Taken like a spoonful of Nyquil just before you pass out from flu exhaustion, nostalgia is no harm at all. In fact, it’s positively uplifting, even if that lift up hampers your hipness standing to the point where you might as well be culturally asleep. Short trips to what was probably an imaginary past—immaculate family gatherings around the tree, perfect junior high summers with perfect junior high kisses—aren’t necessarily grounds for an inner guilt trip. But depending on your references, be prepared to defend your sleepy tastes to anyone who doesn't care for fuzzy focus warmth or the notion that fond reminisce amounts to anything more than premature senility. Enter Peanuts.
Best Buy racks full of oldie television DVDs and forgotten cartoons might otherwise testify to a healthy market for nostalgia, but Charles Schulz’s mini-verse—kids, a dog, unrequited love, and the complete and utter failure of the adult world to play a part in any of it—suggests that the glowing past wasn’t as warm as we remember. This was the genius of the strip: exposing small epiphanies and defeats as the content of real life, even if the lives involved were cartoons, and most (but not all) of the readers were too young to care about the accuracy of Schulz’s observations. Now enter San Francisco pianist Vince Guaraldi.
Playing a smooth brand of West Coast jazz comparable to Dave Brubeck or a very snappy Bill Evans, and having scored a modest pop hit with “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” Guaraldi made an easy choice in 1963 for television producer Lee Mendelson as composer for a documentary on Schulz and Peanuts. The doc was made, but never aired; apparently, the networks didn’t want kids hearing any unnecessary “adult” thoughts about Peanuts. So when plans for A Charlie Brown Christmas came to fruition in 1965, Guaraldi’s music—including the classic “Linus and Lucy” theme—got its chance. The rest is history: The special has been rebroadcast every year since its premiere and, though Guaraldi’s death of a heart attack in 1976 (in between sets at a club no less) prevented him from seeing the full extent of his influence on popular culture, it would be hard to name a more recognizable cartoon theme, give or take a Danny Elfman piece.
But then the reissue of Guaraldi’s soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas has a lot more going for it than “Linus and Lucy.” Melancholy covers of “O Tannenbaum,” “What Child Is This?,” “The Christmas Song,” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”—and yes, it has the Peanuts kids singing “loo-loo-loo, l-loo-loo-loo-loo”—make for the perfect dysfunctional holiday music. Certainly, I will make a point this year to get too drunk, thereby spending the week after Christmas listening to this record and regretting telling off my grandma. However, it doesn’t have to be so bad; Guaraldi’s rolling, snow-mystic touches on “What Child Is This?” or his reconstruction of “Little Drummer Boy” as the minimalist bossa “My Little Drum” are hypnotic, faithful mappings of the rhythm of snow falling, or the reflections of people walking by store windows.
And “Linus and Lucy” is here in all its deceptively simple glory. In fact, the motive bass line and a perfect realization of the melody are patterns that should be taught to all beginning piano students as models of efficient finger technique. The closest parallel to this music is Philip Glass, and really, “Linus and Lucy” is a lot more interesting than anything Glass has done in years. Guaraldi’s “Christmas Is Coming” is similarly kinetic, shining with the kind of understated elation you’d expect for any music soundtracking the misadventures of kids always ready to celebrate while perpetually shown the downside of Christmas. If there’s a muted quality to a lot of this music, it’s smiling nonetheless.
The reissue includes alternate takes of several tracks, and great liner notes detailing the history of the project. Even the cover is cool, with an animation still and foldout, faux LP-style jacket. If all of this screams “stocking stuffer,” please don’t let me stop you. Nostalgic though it may be, anything that’s as full of introspection, empathy, disappointment, loneliness, and the perpetual hope of better things around the corner can’t be all bad. Like the strip, Guaraldi’s songs here are small, observant miracles.
