Holiday melodies
HIGH NOTES
| But if asked, I would have to admit that I adore the likes of "Silent Night" and "Joy To The World". So what if I have never built a snowman or actually seen mommy kissing Santa Claus. Everyone's allowed a small share of fantasy. |
| But Christmas music, or holiday music as it is called, is an expansive genre. And the contemporary versions of traditional Christmas carols that I have come across range from Carribean style Christmas reggae to electronic mixmas renditions to more sophisticated jazz versions and some even shockingly perverse versions. |
| But this Christmas season I accidentally bumped into "A Charlie Brown Christmas", the soundtrack to the classic Christmas TV special based on the popular cartoon strip "Peanuts" that was first broadcast in 1965. Jazz composer and pianist Vince Guaraldi and his trio composed and performed the music for the animated TV show and the music has since become nearly as popular as the show itself. |
| The TV show, when first presented to CBS network by Peanuts creator Charles M Schulz, was not taken very seriously and was provided with a meagre budget that resulted in a series of badly executed work. But when the show premiered, nearly half the television-watching population in the US tuned in and it was a commercial success. |
| The show starts out with an unfortunate looking Charlie Brown who is on a quest to understand the meaning of Christmas and what it is about the holidays that depresses him. The show ends on happy note with Charlie Brown's friends singing around a Christmas tree. |
| On another level, what Schulz had in mind as a concept was to expose the over commercialisation and the lack of understanding of Christmas. Guaraldi's jazz style suits the mood of the film perfectly and surprisingly, when it was released in '65 during the peak of rock n' roll's reign over America, it was received extremely well by everyone. That included adults, teenagers and the youth. |
| Convincing a predominantly rock n' roll audience to listen to jazz music never was or will be easy. But listening to "A Christmas With Charlie Brown" will clear all your doubts as to how the Vince Guaraldi trio managed to do just that. |
| The album has a certain irresistible charm in the way it is innocent, playful and musically sophisticated at the same time, the best example of this being the song "Linus And Lucy", the theme for the Peanuts series that juxtaposes a catchy piano riff and a relatively complex mid-section. As a composer Guaraldi obviously knew the importance of catchy melody lines. And "A Christmas With Charlie Brown" is full of these. |
| Far from being a kids movie and a kids album, there's now a huge number of people that have grown up watching the series and listening to the music. So much so that when a remastered version of the music was released in 2006, it sparked a controversy around slight alterations. |
| According to Michael Azerrad, eMusic editor, the album and the TV show "...share a child-like innocence and precious pocket-sized epiphanies about playfulness and pensiveness, worldliness and naïveté, spirituality and pettiness, elation and melancholy, all manifested in the pathos of children's simple but uncannily prescient reactions to the adult world". And he could not be more correct. |