Switched on Pop - Linus & Lucy

Episode Date: December 17, 2015

Celebrate 50 years of A Charlie Brown Christmas and his eponymous holiday album. If you’re feeling worn out on holiday music, this one never wears old. Its gone triple platinum and charts almost every year on the holiday Billboard. Join us as we dive deep into the brilliance of Vince Guaraldi, the pianist and composer behind Linus and Lucy. We bet you might be hearing the song all wrong. Featuring Vince Guaraldi – What Child Is This, Christmas Is Coming, Linus and Lucy, O Tannenbaum, Christmas Time Is Here, El Matador, Cast Your Fate To The Wind The Supremes – Oh Holy Night Leonard Bernstein – Carol Of The Bells Bobby Timmons – This Here Lee Morgan – The Rumproller Julian “Cannonball” Adderley – One For Daddy-O (featuring Miles Davis) Jack Gleason – Unforgettable This episode was sponsored by VNYL. Subscribe at my.vnyl.org.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. One of the things I really love about Christmas at my house, like so many other families, we bring lots of folks together. In fact, at our Christmas, we have all three major Western religions represented at our Christmas tree, which I don't think is very normal for folks in Maine. Really? Yeah, truly. And so, you know, we keep it really lighthearted. And the thing that for me is, is always the uniting force are the beautiful two elements of the fireplace and the music in the background. That's a good comment. That's a good comment. And we have one soundtrack that goes all Christmas long. It starts playing, obviously, around Thanksgiving and goes all the way through basically the new year.

Because once Christmas has already happened, I want to keep hearing it. It's that good. It's an American tradition that maybe others are familiar with a Charlie Brown Christmas. Oh, I was going to say Jessica Simpson's holiday album, but that's, yeah, that's a much better choice. So I've been listening to this album for decades, and it's the, It's the one CD that gets put in the CD player. It's played nonstop. We just put it on repeat.

And it never gets old. And it has this incredible feeling of both capturing this sort of like cold, winter, somber, reflectiveness. As well as this like just joyous glee of the holidays. And it does this all in sort of an unexpected jazz tradition. So this album is just so beautiful. and I wanted to look into together what makes this so special? What is it about when Linus and Lucy comes on

that it's holiday time? And in particular, why is this in the jazz tradition and who is the mysterious figure behind this incredibly successful album? Let's do it. Switched on Pop, Christmas Edition. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

And I'm musicologist Nate Slughey. Today on the show, a Charlie Brown Christmas. Which character do you relate to the most, Charlie? Pig pen. Big pen. Do you know mine? No, who's that? Schroeder.

Yes, of course. Schroeder, my piano playing buddy. All right, Mr. Piano Man. Well, I'm really excited for everybody to join us in celebrating what is actually the 50th anniversary of Charlie Brown's Christmas. And I'm really excited to go into this back catalog, figure out why you're probably hearing Linus and Lucy the wrong. way and really look at why is this the only major jazz album that you're going to hear this year. So, Charlie, you did some research into the genesis of this Charlie Brown Christmas special. Yes, yes.

Which aired back in 1965. What's the backstory here? First of all, it was a totally unlikely success. Nobody thought that this thing was going to succeed. They did it really quickly. They animated it in like six months, which I don't know. a lot about animation, but I'm guessing that's really fast. They used real child actors instead of professional voice actors,

and everybody thought that that was going to be a real failure. They didn't use a laugh track, which was totally customary at the time. And the biggest surprise is that they chose to use jazz as their soundtrack. Winton Marsalis himself, like one of the great jazz musicians of our age, said that he loved the Charlie Brown Christmas because it was the only time you would hear jazz on television. Right. Totally. And, you know, everyone was saying it's not going to be successful because all the things that made it seem sort of scrappy, I think, are exactly what play into this beautiful duality of the quiet, somber period of year. Yes, where winter depression can set in, but also this beautiful period where we're all around the fire and there's gift giving and joy and celebration of the things that really matter. Oh, Charlie, I love your love of this Christmas special and its soundtrack.

I'm feeling very emotional just listening to you talk about it. I can't wait to get into this music. The thing that I love so much about these songs is that it captures perfectly that same duality that Charlie Brown is feeling, that reflective somber tone as well as that overwhelming joy. Yeah, let's see how this works. The most famous song, we all know, has got to be Linus and Lucy. Yes. Can you play that one? Yeah, I have to be able to.

As a pianist, you have to be able to play this song. It's essential. especially around this time of year, people will look at you very askance if you're not able to, if you're sitting at a piano or not able to serenade them with Linus and Lucy. So why is this song so effective? Why does it continue to move people so much? Well, I have a grand theory. The grander, the better.

So my argument is that at a macro, micro, and nano level, Linus and Lucy perfectly captures this reflectiveness and the job. joy in its entire composition. Let's do it. All right. Should we go from big to small or small to big? Let's go big to small, right? Let's look at the whole, let's take the whole thing, and then let's get all the way down to the small level.

All right. Birds eye view. Birds eye view. Now, there are a couple of sections to this song, but I'm going to sort of sum it up and say, there's a big A section and another B section. Okay. We all know the A section. Instantly recognizable.

So for me, this section. is actually a little bit of the reflectiveness, the pondering. Now, there's a sense of happiness. It's a nice, upbeat, major piece. But the baseline here is this sort of plotting back and forth. And for me, captures a little bit more of that reflective feeling. You buy it? I'm persuaded so far.

If you feel like, well, maybe that's a little too happy, the song gets even bigger, right? We have this B section where the whole thing just explodes into joy. Now I'm convinced, because... Because compared to the A section, that B section is just abulient and, like, celebratory and big and brass. Yeah. Okay. So this is the macro level.

A part, reflective. B part. Joy. Sure. Okay. Let's go down to the micro level. Get inside these sounds a little bit. We're going in it.

So the micro level, I want to look at actually just the A part that we talked about. I think that the left hand of the piano is capturing more of this reflectiveness and the right hand being played at the same time is a little bit more of this joyous feeling. Ooh, okay. So even within the reflective A section, there's also this duality between the left hand and the right hand. The duality continues all the way down into this, just into this A section. That's right. And so, you know, here we go. If we just play the left hand here. I think you can hear this with this rhythmic, plotting, more questioning sort of feel. It's less definitive. Agreed. But when we go into the right hand, we get this really joyous melody.

It's melodic, it's celebratory. I think part of the reason is that the left hand has what we might call a certain modal uncertainty. Okay, okay. Because it never plays the third of the court. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, you just want to lay that out for us? Chords are triads at their most basic form.

Three notes. Exactly. And we call those the root, the third, and the fifth, because that's how far away they are from each other in terms of steps. Yeah, sorry for those music geeks that might already know this stuff, but just bear with us. It'll be quick. The third is what defines the chord as major or minor.

Right. If you have a minor third, it's minor. If you have a major third, it's major. And in this baseline, Vince Goraldi, completely leaves out the third entirely, implying the chord, but never defining whether it's major or minor. Oh, so basically, from the start of the song, it could have gone in either direction. It could have been a happy song or a sad song.

It's uncertain. Exactly. And so, I mean, that's just something I thought when you dropped that adjective questioning, or that's a verb. When you dropped that verb questioning, that was the first thing I thought of. There's no third, so it has this very open-ended feeling to it. Oh, okay. And then so, but in the right hand, we get that closure that you might be looking for if you're

uncertain about what motor end. Right. The right hand is very definite. Major third. I wonder what would sound like if it were minor. Well, in a way, I mean, I don't know if I can hijack your micro-level discussion for a moment, Charlie. Take it away? You'll notice that the baseline moves.

up a minor third. Oh, yeah. So the baseline starts on A-flat, right? And then it moves up a minor third to C-flat. It's exactly what you're describing. I mean, I don't want to make your job too easy, but this left hand is always hinting at the minor third, and the right hand is always hinting at the major third.

So I think that really supports your idea of the left-hand. kind of being the more somber side of the holidays and the right hand being the more joyous side. Thank you for supporting my argument for me. You're welcome. I'll send you an invoice later. So we've gone macro level. We've gone to the micro level. Are you ready to get real small? Nano? We're going nano. We're going nano. All right. And I'm going to say that I think that most people have been hearing this song the wrong way. Ooh, okay. Now, it might be a little bit nuanced here.

But bear with me, I promise you, you're going to hear something totally new and hear this song in a totally new light. I'm excited. It's all about that bass. Okay, make it joiner. Sorry. When the song starts out, when we hear the bass line, right, first time around, the bass. Uh-huh. The bass opens up on the downbeat of the song.

You know, one, two, three, four, it opens right on the one. But just as soon as it's played, starting on the one, a variation is introduced where the bass base always anticipates the one. It comes in just an eighth note before the downbeat of the song. If the baseline, as we talked about before, is all of the sort of reflective plottingness, that anticipation for me is, as you put it,

that little bit of energy, that little spark, that joy in the baseline. So here's a thing. I just spent probably like five hours yesterday trying to learn this on piano. I am not a piano player. This is a really hard song to play. Perhaps a way to appreciate how difficult and how exciting this small syncopation is would be for us to rewrite this baseline in a non-syncopated fashion.

Well, in fact, when I went to look up how to play this song, many of the charts ask you to play it in a non-syncopated way. Oh, really? Yeah. So the charts actually say, you know, just play it on the downbeat. And the reason why I could never learn this song is I was always trying to play it. it on the downbeat. I always thought that the baseline came in on that one. And so all of my sense of rhythm was totally thrown off. The whole rhythm of the song was falling apart for me. And I had to train myself, how to hear it. I think you're right. Let's take a listen to what it would sound like

if there was none of this syncopation, that early anticipation of the note. If we played the misinterpretation of this rhythm that many online sources seem to favor. Exactly. Now, maybe it's subtle. Let's play it the correct way, where every single time the base comes in, it's anticipated, it's syncopated. When I hear the non-syncopated version, it's fine.

Square. But it loses so much of the verve and the playfulness and the uniqueness of that line. It just kind of sits there. I couldn't agree more. But that little bit of syncopation just creates such a,

dynamic and continually surprising phrase. And now when folks go and listen to the original song, you can start to actually count it correctly because just to give you a little bit of hint of where the downbeat really is, the drummer on his high hat is giving you that one, two, three, four. So that's the way to ground yourself through this highly syncopated rhythm. So if you feel like you have no idea what we're talking about, just go listen to the song, Listen for those funny hi-hats. I promise you you're going to hear it totally different.

And if you're having trouble with it, just start to dance, shake those hips. And start to feel where the song really is. Yeah. Or just give Charlie a call and he'll talk you through it. Right? All right. Yeah, sure. Why not?

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We got a little bit of that joy. Very cool. I've always liked the song. Now I'm liking it even more. Okay, so reflectiveness and joy happening at the same time. Why is that important to us? Well, I think that when reflectiveness and somberness and joy happen at the same time, we call that equanimity, where there's an equal holding of happy and sad.

And it gives us this just beautiful sense of peace, of calm, of gratefulness. And that, for me, is what makes this sound so powerful. Ooh, I love that. I wonder, too, if that's something common to a lot of Christmas songs, not just these Charlie Brown jazz numbers. Yeah, do you have any examples? Well, a few come to mind. One would be the Carol, God resty, married gentleman,

which, despite being written in a minor key, is all about bringing glad tidings of comfort and joy. Oh, that's beautiful. So, again, that equanimity between, music and lyrics is present. In a song like, Oh, Holy Night, you have this beautiful

contrast between the major opening and then this minor move to the section, fall on your knees. Hmm. Which is just incredibly powerful, I think, anytime you hear it.

Oh, the stars are right. Certainly there's other Christmas music that doesn't have that kind of interplay of light and dark, deck the halls, maybe. I defy you to find any darkness in that song. So if you've got a happy one, I got a sad one. You got a, you know, one of the most famous Christmas songs of all time is Carol of the Bells. And perhaps when we hear Carol of the Bells, this sad, somber song, and then we later move to Harald the Angel sing or something like this or deck the halls, we, in, in, our caroling get that same at a macro level feeling of reflectiveness and joy in the same performance. Man, you are all about levels today, Charlie.

So it sounds like the composer here, Vince Goraldi, is playing on a grander expectation of Christmas music in general. And that is part of what makes Linus and Lucy stick around and just be really so powerful. So Vince has given us this album of Christmas hits that have incredible stand. power, but there's something very strange about the album. It's a jazz album. Don't say the J word, Charlie. Someone might hear you. Some people might be asking, wait, this is switched on pop.

Why are we talking about jazz? But this album has gone triple platinum. Vince Garale, the writer, was actually inducted into the Grammy's Hall of Fame, and it tops the holiday charts almost every single year into the top 10, even in the year 2000 and above. So this thing has got some staying power. It is through and through popular music. You know, Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts, actually disliked jazz.

Really? Was not happy with the original selection of Vinscaraldi, knowing that he was a jazz player, but as soon as he heard his playing, he was totally convinced. And then he soundtracked to the rest of every other animated Peanuts special. And Charles Schultz then became a fan of jazz music. Right on. I think this might be happening for. other listeners as well. I hope so. I hope this is the Gateway Jazz album for many people that gets them hooked on this music. I think for a lot of people, this is probably the only jazz music

they encounter every year. So what is it about this jazz that people are able to connect with who otherwise might say jazz? I don't listen to jazz. What makes this the exception? You're the musicologist, you're the jazz player. You gotta know. Yeah, leading question. If I was to offer a theory, I think part of the appeal of Christmas music in general is

its inherent nostalgia. Maybe that's why so much of the Christmas music we listen to is from an earlier era, whether it's an earlier era of the 20th century or, you know, much further back into previous

centuries. But, you know, 19th 65, most of the Christmas music we listen to doesn't get much later than this with the possible exception of Mariah Carey. And I wonder if that's not because in listening to Christmas music, we get to transport ourselves back to an imagined American past. This sort of post-war golden age of the 50s and early to mid-60s when America was prosperous, safe and in perfect accord. The reality of that image is full of all the same national demons that we continue to grapple with today, but at least outwardly, it was like, hey, we have a middle class, we have unions, we're moving to the suburbs. Right.

Everything is hunky-dory. Right. Perhaps the language of jazz takes us back to this time when this music was still popular. By an extension, we feel that kind of comfort. safety and warm feeling. Okay, so that's generally Christmas music. So what's the deal with jazz here? I mean, this came out in 1965.

It's the 50th anniversary. We're mid-60s. I feel like that's when the Beatles are happening. Why are we hearing jazz? In this song, Linus and Lucy, Vince Goralty kind of offers us a greatest hits, a jazz sample platter. And he sort of presents to us

all of the most popular sounds of jazz in that era. What are you hearing? In the A section, we have the kind of precise and perfectly calibrated jazz of someone like Dave Bruebeck, who was hugely popular in the late 50s and early 60s. In the B section, we get some of the more gospel flavor of jazz that was made popular. by pianists like Bobby Timmons and Art Blakey's jazz messengers. In the C-section of this piece, Vince Goralty moves to this Bossa Nova groove, which in the hands of Stan Gets and Zhao Gilberto in the early 1960s was incredibly popular,

huge crossover success, and then was translated by various jazz musicians, including chart-topping records, like Song for My Father and The Sidewinder. In the final D section of this composition, we get some of the hard-bop jazz that musicians like Miles Davis were pioneering and who also had another huge successful album and kind of blue.

So I think in a way, Vince Garaldi touches on all of some of the most popular. popular post-war jazz styles and kind of puts them all into this one three-minute track in a way that never feels jerky or discordant but flows together beautifully. In this one song, you get like the best of 60s jazz. This is a very clever cat, Vince Garaldi. Who is Charlie? Who is this person? Besides these Charlie Brown albums for which he does all the music, I mean, I've never heard of him. Despite the success of this album, it's a little bit sad that Vince Garald isn't known for his incredible piano playing because he was really a great player and in many ways he in his playing

exhibited this quality of being able to pull between different modalities and genres of jazz if you listen to this track that he played later i think it was after the recording of linus and lucy called el madador you can hear some of that same rhythmic feeling in the baseline a little bit of that basa nova that you're talking about and he had this other song which which was actually the the piece that convinced Charles Schultz to have Vince score the peanuts, cast your fate to the wind. And here again, you're getting sort of a flavor of lots of different styles. So he was a great player.

And I think that in many ways, Linus and Lucy has the greatest hits of his playing and of Christmas music in general and of all jazz styles sums up his brilliance as a composer. So I'd like to suggest that maybe we shouldn't be a Lucy this year. We shouldn't be what? A Lucy.

Oh, Lucy. There's this wonderful scene in a Charlie Brown Christmas when Lucy goes over to Schroeder who's playing the piano, your Peanuts archetype. And she says, Can you play jingle bells? And he starts improvising this beautiful jazz version of jingle bells, right? And this is what she says. No, no. I mean jingle bell.

You know, Santa Claus and Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho, and Missile Toe and presents to pretty girls. That's it! Lucy doesn't get it. She wants the sleighbell, she wants that sort of standard hit sound. She wants the melody as simple as it gets. So what I'd like to say is maybe don't be a Lucy this year. If there's some more challenging music, go right into it. I would love to see some jazz converts this holiday season.

I predict 2016 is going to be a very jazz year. Maybe you can help us out, Nate. Maybe you can put us together a little jazz Christmas tune playlist. Oh, I'd be honored. We'll post that on our website, and we'll, We'll share it out on social media. You can tweet at us if you have suggestions for great jazz Christmas tunes at Switched on Pop. Feel as though a Charlie Brown Christmas is best wrapped up in the wonderful lyric from Christmas Time is Here.

The lyricist Lee Mendelssohn wrote Olden times and ancient rhymes of love and dreams to share. It's that time of year when we can get reflective and we can be joyous and we can give thanks to the things that really matter to us. And I thought maybe we could take a moment of reflection about what has been so great for Switched on Pop this year. Ooh, yeah. I really want to say thank you to our listeners. Over a half million of you over the last year or so have downloaded our show. That's insane. Yeah, isn't that crazy?

And it's just been a little bit over a year since we got started. It's a Christmas miracle. And you've engaged with us and challenged us with cool and interesting topics about music. You've started to listen more deeply to the things that are all around. So thanks for joining us on that journey. This is the first step in Charlie and I's secret plan to make everyone musically literate, whether they think they can be or not. We're going to take just a few weeks off for a holiday break, and we'll put out some really fun shorter episodes throughout the holidays. So keep tuning in, but maybe some shorter stuff.

And when we come back next year, we want to take the show to a new level. We're going to do some more ambitious shows. We're going to hear more voices from artists and producers and other people in the music world. So prepare for an all-new sound in 2016. We're super excited. Switched on Pop Today is brought to you by Vinyl, V-N-Y-L, the record club that sends brand-new LPs right to your mailbox. Not MP3s, not streaming audio, real live records that you can hold in your hands show off to your neighbors and treasure for the rest of your life. Vinyl offers gift memberships, and if you're one of the first hundred people to use the coupon code pop, P-O-P, you get $5 off your first month.

Check out my.vinyl.org, m-y-n-y-l-l-O-R-G to learn more. Switched-on pop is produced and edited by us. Our design is by Luke Harris, and we want to wish a special holiday thanks to both of our partners for putting up with us making this show over the year. Getting under the blanket, going in the closet. Making a podcast every two weeks. We're very lucky. We're very lucky. We love you both.

Kind of sounds like we're in one big quadrangle, doesn't it? Yeah, I was going to say, what do you mean, we love you? Let's like... No, let's just be honest and call it what it is. Oh, okay, blah. Also, we haven't said this in a while, but if you review our show on iTunes, it helps us enormously. So we'd really appreciate it if you did that. That would be your little Christmas gift to us.

All right, we'll be back in January with some big new shows. Things are really excited about. Until then, thanks for listening. This is Schroeder signing off. Pigpen, see you in the new year. Adios. Convierte your passion in a new business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world.

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