{"id":3110,"date":"2012-09-27T05:30:08","date_gmt":"2012-09-27T09:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=3110"},"modified":"2020-06-18T11:30:07","modified_gmt":"2020-06-18T15:30:07","slug":"album-review-vince-guaraldi-the-very-best-of-vince-guaraldi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2012\/09\/27\/album-review-vince-guaraldi-the-very-best-of-vince-guaraldi\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Vince Guaraldi – The Very Best of Vince Guaraldi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The music of Vince Guaraldi<\/strong> could well be described as \u201cjazz for people who don’t like jazz.\u201d And even knowing what little I do about Guaraldi the man, I strongly suspect that he’d be pleased with that description. He was a hipster-looking pianist who created arguably the most accessible body of work in the jazz idiom. Guaraldi is the composer and performer of music that a generation knows, though they may not know it was he who created it.<\/p>\n

Among music fans, Guaraldi’s most well-known and immortal work is \u201cCast your Fate to the Wind\u201d from the album Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus<\/em><\/a>, itself a groundbreaking work and major commercial success. It’s my contention \u2013 not provable, mind you \u2013 that the main melodic line of \u201cCast your Fate to the Wind\u201d provided the riff for a song by another artist who’d many years later be on Fantasy Records (as leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival<\/strong>) John Fogerty<\/strong>. Listen to his post-CCR solo hit \u201cCenterfield\u201d and decide for yourself. And Todd Rundgren<\/strong>‘s \u201cBreathless\u201d from Something\/Anything?<\/em> owes a similar debt to Guaraldi’s \u201cTreat Street.\u201d Clearly, Guaraldi’s influence and reach clearly extended well beyond jazz and jazz fans.<\/p>\n

Because among the public at large, Guaraldi is the man who wrote and performed the Peanuts<\/em> theme, \u201cLinus and Lucy.\u201d The warm, friendly and \u2013 here’s that word again \u2013 accessible approach of Guaraldi’s work expressed a carefree joy without the use of words. And Guaraldi’s subsequent work for the animation franchise included more music in that vein, especially his work for the Peanuts<\/em> Christmas specials.<\/p>\n

The best of that work plus nearly a dozen more tunes make up the new one-disc collection from Concord\/Fantasy, The Very Best of Vince Guaraldi<\/em>. Part of Concord\u2019s plan to release boiled-down introductory collections for those interested yet new to jazz artists, The Best of Vince Guaraldi<\/em> shows the pianist in a jazz trio. With a string quintet; delving in to the then-hot samba scene; and much more. Guitarists Eddie Duran<\/strong> and Bola Sete<\/strong> (one or the other is featured on the majority of these tracks) add even more tasty appeal to the songs. Across all the tracks \u2013 live and studio \u2013 Guaraldi’s approach is always aimed squarely at drawing in the widest swath of listeners, and he does it without ever \u201cselling out\u201d or diluting his music. Guaraldi comes by his commercial appeal honestly; it’s simply who we was as a musician.<\/p>\n

Guaraldi biographer Derrick Bang<\/a><\/strong>‘s lyrical (there’s no better word) liner notes offer a short course in Guaraldi’s appeal, and \u2013 like the music \u2013 will lead listeners to delve deeper into his catalog. If I might recommend a second and third destination: the aforementioned Jazz Impressions<\/em><\/a> and one I don’t have (yet), a 2CD release from 2009 titled The Definitive Vince Guaraldi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Postscript: I discovered the \u201cTreat Street\u201d \/ \u201cBreathless\u201d connection on my own; Derrick Bang (a much more learned scholar than myself) was hipped to the connection by another reviewer a few short weeks ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The music of Vince Guaraldi could well be described as \u201cjazz for people who don’t like jazz.\u201d And even knowing what little I do about Guaraldi the man, I strongly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,42,65],"tags":[2326],"class_list":["post-3110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-compilation","category-jazz","category-review","tag-vince-guaraldi","cat-19-id","cat-42-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19031,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3110\/revisions\/19031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}