A heaping helping of Vince

It's worth mentioning that Amazon, iTunes and Google Play have made just about all of Guaraldi’s catalogue (as leader) available for streaming and purchase as digital downloads.

And I mean everything:

• All of his releases from Fantasy and Warner Bros., along with the 21st century anthology albums: The Definitive Vince Guaraldi, The Very Best of Vince Guaraldi, etc.

• The initial and much later releases on the resurrected D&D label: Vince Guaraldi and the San Francisco Boys Chorus, Oaxaca, etc.

• Most important, from the standpoint of hard-to-get material, is everything released by Vince’s son, David: Live on the Air, North Beach, both of the Peanuts Lost Cues albums, and so forth. Some of those have become quite difficult to find in CD format.

This list even includes a “digital single” of Guaraldi’s cover of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” featured as a bonus track within Omnivore’s anthology set of his three Warners albums. And, as you can see above, somebody even took the trouble to produce a faux 45 disc and sleeve. (I assure you: It doesn’t exist in real life.)

Oddly, though, the list does not include “The Sharecropper’s Daughter” or “Oh, Happy Day,” the other bonus tracks from the Omnivore set.

And this is important: I checked with ace sound and re-mastering engineer Michael Graves, and he assures me that these streaming versions of Oh, Good Grief, The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi and Alma-Ville are, respectively, from the Warner Bros. and Wounded Bird CDs … not the Omnivore package he worked on.

The only album missing from the list is the soundtrack to 1969’s big-screen movie, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, released on CD by Kritzerland in 2017.

This is a great chance to “fill in the gaps,” for folks who don’t mind not having physical copies. But I advise acting quickly: Digital services sometimes taketh away just as rapidly as they giveth!

Quadruple platinum!

Big news today, folks.

The milestone cited here actually has been public since August, but Concord/Fantasy waited for the official ceremony on Friday, December 9, before issuing the following press release:

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From left, Jeannie Schulz, David and Dia Guaraldi, and Lee Mendelson

LOS ANGELES, CA -- Concord Bicycle Music and Fantasy Records announced the Quadruple Platinum certification of A Charlie Brown Christmas at a presentation today, with Vince Guaraldi's children David and Dia, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz's widow Jeannie Schulz, and the animated television special's producer, Lee Mendelson. The certification, awarded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), marks four million units in album sales of the 1965 soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. That makes it the second-highest certification of a jazz album, behind only Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.

Guaraldi's engaging score to the synonymous holiday television special --̶ which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year -- has introduced generations of children to the joys of jazz, with tracks such as the instantly recognizable "Linus and Lucy," and the yuletide favorite, "Christmas Time is Here." The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007, and the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry five years later, and it continues to be a perennial favorite, thanks in part to annual airings of the Christmas special. 

Guaraldi, a native of San Francisco, became one of America's best-selling jazz artists during the course of his life. Though his legacy is most famously tied to his association with Peanuts, he already was an established, Grammy Award-winning artist by the time that producer Lee Mendelson tapped him to score the first of many animated specials based on the Charles Schulz-penned newspaper strip. In a 2003 interview, excerpted from Vince Guaraldi At The Piano (Derrick Bang; McFarland Books), Mendelson declared, "There was no doubt in my mind that if we hadn't had that Guaraldi score, we wouldn't have had the franchise we later enjoyed."

Jeannie Schulz was equally taken with the musician. "Vince Guaraldi was already a legend when I first met him in the mid-'70s," she said. "What amazed me, and touched me, was his humility about his celebrity, and his complete joy in playing the piano for a group at a gathering. Music was like breathing to Vince."

"The combination of Vince Guaraldi's music and Peanuts continues to prove a magical marriage, which has helped push this iconic recording to being one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time," remarked Concord Bicycle Music's Chief Catalog Officer, Sig Sigwort.

"Celebrating this wonderful achievement with the families and principles involved is a great honor."

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In point of fact, this sales figure is low, being based mostly on electronically recorded sales made subsequent to 1991, when Neilsen SoundScan began tracking data. Clearly, Guaraldi's album sold many, many copies during the previous quarter-century ... but because Fantasy's record-keeping was so sloppy during the early years, a precise figure has been impossible to determine.

Meaning, it's entirely possible that Guaraldi's score album already has surpassed Kind of Blue ... but we can only speculate. Meanwhile, the RIAA certification is indisputable.

(And yes: It was a nice surprise to see that the official press release cited a Mendelson quote from my Guaraldi biography.)

Congrats all around ... and onward to quintuple platinum!

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In a droll bit of related news...

Back on November 21, USA Today interviewed Billy Bob Thornton prior to the release of his newest film, Bad Santa 2. When asked when folks should start celebrating the Christmas season, Thornton responded with the following:

"My 12-year-old daughter Bella is vehemently opposed to starting the holidays too soon, and I support that. She thinks it's unfair to whichever holiday comes before. She can't stand it when people put Christmas decorations on our street before Thanksgiving. It's, like, give Thanksgiving its due. If you want to start the day after, I'm cool with it.

"But I listen to Christmas music all year round. I always have a CD in a little boom box in my trailer on every movie. All I listen to is A Charlie Brown Christmas, by Vince Guaraldi. Doesn't matter what season. Every waking moment, I have that record on. It's my obsessive/compulsive nature."

I appreciate the sentiment, Billy Bob. It's nice to know I'm not the only one!

Incident at a Coffee Shop

Although I've had the honor — and great joy — to chat with all sorts of folks who knew and worked with Guaraldi, I often think about the people I missed interviewing.

I first met Vince's son David, and his family, at an all-Guaraldi concert George Winston gave in November 1998, in Santa Rosa. David's group included his grandmother — yep, Vince's mother — and I walked her back to their car, when the evening concluded. She held my arm like a cultured lady at a society dance. So close, I reflect, so close ... but that was years before I decided to write my book.

Vince's ex-wife, Shirley, also died before I ever had a chance to meet her. As far as I know, she never was interviewed formally about their years together. That may have been by choice; she's not mentioned at all in Bob Deorchuck's excellent Guaraldi profile in the July 1981 issue of Keyboard Magazine — which definitely is worth seeking out, for those who've not read it — and there's no evidence she attended any of the annual Guaraldi reunion concerts at the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, for as long as they lasted.

Gretchen Glanzer and friend. She modeled for Lilli Ann
during her early years with Vince, and therefore knew
how to "sell" a photo. Many of Guaraldi's LP covers are
droll, but this definitely is the best.
(Photo by Charles Weckler)

Number One with a bullet on my list of those who got away, however, is Vince's longtime girlfriend, Gretchen Katamay (Gretchen Glanzer, when he knew her). I missed her by inches ... well ... by a few months. She maintained a close relationship with Vince's two children, and particularly with Dia. Gretchen apparently was a cheerful, gregarious woman who lived life to the fullest and loved talking about Vince. I was lucky to gain access to an on-camera interview she gave in August 2003, for a project that never got off the ground; I was, as a result, able to spend about an hour listening to her share memories ... many of which put an even broader smile on her already beaming face.

But I sure wish I'd met her in person.

I therefore was quite pleased to receive a note from a gentleman named Brian McCormack, who thought I'd enjoy hearing a little story he had to tell. He thought correctly; he also agreed to share his anecdote in this wider forum. Take it away, Brian:

I've been a huge fan of Vince Guaraldi since I was a child, and have enjoyed playing his music on the piano for many years now.

On Labor Day weekend in September 2007, I was visiting two friends — Rob and Ted — in Morro Bay, California. We're all landscape architects, and a larger bunch of us got together one evening to drink wine at Rob's house, and enjoy the charm of his family and his small California coastal town. Some of us had worked together at the same landscape architectural firm in Southern California in the 1980s, while others had graduated together from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Rob, Ted and I drove to nearby Los Osos the following morning, to Celia's Garden Café, a locally owned coffee shop. We sat outside to enjoy our lattes and scones, and two very cool ladies about my Mom's age sat next to us. We all started talking; we explained about being landscape architects, and how most of us had started our own firms, and that the weekend was a reunion of sorts for us. The ladies were quite interested in our work, and I'm pretty sure we gave them our business cards.

We also talked about my heritage, as I'm a member of Idaho's Nez Perce Tribe. (Later that day, Rob took Ted and me on a hike to visit some local Indian archaeological sites along the California coastline.)

Eventually, we got around to asking the ladies about their professions.

One of them told us that she once was a concert promoter for Bill Graham in the Bay Area, and that she had toured with the Grateful Dead and other 1960s and '70s-era rock bands. She talked about some of the bands that she had managed. One in particular was Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick. I was a huge fan of their music, and we talked about how I liked playing some of Jefferson Airplane's music on the piano. (I also was a piano major in college.)

She also mentioned having lived with Vince Guaraldi. She was surprised when I told her I loved his music.

I always think of this lady whenever I play any of Vince's pieces on the piano. (My favorite is "Manha de Carnaval.") I didn't get her name that day, and only learned that it was Gretchen after visiting this blog. I was hoping to run into her again during my next visit to Los Osos, but was sad to read in the Lost Live Dead blog that she had died in 2009. My condolences to her family and friends.

That was a memorable Labor Day weekend for me, to say the least.

By all accounts, Gretchen charmed everybody she met, and that certainly seems to have been the case here. I envy your chance encounter, Brian, and I'm grateful you got in touch.

It would be nice, one day, to hear you play "Manha de Carnaval."