A Charlie Brown Christmas

Product Information

Consider the 21st Century reality that, if there was a possibility of creating a fresh and improved stereo master from the original multitrack tapes, it is no doubt in the best interest of Vince Guaraldi’s musical legacy to preserve those recordings before the tapes disintegrate any further. He had one of the early versions without the sides listed on the labels and I paid no mind to the side serials under the word STEREO.

If the remix was handled with loving care, there is certainly the potential for an improved — or at least different — listening experience.

So the outside cover is gold, but the actual vinyl is available in a number of coloured vinyl variants, depending on retailer. The super deluxe, 2LP and single CD editions follow on 2 December (was 14 October), via Craft Recordings. Also in the dead wax the second number is scratched out and the "2" is placed below the scratched out number.

It never touches the sonic cliches of Christmas music, and manages to convey the complete range of emotions you might feel about the season. The LP jacket features the original 1965 cover art with the classic Charles Schultz illustration, and not the revised cover art that been largely used since the 1980’s across all formats. A perfect blend of classical, Christmas, and Jazz this is definitely something you need to give an Xmas Day spin.Plus, it's housed in a replica of the original cover, with tip on artwork and nice, heavy cardboard. However, if you love this album and want to hear Vince Guaraldi and his trio in as close-to-first-gen quality as possible, then you owe it to yourself to hear this new version.

I chose this version, as the stamper labels are the same, but it has the reissue cover art Vince Guaraldi Trio - A Charlie Brown Christmas. For a long time now, I have had the feeling there were seemingly a bazillion different versions of Vince Guaraldi’s beloved jazz soundtrack to the timeless “A Charlie Brown Christmas” 1965 TV special out there in the wilds of record collecting. Mark Smotroff is an avid vinyl collector who has also worked in marketing communications for decades. For items that are dispatched using our standard service, we ask that you wait 14 days from the date of dispatch before reporting any items as undelivered. When the great jazz critic Nat Hentoff belatedly wrote an essay about him in 2010 – 34 years after Guaraldi’s sudden death, aged 47 – it was in the context of rediscovering a lost figure, noting that Guaraldi had never been on the list of nominees for the Jazz Hall of Fame, and comparing him to the largely forgotten swing-era trombonist Jack Jenney.I have this version (CR 00061) and the 2021 silver foil version (F- 8431) and this version sounds 100 times better. There are funny scenes in A Charlie Brown Christmas, but the whole 25 minutes is shot through with a haunting vein of melancholy, which Guaraldi picked up on and amplified in his score. The album was inducted into the GRAMMY® Hall of Fame in 2007 and continues to be a perennial favorite, thanks to annual airings of the Christmas TV special. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Most of the tracks are twinkly piano numbers, with a few choral pieces thrown in, and all of them have the warmth that you want at Christmas.