10 Great Vince Guaraldi Tracks NOT from Charlie Brown TV Shows

This pianist’s music wasn’t just a bag of peanuts

Around the time of my tenth birthday, my parents gave me a copy of the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack album. This was the first jazz record I owned—except I didn’t know it was jazz.

I just assumed this was music for kids like me—with no connection to the world of grown-ups.

Back then, I was interested in Charlie Brown as a character in the Peanuts comic strip—which appeared in full color every Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. Peanuts was pervasive during my childhood, with the key characters showing up everywhere, from lunch boxes to T-shirts.

If you were an odd youngster back in those days, and didn’t fit easily into the stream of things, you tended to identify with Charlie Brown. At least I did.

Then the cartoon made the leap to television, showcased in 15 TV specials over the next decade. But by that time I’d graduated from high school and, putting away childish things, left Peanuts behind.

I had become, at age 17, a jazz fanatic. Maybe even a jazz snob (please forgive me).

This is when I rediscovered Vince Guaraldi, the composer and performer behind the Peanuts’ TV soundtracks. I learned that he was an extremely creative and expressive jazz pianist.

But, like Charlie Brown, Guaraldi was also a bit of an outsider. He played (and composed) jazz music in his own strange and beautiful way, violating most of the norms of the day.

Hearing Guaraldi from this new angle brought back my fond adolescent memories of his Charlie Brown music, but also deepened my interest in his other projects. A few years later, when I wrote my book West Coast Jazz, I had an excuse to dig more deeply into Guaraldi’s life and times.

I met many people who had known him, and even played with musicians who had gigged and recorded with him. I heard so many stories, I felt as if I had known Guaraldi myself.

Over the years, my fandom has grown more intense. So I chafe when I hear Guaraldi dismissed as a jazz lightweight or some kind of crossover simpleton who didn’t play the real thing.

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The truth is the exact opposite. Guaraldi was as real as you could get. For example, he was one of the deepest blues players on the West Coast, and got many gigs for that skill alone.

Consider this assessment of legendary music critic Ralph Gleason, who knew all the stars—from John Coltrane to Bob Dylan—and founded Rolling Stone magazine. But he claimed that Vince Guaraldi had delivered one of the best performances he ever heard in his life:

I will never forget one night at the Macumba in San Francisco when that group [Guaraldi with the Cal Tjader band] got a blues groove going that was something else again. It was so good that the band was giggling, the waitresses stopped serving to turn and look, and the audience held its breath. It was one of the best moments of music in my entire life, believe me.

That was what Guaraldi’s blues playing could do. And his work with Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete was just as inspiring. Or his choral music. Or, of course, his straight-ahead jazz.

To make that point more convincingly, I’m sharing below ten Vince Guaraldi tracks that are NOT from Charlie Brown soundtracks.

Happy listening!

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Vince Guaraldi with Bola Sete: “Star Song”

I’m grateful that this performance got captured live on TV back in 1963. I’ve claimed elsewhere that guitarist Bola Sete deserved to be a bossa nova star, but he always ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even his partnership with Guaraldi was star-crossed, as demonstrated by this “Star Song.” The duo parted ways before the Charlie Brown opportunity emerged—otherwise I could easily imagine this track featured on the popular holiday soundtrack.

The piano playing here could hardly be more low-key—Guaraldi is doing almost nothing at the keyboard. But that almost speaks volumes. His touch and dynamics are exquisite. His phrasing is perfect—so much so that you wouldn’t want to change a single note. And his melodic instincts are unsurpassed.

The composition originated when Guaraldi received lyrics—now lost—from a fan who worked at Pacific Gas & Electric, and the pianist decided to set them to music. With a little luck, “Star Song” might have been a radio hit, but (like so much of Guaraldi’s best work) it didn’t fit easily into the dominant commercial genre definitions.

That’s still true today.

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Vince Guaraldi, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”

This tune did become a radio hit. And one of the most unusual ones of the era.

“Cast Your Fate to the Wind” moves back and forth from pastoral meditation to light funk—everything held together by an unforgettable melody, as inspired as any Guaraldi ever wrote.

Nobody expected a hit single from “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” When Ralph Gleason wrote the liner notes to the album that included this song, he didn’t even mention it. It only arrived at radio stations because it was the B-side of the single for the intended airplay tune “Samba de Orfeu.”

But listeners loved it, and it climbed to number 22 on the Billboard chart. It probably would have gone higher if it wasn’t so out-of-place alongside the other hits of the day. Not even jazz tunes sounded like this back in 1963.

Drummer Colin Bailey does the best he can to create a rhythmic groove for the different sections, but the larger reality is that this song propels itself.

I note that this composition convinced TV producer Lee Mendelson to hire Guaraldi for the Peanuts soundtrack.