Customer Reviews

In Person

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This album of melodic jazz piano will feel like an old friend from the very first listen. Though it makes some forays into Brazilian music, the basic style will be familiar to anyone who grew up watching the Charlie Brown animated TV specials since Guaraldi wrote and performed the soundtracks to those programs.

Very little of Guaraldi's original work appears on this record. But he really does a beautiful job of making other people's songs sound like his own. What I appreciate is the restraint that characterizes Guaraldi's playing. Though clearly a virtuoso musician, he avoids lengthy, self-aggrandizing solos, focusing instead on enhancing the songs themselves.

"In Person" may not be the most adventurous jazz record I've ever heard, but it's certainly one of the most consistently enjoyable.

"In Person" continued the sound of Vince Guaraldi's 1962 masterpiece, "Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus." Despite being a "live" album, the audience noise has been removed, and this is all original material.

Vince Guaraldi created one of the most original, distinctive, and joyous sounds in jazz piano. This work - like his others - deserves a wider audience.

Guaraldi is as brilliant as ever. This being a live album, it proves he didn't need mulitple takes to "get it right". He was mostly in his Latin bag for this recording. The sound reproduction is a little dissapointing, however. Just the same, with so few Guaraldi albums available, this is a precious find.

I've been listening to this CD for over 6 months now... religiously (at least once every other day ... no joke.) I mainly listen because this is the best rendition of "On Green Dolphin Street" performed by any jazz artist. Period. I've also enjoyed his ability to incorporate different styles of music and make them his own (like in the CD "From Both Sides"). He does this here as well with the latin rythms he weaves into several songs on this recording. You must buy this CD.

As with many people out there it's pretty likely Vince Guaraldi is the first jazz music I ever heard thanks to his well known scoring for the Charlie Brown cartoons in the mid to late 60's. And it's probably because of albums such as this that earned Guaraldi the attention of Charles Schultz to begin with because the music on here is so thoroughly pleasent. It's not by any means that Guaraldi avoids any moodiness in his music,in fact his transitions in and out of minor chords with his piano playing is legendary to me anyway and it's part of what makes him such as clever composer. All the same this album doesn't strongly showcase Guaraldi's strong compositional capabilities. That's sort of unfortunate but all the same there's a good reason why.

This album primarily showcases Guaraldi's appropriation of the fairly new genre of Brazillian jazz-something strongly explored in earlier points in jazz with people like Jelly Roll Morton's "Spanish Tinge" and Dizzy Gillespie's cuban influences. A good deal of these songs such as Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Outra Vez" along with other covers such as "Zelao","Forgive Me If I'm Late","The Love Of A Rose" and "Chora Tua Tristeza" and a version of Fats Waller's "Jitterbug Waltz". These songs showcase a fast paced yet softly smokey percussive rhythm courtesy of drummer Colin Bailey and Benny Velarde. These songs prove once and for all how right Jelly Roll was when he suggested latin rhythms of any sort add the "right seasoning to jazz".

Other songs such as "Misirlou" and the lone Guaraldi composition "Freeway" more strongly emphasize his unusually metered piano playing with more conventional modern jazz rhythms. A beautiful cover of the standard "On Green Dolphin Street" really showcases Guaraldi's trademark flair with melody,which is interesting considering this album consists mainly of melody. This is not only a great jazz album,especially for lovers of the Brazillian side of the genre but perhaps also a great introductory album for those unfamiliar with the acoustic jazz style because of the massive familiarity of Guaraldi's compositional style in American popular culture as well as the overall inviting nature of his sound.

The most distinctive thing about this album is the cover design, which reflects the fact this was a compilation of two different live sets: one, a standard jazz set featuring his trio; the other an expanded line-up venturing into Cal Tjader territory, with acoustic guitar (Eddie Duran, who doesn't take any solos here but keeps the Latin groove chugging along) and some heavy-handed percussion.

The sound quality isn't great, but in a way this adds a kind of documentary flavour to the proceedings - snapshots of typical club sets somewhere in late 50s/early 60s San Francisco when Latin and pop jazz was ubiquitous in venues such as the "Blackhawk" or the "Hungry i".

But I can't help wondering if the original LP was little more than a quickly-issued follow up to Guaraldi's suprise hit, Cast Your Fate To The Wind (a.k.a Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus), such is the triviality and brevity of some of these tracks.

I'm not much into the salsa stuff, and this album is full of it. There are only 2 or 3 songs that are straight up. That being said, I really like Vince and it was probably worth the 10 bucks just to hear him play "On Green Dolphin Street".