Showing posts with label Warner Bros.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Warner Bros.. Show all posts

Thursday, April 18, 2019

A heaping helping of Vince

It's worth mentioning that Amazon, iTunes and Google Play have made just about all of Guaraldi’s catalogue (as leader) available for streaming and purchase as digital downloads.

And I mean everything:

• All of his releases from Fantasy and Warner Bros., along with the 21st century anthology albums: The Definitive Vince Guaraldi, The Very Best of Vince Guaraldi, etc.

• The initial and much later releases on the resurrected D&D label: Vince Guaraldi and the San Francisco Boys Chorus, Oaxaca, etc.

• Most important, from the standpoint of hard-to-get material, is everything released by Vince’s son, David: Live on the Air, North Beach, both of the Peanuts Lost Cues albums, and so forth. Some of those have become quite difficult to find in CD format.

This list even includes a “digital single” of Guaraldi’s cover of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” featured as a bonus track within Omnivore’s anthology set of his three Warners albums. And, as you can see above, somebody even took the trouble to produce a faux 45 disc and sleeve. (I assure you: It doesn’t exist in real life.)

Oddly, though, the list does not include “The Sharecropper’s Daughter” or “Oh, Happy Day,” the other bonus tracks from the Omnivore set.

And this is important: I checked with ace sound and re-mastering engineer Michael Graves, and he assures me that these streaming versions of Oh, Good Grief, The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi and Alma-Ville are, respectively, from the Warner Bros. and Wounded Bird CDs … not the Omnivore package he worked on.

The only album missing from the list is the soundtrack to 1969’s big-screen movie, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, released on CD by Kritzerland in 2017.

This is a great chance to “fill in the gaps,” for folks who don’t mind not having physical copies. But I advise acting quickly: Digital services sometimes taketh away just as rapidly as they giveth!

Friday, April 27, 2018

Something to devour from Omnivore

Big news, folks.

Omnivore Recordings — a terrific prestige label, with an impressive catalog — will release two Vince Guaraldi items on July 6: The Complete Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Recordings (encompassing Vince’s three Warner Bros.-Seven Arts albums: Oh, Good Grief!, The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi and Alma-Ville), as a two-CD set with four previously unreleased bonus tracks; and the classic Oh, Good Grief! album, on translucent red vinyl.

Check out this cool trailer.

Got your attention with the phrase “bonus tracks,” right?

It's true. The double-CD package includes never-heard-before covers of Bacharach/David’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and the gospel hit “Oh, Happy Day,” along with a Guaraldi original titled “The Share Croppers Daughter” and an alternate take of “The Beat Goes On.”

Quoting now from Omnivore's press release:

Many people got to know Guaraldi through his 1963 Grammy Award-winning song, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” or via Sounds Orchestral’s Top 10 cover of it two years later. Lee Mendelson heard Guaraldi’s version while working on a Peanuts documentary; he contacted the pianist and asked him to score that project. Although Mendelson wasn’t able to sell that documentary to network television, he and Guaraldi subsequently reunited for what became the first Peanuts television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was a match made in TV and musical history. With songs like “Linus and Lucy,” the show was a hit, and for more than five decades, not a holiday season went by without an airing. So potent and successful was the Peanuts/Guaraldi combination that the jazz pianist went on to score a total of 15 Peanuts television specials, a 1969 documentary and the debut feature film that same year.

In 1968, Vince made a label switch from his long-time home, Fantasy Records, to Warner Bros. Records. For his inaugural album, Oh, Good Grief!, he decided to re-interpret his Peanuts classics. In addition to the instantly recognizable Guaraldi sound of piano, bass and drums, he added electric guitar and electric harpsichord to the mix. The record was a smash hit.

For its 50th anniversary, Oh, Good Grief! will be presented by Omnivore Recordings the way the world first heard it: as stated on the original release’s back cover, “on shiny black vinyl.” (Well, actually, this special edition is “on shiny red vinyl.”) Mastered by Kevin Gray and pressed at world-class record-pressing plant RTI, this timeless album never has sounded better. 

Following Oh, Good Grief!,1969’s The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi lived up to its title and found the pianist experimenting: There’s a large string section, Guaraldi’s first recorded vocals (covering the singer/songwriter Tim Hardin), and original compositions that could be described as lengthy rock jams. 

Guaraldi’s last album for the label and final-ever album, 1970’s Alma-Ville, ranks among his best-ever releases. Six of the nine songs on this “return to jazz” project were Guaraldi originals; the set was recorded with several different ensembles. Besides the original compositions, Alma-Ville finds Guaraldi covering the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” which had become a staple of his live performances; Duke Pearson’s “Cristo Redentor”; and the Michel Legrand/Norman Gimbel song “Watch What Happens.”

Guaraldi’s three albums for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts have been produced for this reissue by Grammy Award-winning Omnivore, Cheryl Pawelski; and remastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer, Michael Graves (who, under his Osiris Studios banner, also handled remastering for earlier Guaraldi digital releases such as Vince Guaraldi with the San Francisco Boys Chorus and Oaxaca)The new liner notes are written by your humble biographer/blogger.

Orders can be made directly from Omnivore.

Mark your calendars: July 6 will be a big day!