Home » Jazz Musicians » Fred Marshall
Fred Marshall
Vince Guaraldi and Bola Sete: From All Sides
by C. Andrew Hovan
When it comes to West Coast jazz of the highest order, Lester Koenig's Contemporary label set the standard, although Fantasy Records would also carve its own niche. Founded by the Weiss Brothers in 1949, Fantasy would be the home to two early jazz crossover artists, Dave Brubeck and Vince Guaraldi. With a taste for multiple genres, the label also documented the work of comedian Lenny Bruce and the country rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival. The latter group actually earned ...
Continue Reading...Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Christmas
by Marc Davis
A Charlie Brown Christmas is the corniest jazz-Christmas album ever made. And that's OK. It's even good. I know the dig. What Vince Guaraldi played wasn't jazz, it was lounge music. It was sentimental. It was lightweight. It was sappy. Yep. All of that. So what? Christmas time is about memories. That's what the smells, the sights, the tastes and the music are about. Some are family memories, some are communal memories. A Charlie Brown Christmas ...
Continue Reading...Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Christmas
by Robert Gilbert
Only a handful of jazz albums find their way into the collections of music lovers who would never call themselves jazz fans. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is one, Getz/Gilberto is another, and Coltrane's A Love Supreme also comes to mind. For Christmas time, though, the album is Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack to the 1965 special A Charlie Brown Christmas.A beloved (and rightly so) half-hour parable about the meaning of the holidays featuring the Peanuts gang, Guaraldi's music plays ...
Continue Reading...Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Christmas
by Florence Wetzel
Just in time for the holidays, Fantasy has released a remaster of the classic soundtrack A Charlie Brown Christmas. The cartoon follows Charlie Brown's search for the true meaning of Christmas, and Vince Guaraldi's music is an integral part of this perennial holiday favorite. Guaraldi, born in 1928 in San Francisco and died in 1976 while resting between sets at a club, was part of the flourishing '50s California scene which produced the movement known as West Coast jazz. The ...
Continue Reading...Vince Guaraldi & Bola Sete: Vince & Bola
by Derek Taylor
The ascendancy of the Bossa Nova ‘craze’ in the late 1950s and '60s was birthed by a succession of highly successful musical partnerships--Laurindo Almeida and Bud Shank, Sergio Mendes and Herbie Mann, Stan Getz and just about every major Brazilian musician of the day including Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto--all were major proponents of the style. One partnership that is often bypassed in discussions of the music is that shared between Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete and California-based cool jazz ...
Continue Reading...Vince Guaraldi Trio: Charlie Brown's Holiday Hits
by Douglas Payne
This nice little holiday gift is easily confused with the popular soundtrack to the 1964 TV special,A Charlie Brown Christmas. But don't be fooled. Nine of the 14 tracks included here are culled from the 15 Peanuts holiday specials Vince Guaraldi scored before his untimely death at age 47 in 1976--and have never been released on disc before.Some will even startle Vince Guaraldi fans. The lovely, melodic waltzes you can hum along to are all here. But it's ...
Continue Reading...
