What an excellent concept for an album. The modern jazz trio headed by veteran drummer Jerry Granelli pays tribute to two of the greats of the mid-20th Century, Vince Guaraldi and Mose Allison. Both of them popularized jazz, the blues, and the piano in their own very unique ways, and Granelli played with both of them back in the day.
Guaraldi, of course, was the genius composer and pianist behind the singular soundtracks to the Peanuts holiday television specials, starting with A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1963. And Mose Allison was another genius, as a composer, writer and pianist whose wry and edgy lyrics and deceptively simple playing pushed the blues in new directions.
Granelli played as a young man with Guaraldi through those early “Peanuts” years, his brush work playing a key role in the subtlety and grace of those signature tunes. He left Guaraldi’s trio in 1965, played with Charlie Haden in the Denny Zeitlin trio for several years, and went on to play with the likes of Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Kenny Garrett, Ralph Towner, Jay Clayton, Gary Peacock and countless others. He signed on with Allison in the 1970s in time to record Mose’s signature album Your Mind is on Vacation. The two were lifelong friends and worked together on and off until Allison’s death in 2016.
So even though Guaraldi and Allison kind of came at mid-century jazz from different angles, a pairing of their music by this trio is natural and organic. Granelli has made a point of not looking back throughout his career, but now felt that he wanted to revisit some of the extraordinary compositions by his two early collaborators with his current bandmates, pianist Jamie Saft and bassist Bradley Christopher Jones.
The album is bookended by two of the compositions for which Guaraldi is best known. Opener “Cast Your Fate To The Wind” was Vince’s first hit and got him the Peanuts job. Granelli’s trio gives is a stately, almost classical treatment.
And the closer is “Christmas Time Is Here,” with Granelli echoing his delicate brushwork behind Saft’s elegant melodic exploration and Jones’s no-nonsense bass. The other Guaraldi piece comes midway – his bossa-influenced “Star Song,” which Granelli says was a favorite of Miles Davis, and I can see why. It’s a showcase for Guaraldi’s expertise with a memorable melody.
The rest of the album is a muscular homage to Allison, centered on his pithy putdown song “Your Mind Is On Vacation.” Besides two sturdy prelude pieces to it that stand on their own and showcase the interplay of Jones’s bass with Granelli’s intricate brushwork, there’s a flashy post-bop interpretation of the song itself. “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy” is a slow-burning blues that loses none of Allison’s stinging satire thanks to Saft’s over-the-top lyricism and Jones’s practically weeping bass. Probably the most recognizable of Allison’s tunes here is the primal and soulful “Parchman Farm,” although astute fans of The Who might hear something familiar in the album’s clever arrangement of “Young Man Blues,”an Allison song covered by those mods back in the day. This trio’s arrangement gives the “call” part of this call-and-response blues to Jones’s arco bass, while Saft wrings all he can out of the melodic response usually played by guitar, and Granelli gives up nothing to Keith Moon in terms of raw power but outplays him by a mile in technical terms.
The Jerry Granelli Trio Plays Vince Guaraldi and Mose Allison is a great tribute album that stands on its own, rooted in the blues but always modern and forward looking. The hardest part is picking a favorite track. The easiest is listening to it again.
(Rare Noise, 2020)
