Tales of a Charlie Brown Christmas with the Jerry Granelli Trio, Dec. 9, 8 p.m., Kay Meek Centre. Note: This performance is currently sold out. To put your name on the waitlist, call the Kay Meek box office at 604-981-6335 or email [email protected].
Jerry Granelli has just hit the gym at his hotel in Banff.
He sounds energized, a youthful 75, as he steps out on a chilly morning and wanders through a magical winter wonderland.
“It’s beautiful, just beautiful,” Granelli says of Banff.
A fresh snowfall blankets the town, frozen ice skating ponds sit nestled in the silent forest – there’s a feeling of Christmas in the air. Banff is like a scene straight out of A Charlie Brown Christmas, you could say.
Granelli is well-versed in the Charlie Brown classic, being the last living member of the Vince Guaraldi Trio, which recorded the soundtrack for a scrappy little animated Christmas special featuring the Peanuts gang.
Little being a gross understatement. Over 15 million homes in Canada and the U.S. tuned in to the original Dec. 9, 1965 broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has since become a holiday classic.
Kay Meek Centre audience members will be treated to Tales of a Charlie Brown Christmas, a nostalgia-filled evening featuring legendary drummer Granelli revealing insights into the famous recording – 51 years to the day the TV special originally aired.
Why does A Charlie Brown Christmas resonate with multi-generations every holiday season?
“Because it’s human and people make it a soundtrack for wonderful moments in their lives,” explains Granelli.
Fans will come up to Granelli during stops on his touring show and share how Charlie Brown has become a Christmas tradition in their homes.
“They will say, ‘Hey, this is the first record I play at Christmas time,’ or ‘This is the record I open my Christmas presents to, or ‘I listen to it in the summer because it’s real jazz.’ (A Charlie Brown
Christmas) is like handing down a pasta recipe, people value it,” says Granelli.
But the Christmas classic that generations have come to love almost never aired. Jazz on TV? And in a cartoon? It was a tough sell at the time, as Granelli recalls. No corporate TV station was interested.
Good grief.
“In 1964 you can’t imagine a world that liked that then, jazz on TV,” he says. “Now 51 years later, A Charlie Brown Christmas is the largest selling record in jazz history.”
Written in several weeks and animated on a shoestring budget, in the end the Charlie Brown Christmas special was commissioned and sponsored by The Coca-Cola Company, which got the show into living rooms. The soundtrack was recorded in a by-all-accounts productive three-hour session.
A Charlie Brown Christmas was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007 and later added to the Library of Congress’s list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” American sound recordings.
“It’s a great piece of art,” says Granelli. “It’s got a gorgeous melody.”
But what made the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack so unique was that all of the songs were improvised, explains Granelli, whose deft ability at percussion helped propel “Linus and Lucy” along, for instance.
Granelli has always enjoyed the thrill of throwing caution to the wind when he plays the drums.
“One reason why people like improvised music is that it’s a direct reflection of life, not something we thought up,” he says. “It scares you … makes you think you’re going to die for a moment.”
Granelli had that heart-pounding moment when, as a young 20-something the precocious drummer auditioned for a vacant spot in the famed Guaraldi Trio.
“Vince gave me a chance,” says Granelli. “He had been hearing about me. He says, ‘Hey man, do you want to do this?”
Guaraldi gave Granelli a weekend to prove himself. And oh how he did.
“And lucky for me, I played my butt off,” recalls Granelli.
He says he was more afraid of failing than anything, in the face of a steep learning curve at the drum kit.
“I probably played way over my head,” says Granelli, laughing.
But then again Granelli is a quick study, picking up the drums sticks at age four.
The first generation Italian-American grew up in San Francisco, in a heavily ethnic section of the city that looked like Little Italy in New York.
“I loved that Kitchen community family feeling,” recalls Granelli.
As the son of an Italian immigrant parents, a young Granelli was dragged to lot of dances, Italian weddings and social clubs, filled with the happy sounds of traditional accordion music.
“My dad, Jack Granelli, was a great Italian wedding drummer,” he shares.
Jack, wanting his son to follow in his musical footsteps, rested a violin in his small arms when he was four years old. But Granelli junior had other plans.
“My dad caught me sleeping in a chair at four years old when I supposed to be practising violin. He said, ‘What do you want to play, the violin or drums?’ I said, ‘That’s a no brainer – I want to play the drums.’ My first love affair was feeling good about hitting (objects) and hearing that sound. I started on pots and pans in the kitchen,” says Granelli.
He would later enter and win every drum competition that came along, despite having to sit at the edge of a chair to reach the foot pedals.
By the 1950s San Francisco had a rich jazz scene, which Granelli immersed himself in, learning from many of the local jazz greats. After his success with Charlie Brown, Granelli jumped around to some other trios and notably did some studio work for then-up-and-coming record producer Sly Stone – pre-Family Stone.
“The Beatles bored me,” confesses Granelli in his online bio, “but working with Sly I got to play some rhythm and blues … .”
On the advice of his Buddhist teacher, Granelli left Reagan-era America in favour of Halifax, where he got in touch with its strong folk and roots scene and Celtic music.
“Halifax is a great place, a really good community of people who appreciate music,” says Granelli of his experience in the Maritimes.
Granelli has gotten a chance to experience plenty of Canadian hospitality with the Tales of a Charlie Brown Christmas tour. When Granelli spoke with the News earlier this week, he’d just played a sold-out show for 700 people at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Next up is Ottawa. Then Sudbury. Then his adopted home of Halifax. Granelli is crisscrossing the country with his beloved show, before making his way to Vancouver next week.
Those who attend the Kay Meek performance will learn some of the backstory of how A Charlie Brown Christmas came to be, see film clips and of course hear the familiar music Granelli help make famous.
West Vancouver’s Irwin Park elementary children’s choir will lend their voices during some of the songs, including the classic “Christmas Time is Here.”
After the Christmas season, Granelli, who has recorded almost an album a year since 1987, will head to New York City to a do a residency at The Stone, to celebrate his 76th birthday and 60 years of performing improvised music.
Granelli has vowed to keep making music until that final downbeat.
“Just because you get old, the creative juices don’t go away,” he says. “If that’s what you dedicate your life to, the desire doesn’t go away. And as long as that’s there, I will keep doing it.”
