Craft Recordings have announced a definitive, bonus-filled edition of Vince Guaraldi’s timeless score from the beloved, 1965 animated PEANUTS® special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, from Charles Schulz, Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez.
The album has been a holiday staple for nearly 60 years. It is one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, after earning 5x platinum certification by the RIAA in May. This latest edition showcases Guaraldi’s creative process like never before, thanks to hours of newly unearthed session tapes from Fantasy Records’ vaults. Listeners will be experience cues like ‘Christmas Time Is Here,’ ‘O Tannenbaum,” and ‘Skating’ as they take shape in the studio through dozens of previously unreleased alternate tracks.
The story began in 1964, when producer Lee Mendelson set out to make a TV documentary titled A Boy Named Charlie Brown about Schulz and his beloved comic strip. To score the film, he hired Vince Guaraldi—then a fast-rising Bay Area jazz artist—best known at the time for his GRAMMY®-winning instrumental crossover hit, ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind.’ Although the documentary never made it to the airwaves, Mendelson was struck by Guaraldi’s sophisticated work. When A Charlie Brown Christmas was greenlit one year later, he sought out the musician once again, marking the beginning of a long and successful creative partnership.
A Charlie Brown Christmas was first aired on December 9, 1965. At the time no one expected just how monumental the half-hour animated special would be. While based on Schulz’s immensely popular PEANUTS® comic strip, TV executives were wary of the unconventional format, which featured the voices of child actors, a jazz score, and no laugh track—all unprecedented for the time. Their worries, however, proved to be unfounded. Not only did the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning special capture nearly half of America’s TV audience that night, but it would quickly become an essential holiday classic.
The Super Deluxe Edition consists of 4CDs and 1 Blu-ray. Disc 1 features the 2002 Stereo Mix and the Original Stereo Mix of the album, while Discs 2, 3 and 4 feature the recording sessions from September and October 1965. The Blu-ray features A Charlie Brown Christmas in both 2022 Stereo Mix and Dolby Atmos mix. In addition, there is a deluxe edition CD and 2LP, as well as a gold foil edition LP and a ‘snowball’ LP editions.
The gold foil and snowball edition LPs will be released on September 16, with the deluxe editions to follow on October 14.
