Compared to the Peanuts ‘Easter Beagle’ (reviewed in April’s Jazzwise) which was a patchwork of minuscule cues, almost all of the tracks on this new release run at a decent length, and the trio develops its ideas well. The music comes both from the cartoon soundtracks and an ultimately unreleased film profile of the artist Charles M Schultz. The ‘Oh Good Grief’ theme sets things off, but the band really works as a listening experience (rather than just a film soundtrack) on pieces such as ‘Happiness Is’ or indeed the full ‘Charlie Brown Theme’.

But where this album really scores most is the extended tracks, which work out ideas from shorter moments of cartoon backing – a case in point being the slow grooving ‘Blue Charlie Brown’ which is seven minutes of the band playing really well together.

And in it, any Peanuts fan will spot the familiar motifs from the films as they flicker by. Also making this a valuable document for both jazz and movie lovers are the studio tests, or alternate takes, of familiar tracks from all the shows, principally the ‘Linus and Lucy’ theme, so we can hear how these ideas developed into proper soundtrack material.

In this context, Guaraldi’s trio could too easily be subsumed by the demands of the animators, yet we have standards here, which made fleeting appearances in the kids’ movies, but which were played for the putative documentary at full length. Hearing the band play ‘Fly Me To The Moon’, for example, we get a clear impression of them as jazz musicians playing on a consistent level with any other mainstream piano trio of the 1960s that tackled standards. The disc closes with a sumptuous 10-minute workout on ‘Autumn Leaves’ that shows the band at its best.