Thursday, December 25, 2014
The making of a classic
Few people can hear the opening notes of "Linus and Lucy" without recognizing it and possibly remembering the first time they heard it. Tom Maxwell gives us a brief vision of how that and the rest of the soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas came to be.
One day in 1964, television producer Lee Mendelson got a call from jazz musician Vince Guaraldi about the documentary score he was working on.
“I gotta play something for you,” Guaraldi told him. “It just came in my head.”
So he wouldn’t forget, Guaraldi performed a playful, uptempo piece over the phone. It started with a 12-note left-hand introduction that is somehow both complementary and at odds with the right-hand melody that comes in four bars later, as if describing two different personalities. What Mendelson heard that day is the first performance of “Linus and Lucy,” better known as the Peanuts cartoon theme.
Guaraldi and Mendelson were creating, through perseverance and providential accident, a brilliant soundtrack and one of the most popular Christmas albums of all time. That record, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” is a wondrous mix of traditional and original material, scored for a jazz piano trio.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
Post a Comment