Guaraldi Gets His Due at Sausalito Film Fest

The ties between Peanuts creator Charles Shulz and his longtime home of Santa Rosa are hard to miss.

The city is home to an entire museum dedicated to the late cartoonist. A bronze statue of Charlie Brown and Snoopy stands in Depot Park downtown. And a library bearing his name at nearby Sonoma State University is one of the largest in the California State University system.

But while Schulz's legend is widely known in the Bay Area, the same cannot be said for the man who created the universally recognizable music for Schulz's 16 Peanuts cartoon TV specials. Vince Guaraldi, a stalwart Bay Area jazz musician known for his fat fingers and handlebar mustache, lived in a nondescript A-frame home on Millay Place in Enchanted Knolls until his death in 1976.

While he was known primarily in jazz circles for anchoring the house band at the hungry I in San Francisco's North Beach, Guaraldi struck gold with his 1963 hit "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" and his unmistakable compositions like "Linus & Lucy" and "You're in Love, Charlie Brown" for A Charlie Brown Christmas two years later.

The pianist is the subject of a new documentary, The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi, which screens tonight at 7pm at the Sausalito Film Festival at Cavallo Point. The screening will feature a recreation of Guaraldi's sessions with Rev. Malcolm Boyd at the hungry I in San Francisco in 1966, with Boyd backed by a trio of musicians.

The film is anchored by a treasure trove of black-and-white footage shot in 1963 for San Francisco jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason's public television program, Anatomy of a Hit. The documentary was spawned when Gleason's son Toby found a master copy of the footage in the family's home years later. When Toby Gleason and co-director Andrew Thomas started asking around about the footage and people's memories of Guaraldi, the project took on a life of its own, Thomas said.

"A lot of people in the jazz community that wanted to see this again," Thomas said. "In the process, something quite touching and magical happened. There were all these people who spontaneously said, 'if you are doing something on Vince, we want to be a part of it.' The love for Vince has continued now for 40 years."

They sat down with jazz legends like Dave Brubeck, John Handy and Jon Hendricks, along with contemporary solo pianist George Winston and comedian Dick Gregory, who regularly performed at the hungry i.

The film uses Gleason's footage as a entry point into Guaraldi's career. Although he'd achieved little success early in his career, "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" changed all that. The melodic instrumental was included on Guaraldi's Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus, an album of jazz interpretations of the music from the film Black Orpheus. The track was included as a throwaway b-side for the single "Samba de Orpheus," and likely would have never seen the light of day if a disc jockey in Sacramento hadn't checked it out simply because he liked the title. The song took off from there, and garnered a Grammy for best original jazz instrumental in 1963, turning Guaraldi into an anomaly as a jazz artist with a pop hit.

"They were two separate worlds and he made jazz accessible," Thomas said.

The song reflected Guaraldi's belief that melody was essential to his compositions.

"I can't think of any instance where someone is walking down the street listening to chord changes," he said in the film.

After "Cast Your Fate" became a hit, Guaraldi said people began to recognize him "as a piano player or a musician and not just a nut with a mustache."

Winston, who has released two tribute albums to Guaraldi, including the recent Love Will Come: The Music of Vince Guaraldi Vol. 2, said in the film that "Cast Your Fate" had a huge impact on him.

"That song has always taken me out to the ocean where you can't see any land," Winston said.

While "Cast Your Fate" put jazz on the pop charts, the music Guaraldi created for Schulz's TV specials became part of American folklore, ingrained in the ears of generation after generation.

That same year, Guaraldi moved with his wife and two kids into Enchanted Knolls. The couple divorced in 1970, but Guaraldi lived there until he died in 1976 from a stomach aneurysm between sets at a nightclub in Menlo Park.

Thomas said he hopes the film will incite people to dig deeper into Guaraldi's musical catalog.

"Just as Vince's music is a gateway drug to more sophisticated jazz, we hope this film is the introduction for a lot of people to expand the library of music they put on their iPods," Thomas said. "We're hoping that when they see this film that they'll want to sample some of the deeper catalog."

For more information on the film and the Sausalito Film Fest, check out the festival's Web site.