As with Guaraldi’s It Was a Short Summer (reviewed in Jazzwise May 2024) this new release is an amalgam of the short cues for another Peanuts special made three years after that album. And apart from being of great sentimental value to fans of Charles Schulz’s famous characters, Charlie Brown and his friends, it is another opportunity to see how the film score was put together by Guaraldi and the original producers Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelson, the latter of whom raided his archives (prior to his death in 2019), to bring 10 alternate versions of the cues into this package that has been produced by his sons, Sean and Jason Mendelson.

Some of these are longer than the short snippets in the film itself, giving us a chance to hear how Guaraldi envisioned the themes developing. This applies particularly to the ‘Incumbent Waltz’ (dedicated to the person whom Charlie Brown’s possible election is to replace) and to a lovely alternate to the portrait of ‘Joe Cool’, that (for once on this record) stretches out beyond two minutes!

Unlike the Short Summer album, the guests who join Guaraldi’s trio (including the estimable Tom Harrell) don’t get quite so much of a look in, although they blow their way energetically through the movie’s theme song, where Mel Martin (woodwinds), Pat O‘Hara (trombone) and Harrell join forces in a kind of Dixieland setting, quite unlike anything else I’ve ever heard Harrell play!

But the constant is Guaraldi’s confidently assured keyboard work, whether on acoustic or electric piano, which brings both a consistency to the score – and an aural familiarity that will make nostalgic listening for Charlie Brown fans, or indeed any of us who watched Peanuts back in the day.