.) And it’s odd that Zaentz would issue such a statement, given that Guaraldi was in the midst of suing to be released from his Fantasy contract, which was indeed dissolved just a few months later, on December 27.

 

Guaraldi didn’t waste any time. Record World’s 4/13/68 issue features a short article headlined “WB-7A Signs Guaraldi,” which reads, in part:

 

Vince Guaraldi, composer of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” and the musical scores of the Charlie Brown television specials, has been signed to an exclusive contract as an artist by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Records Inc., announces Joe Smith, Vice President and general manager.

 

Guaraldi, one of the more recent contributors responsible for interpretive jazz in church halls and theater, will produce his own sessions at Warners.

 

It’s nice to see an early article that acknowledges the impact of Guaraldi’s Grace Cathedral Mass.

 

Moving ahead again, the 1/17/70 issue includes one of the very few reviews I’ve seen of Alma-Ville, the final album Guaraldi released during his lifetime:

That subtle, fluid melodic mind of Vince Guaraldi’s is at it again. Vince has come up with some exquisite melodies on this album, and plays them better than anybody else can, or probably ever will. He also does a striking guitar solo. Watch every cut.

 

(Goodness; you can’t ask for better than that!)

 

The final Guaraldi entry is somewhat bittersweet, as it comes more than a year after his passing in early 1976. The 12/24/77 issue features a round-up of “good Christmas records” by columnists David McGee and Barry Taylor. Along with paragraphs devoted to Elvis’ Christmas Album, Phil Spector’s Christmas Album, Merry Christmas: The Supremes and several others, we get this endorsement of A Charlie Brown Christmas:

 

Nothing like it anywhere. Vince Guaraldi fused classical, pop and jazz in writing the mellowest of scores for the Emmy Award-winning television show. Light and lyrical, with boundless good humor, it is enough to make you believe in Santa Claus and man’s inherent goodness.

 

We now take for granted that Guaraldi’s score for that cherished Peanuts special has become a must-play item every December … but it’s nice to see that Record World, way back in 1977, already was trumpeting its merits as a holiday chestnut. 

Something to devour from Omnivore

Big news, folks.

Omnivore Recordings — a terrific prestige label, with an impressive catalog — will release two Vince Guaraldi items on July 6: The Complete Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Recordings (encompassing Vince’s three Warner Bros.-Seven Arts albums: Oh, Good Grief!, The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi and Alma-Ville), as a two-CD set with four previously unreleased bonus tracks; and the classic Oh, Good Grief! album, on translucent red vinyl.

Check out this cool trailer.

Got your attention with the phrase “bonus tracks,” right?

It's true. The double-CD package includes never-heard-before covers of Bacharach/David’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and the gospel hit “Oh, Happy Day,” along with a Guaraldi original titled “The Share Cropper’s Daughter” and an alternate take of “The Beat Goes On.”

Quoting now from Omnivore's press release:

Many people got to know Guaraldi through his 1963 Grammy Award-winning song, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” or via Sounds Orchestral’s Top 10 cover of it two years later. Lee Mendelson heard Guaraldi’s version while working on a Peanuts documentary; he contacted the pianist and asked him to score that project. Although Mendelson wasn’t able to sell that documentary to network television, he and Guaraldi subsequently reunited for what became the first Peanuts television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was a match made in TV and musical history. With songs like “Linus and Lucy,” the show was a hit, and for more than five decades, not a holiday season went by without an airing. So potent and successful was the Peanuts/Guaraldi combination that the jazz pianist went on to score a total of 15 Peanuts television specials, a 1969 documentary and the debut feature film that same year.

In 1968, Vince made a label switch from his long-time home, Fantasy Records, to Warner Bros. Records. For his inaugural album, Oh, Good Grief!, he decided to re-interpret his Peanuts classics. In addition to the instantly recognizable Guaraldi sound of piano, bass and drums, he added electric guitar and electric harpsichord to the mix. The record was a smash hit.

For its 50th anniversary, Oh, Good Grief! will be presented by Omnivore Recordings the way the world first heard it: as stated on the original release’s back cover, “on shiny black vinyl.” (Well, actually, this special edition is “on shiny red vinyl.”) Mastered by Kevin Gray and pressed at world-class record-pressing plant RTI, this timeless album never has sounded better. 

Following Oh, Good Grief!,1969’s The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi lived up to its title and found the pianist experimenting: There’s a large string section, Guaraldi’s first recorded vocals (covering the singer/songwriter Tim Hardin), and original compositions that could be described as lengthy rock jams. 

Guaraldi’s last album for the label and final-ever album, 1970’s Alma-Ville, ranks among his best-ever releases. Six of the nine songs on this “return to jazz” project were Guaraldi originals; the set was recorded with several different ensembles. Besides the original compositions, Alma-Ville finds Guaraldi covering the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” which had become a staple of his live performances; Duke Pearson’s “Cristo Redentor”; and the Michel Legrand/Norman Gimbel song “Watch What Happens.”

Guaraldi’s three albums for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts have been produced for this reissue by Grammy Award-winning Omnivore, Cheryl Pawelski; and remastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer, Michael Graves (who, under his Osiris Studios banner, also handled remastering for earlier Guaraldi digital releases such as Vince Guaraldi with the San Francisco Boys Chorus and Oaxaca). The new liner notes are written by your humble biographer/blogger.

Orders can be made directly from Omnivore.

Mark your calendars: July 6 will be a big day!

What's in a name?

Full disclosure up front: This entry is sheer speculation.

But it's fun to wonder about such stuff, even when there's probably no way to verify the hypothesis.

First, the facts: On August 7, 1959, a club/theater dubbed Caffe Court opened at 642 High Street in Palo Alto, California. The Vince Guaraldi trio was on hand for the gala opening celebration, backing vocalist Valerie Knight. This gig ran through August 16, and likely would have continued longer, but on August 17 Guaraldi left for Las Vegas, to join Woody Herman's "small combo" for a week. Immediately thereafter, Guaraldi spent most of the next eight months down in Southern California, as a member of the Lighthouse All-Stars.

To my ongoing frustration, I've never been able to find a photo of Outside at the Inside.
Not even the kind fellow at the Palo Alto Historical Association could locate one. But he
did supply this nifty vintage shot of 621 High Street, which would have been directly
across the street from the club, once upon a time. And isn't in interesting that, at
the time this picture was taken, 621 High Street appears to have been a recording
studio and (possibly) a TV repair shop!

He returned to the greater Bay Area in the spring of 1960, and on May 18 began what would become a regular gig at the same Palo Alto venue, which in the meanwhile had adopted the name by which it remains best known today: Outside at the Inside. The Guaraldi Trio remained the house band for roughly a year, through the early spring of 1961.

This portion of High Street is quite close to Stanford University. (Today, what once was 642 High Street appears to be a parking lot. Sic transit gloria mundi.) High Street runs parallel to one of the city's primary arteries, El Camino Real/The Betty Meltzer Memorial Highway. There's also one major street running parallel between High Street and El Camino Real: Alma Street.

The Brazilian/French/Italian/Portuguese film Black Orpheus debuted in the United States on December 21, 1959. Guaraldi is known to have seen it quite a few times, and he quickly became entranced by its marvelous soundtrack, a collaborative masterpiece by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes, Luis Bonfá and Antônio Maria. During the next year and change, Guaraldi shopped his concept for an album of jazz arrangements of that film's four primary themes. The project finally found a home at Fantasy Records, but the Black Orpheus music filled only one side of the album. No problem, of course; Guaraldi filled the other side with material that he'd been working up during his club gigs, most of which -- at this point in time -- would have been at Outside at the Inside.

A vintage shot of Palo Alto's University Avenue. Note, in the lower right corner, the sign that points the way to Alma Street.

Two of the additional tracks were covers: Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer's "Moon River" and Buddy Johnson's "Since I Fell for You." The two remaining tracks were Guaraldi originals, one of which — "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" — we know all about, as it put the jazz pianist on the map. The other was a tune dubbed "Alma-Ville," which later gave its name to the final LP that Guaraldi recorded during his lifetime. It's known that he was refining "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" during 1960; it's highly likely that he also composed, shaped and named "Alma-Ville" at the same time.

So: Whence the name "Alma-Ville"?

As suggested by a good friend and fellow Guaraldi fan, is it reasonable to assume that Alma Street's lengthy presence in this Northern California municipality, and its proximity to High Street and Outside at the Inside, could have made Palo Alto "the city of Alma" ... or, to put it another way, Alma-Ville?

Guaraldi is known to have acknowledged the venues and areas where he performed; consider his original composition "El Matador." It's not too much a stretch to imagine that he might have paid tribute to Palo Alto in a similar, whimsical vein.

That's total guesswork, of course. But it seems a reasonable assumption.

What do you think?