Celebrate Christmas with holiday music from one cool cat

Christmas time is here... and you likely have grown weary of Andy Williams and Johnny Williams telling you "it's the most wonderful time of the year" two weeks ago. Why on earth do radio broadcast executives - programmers ruled by the bottom line than viewer interest - pump the airwaves with holiday ditties from Thanksgiving forward? You can't help but experience holiday music fatigue by the start of Hanukkah.

If WARM radio's blitz of yuletide tunes leaves you cold, you will find solace in nontraditional but iconic holiday music of one of the coolest cats in jazz, pianist and composer Vince Guaraldi.

A self-described "reformed boogie-woogie player," the San Francisco native - working at the San Francisco Daily News - nearly lost a finger to an occupational accident. The San Francisco State University (SFSU) alum performed at weddings, high-school concerts and Bay Area clubs while seeking the Big Break to which hungry musicians aspire. In the late 1950s, Guaraldi began incorporating American cool jazz (a staple of 1950s music) and Brazilian bossa nova compositions (which would experience unprecedented popularity in the 1960s) in his compositions. Blame it on the bossa nova: A star would emerge.

In 1962, the Vince Guaraldi Trio's 1962 limited play (LP) album Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus. The LP comprised music from songs from the Brazilian film released in three years earlier ("Samba de Orpheus", "Manha de Carnaval", "Generique") a contemporary favorite ("Moon River") and a songbook standard "Since I Fell For You"). "Cast Your Fate to the Wind", though, became a breakout hit and propelled the trio to stardom and captured the Grammy award for Best Original Jazz Composition.

Guaraldi's popularity caught the attention of a trio of men producing an animated holiday program in 1965. Lee Mendelson, Bill Menendez and Charles M. Schulz made up the group of three wise men. Their passion project involved a Christmas special featuring the characters of the white-hot Peanuts comic strip. We know the special as A Charlie Brown Christmas. Schulz, Mendelson and Menendez resisted the implorations of executives from the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) to deep-six the original jazz compositions that would serve as the program's soundtrack. Nobody could foresee that "Linus and Lucy" - a staple of all future Peanuts TV shows - would resonate with an American television audience that favored episodes of The Fugitive (#5), The Andy Griffith Show (#4), Gomer Pyle, USMC (#3), Bewitched (#2) and Bonanza (#1) during the 1964-1965 television season.

How big significant was Guaraldi's trailblazing endeavors to the beloved Peanuts holiday special? Producer Mendelson once told a reporter: "I think Vince's music was one of the contributions that made the Charlie Brown shows so special." Guaraldi, Mendelson explained, "gave it a sound, an individuality, that no other cartoon ever had. I'd say over the last 15 years we've received as much mail asking about the music as we have about anything else in the shows."

If Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus and "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" didn't make Guaraldi a household name, A Charlie Brown Christmas propelled the beatnik musician into the American mainstream. Billboard writer Shirley Lewis Harris later lauded Guaraldi as "still playing the same jazz as he did years ago, but with more guts than ever. This man can turn a piano into the closet thing a human being just putting his hands on the keys. He makes the piano laugh, cry, sigh, be coy or intellectual."

Critical respect, though, didn't provide Guaraldi the commercial and financial success that he deserved. Guaraldi returned to the Bay Area club scene. In February 1976 - a little more than a decade after A Charlie Brown Christmas premiered - Guaraldi suffered a fatal heart attack. Only 47 years old, he died while playing between sets during a gig at Butterfield's Bar in Menlo Park, CA.

Despite the explosion of video clips available on YouTube, you won't find a live performance of the Vince Guaraldi Trio. Any individual with access to a tape of a live Guaraldi performance is implored to post on YouTube. We want to see the man playing his groundbreaking music.