Vince Guaraldi Trio: Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus [CONCORD]

Why you'll love it

This Original Jazz Classics reissue is the stereo mix, pressed in the EU. "Cast Your Fate To The Wind" became a radio hit and won the 1963 Grammy Award for Best Original Jazz Composition.

This edition

• Stereo mix
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Years before a certain round-headed boy and his beagle made him a household name, Vince Guaraldi was a San Francisco pianist with a soft spot for Brazil. Marcel Camus's film Black Orpheus had brought the new sound of Rio to the world, and Guaraldi took its songs home to Fantasy Records and played them his own way, with a light, swinging trio and plenty of space between the notes.

Side A is the film: "Samba De Orpheus" skips along, "Manha De Carnaval" is tender and unhurried, "O Nosso Amor" swings with carnival brightness, and "Generique" winds it up. Side B turns to Guaraldi's own world and the standards he loved with a gentle "Moon River," a bluesy "Since I Fell For You," his original "Alma-Ville" and the song that changed everything for him, "Cast Your Fate To The Wind," a warm, rolling melody that crossed over to pop radio.

His light touch and singing melodies would soon lead him to the Peanuts specials and A Charlie Brown Christmas, the best-selling jazz album of all time. Snoopy, it turns out, has excellent taste in pianists.

Also at Kops: more Vince Guaraldi on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Fantasy / Original Jazz Classics (cat# OJC-437), a reissue of the 1962 album.