Odds & Ends: News/Humor (with a "Who Lost the Week?" poll)

His breakthrough hit (in more ways than one) was the 1963 Grammy-winning tune Cast Your Fate to the Wind - a gorgeous melody that eight years later the guitarist Joe Walsh - later to join The Eagles - worked into a medley (most improbably) with a hard rock song with the James Gang entitled The Bomber in 1971.

In the early 1960's, Vince Guaraldi was successful in the jazz world — first as a sideman in  vibraphonist Cal Tjader’s band— yet comparatively unknown to the general public. But that changed - dramatically - with a 1965 cab ride that TV producer Lee Mendelson took across the Golden Gate Bridge. He had already contacted both Dave Brubeck and also vibraphone player Cal Tjader about composing for his project (and turned down by both for lack of time).

Just as The Sopranos producer David Chase decided upon his show's theme song - by hearing the UK band "Alabama 3" perform it on the radio - Lee Mendelson heard "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" on the radio in that fateful cab ride.

He asked for help from the noted San Francisco music journalist Ralph Gleason (who helped co-found Rolling Stone magazine later that decade) and was thus able to contact Guaraldi about composing for the upcoming Charlie Brown Christmas special. In 2018, the Jersey City Ballet Theater did a dance version of the special. This is the second-best selling jazz album of all time (with only Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue ahead of it). And Billboard reported last year that, as it does annually, A Charlie Brown Christmas entered its best-selling album charts in December.

Sixteen TV shows (and one feature film) later, the music of Vince Guaraldi is an integral part of the Peanuts experience - with the theme song Linus and Lucy plus the irresistible song Skating among his best-loved Peanuts music. One reviewer noted that Linus and Lucy borrows its syncopation and A-flat key from “Cast Your Fate”. And Guaraldi was a later influence for Gary Burton and Pat Metheny.

As a child, my mother bought the Vince Guaraldi album for me … mistakenly believing it was the soundtrack of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” (and apologizing to me for it) — but I was delighted to be introduced to his music, and it was a stepping-stone (among other recordings) to becoming a piano trio lover. When people say there is no Thanksgiving music to speak of — while instrumental (and quite short), Guaraldi wrote Thanksgiving Theme to offer a possible gift to us.

Vince Guaraldi died forty-six years ago in 1976 (at only age 47) in-between sets of a gig in Menlo Park California. The musician David Benoit cites Guaraldi as an inspiration, and it's difficult to imagine Peanuts with any other music backing it. If you are a fan of George Winston: he had a meeting with Guaraldi in 1971, saying "He was very gracious and encouraging when I occasionally had the opportunity to play intermission piano between his sets” (a common practice at jazz clubs then).

Some long-lost film archives of Guaraldi were discovered in Ralph Gleason’s attic, and his son has helped restore them for a new documentary The Anatomy Of Vince Guaraldi— seeking to bring it to home video at some point.

For the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis,"Peanuts" was the only chance to hear jazz on television in his youth. Wynton also loved that his late pianist father Ellis— the patriarch of the Marsalis musical family whom we lost to Covid — knew Guaraldi. "Our father knew somebody who was connected to television!", he exclaimed.