Miserlou
Vince Guaraldi
"In Person"
Cover Photo: Jim Weckler
Cover Design: Balzer Shops
Type Set by Jim Melvin, Typographer
Fantasy Records 3352
1963
Vince Guaraildi - Piano
Fred Marshall - Bass
Benny Velarde - Scratcher
Eddie Duran - Guitar
Colin Bailey - Drums
From the back cover: The president of Fantasy Records, who is standing over me with a gun (which he borrowed from his younger brother Max) as I write this, possesses a birth certificate which proves beyond question that his first name is actually Soul. Soul Weiss may go down in history as the true owner of "soul music", but for me he will always be known as the author of a way of life called "the art of getting there without actually going."
Others have known this as Serendipity, but to those who knew Soul Weiss as Sol Weiss, it was simply "Solsmanship."
Vince Guaraldi is a beautiful example of Solsmanship. He got on the hit charts with his original composition "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" (Fantasy LP 3337/8089) because he tried to make a good album of jazz impressions of the music from the Black Orpheus flick. "Cast Your Fate" was added, along with a couple of other tracks, to make enough music for an album. When the single record was issued, the A side, or the one every- one thought had the strongest potential, was "Samba de Orpheus." Just because a record has to have two sides, "Cast Your Fate" was put on the back. It was just the right length.
Serendipity.
Aided by curiosity. Always somewhere there is a guy who doesn't do what you expect him to. In Sacramento there were two of them, Buck Herring and Tony Bill. They turned the 45 rpm disc over. Voila! "Cast Your Fate" got played, the winds blew back public reaction and the pot of gold turned out to be in the grooves of Vince's own tune.
By now, of course, Max Weiss, the gun-toting younger brother of Soul, remembers that, in his own words, "having perfect pitch and a perfect rhythmic balance" he helped Vince with his hit song and knew it to be a hit from the first bar.
I, myself, author of the liner notes to the Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus LP, deliberately refrained from writing about "Cast Your Fate" in those notes because I knew it would be a hit and I didn't want to influence anybody. So now on this LP, I really can't write about ANY of the tunes. I don't want to jeopardize their hit possibilities.
The title "Vince Guaraldi In Person" indicates that something of the personality of this delightful Italian leprechaun comes through to you. I hope so. I have known Vince Guaraldi for a very long time now, through good times and bad. When he's been scuffling in a panic of non-employment and convinced the world was in a plot against him. When he was frantic with the first flush of the success of "Cast Your Fate" and convinced again that the world was in a plot to prevent him from enjoying it.
Throughout it all, Vince has had two great saving graces. He is a beautiful piano player and he has a marvelous sense of humor.
There are many things Vince has recorded which, for me, rank among the very best and most rewarding piano tracks in the great library of recorded jazz. "Thinking of You MJQ" with Cal Tjader "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing," "Since I Fell for You," "Cast Your Fate," and the Black Orpheus music and some of the tracks on this LP.
What Vince has got in his playing is feeling. This is a quality that money can't buy, practice cannot make perfect and technique tends to defear rather than enhance. Vince sings when he plays. I don't mean he grunts or hums or even makes a noise at all. I mean his fingers sing, the music sings, and he writhes and twists on the piano stool like a balancing act in the circus. But the music sings.
You look at his hands. Stubby, thick, tough, little mitts and you think of the cliche of artists' hands. Vince is always pulling splinters from his fingers, driven in when he claws at the wooden baseboard, behind the keys. His finger nails are perpetually split and ragged from hitting that wood.
He fingers all wrong when he makes runs and plays chords. All wrong, that is, from the standpoint of efficiency and "piano technique." But I've noticed over the years in jazz that almost all the good ones do it all wrong because it's the sound that matters-and the sound, with Vince, is beautiful and moving.
Vince sometimes refers to his songs as his dreams. He talks of the success of "Cast Your Fate" as similar to "building a rocket in your basement and catching your tie in it when it goes off." He says, "I didn't sell out, I bought in", and claims he never gets tired of playing "Cast Your Fate" several times a night because it's "Like signing your name to a check."
Vince has a serious streak, too, a natural corollary to his wit. Every album has been a challenge to him, he once said, and added that he looks forward, regardless of the success or lack of success of any individual effort, to "trying to be a good musician and making the best album I can" every time.
That's what you hear in Vince Guaraldi in person. He's in there, trying every minute.
It may be Serendipity or Solsmanship again, or it may not. But one thing it will be is honest. Because that's the only way Vince knows. – RALPH J. GLEASON
Zelao (Zell-ah-oh)
Green Dolphin Street
Miserly
Forgive Me If I'm Late
Jitterbug Waltz
Outra Vez
Freeway
The Love Of A Rose
Chora Tua Tristeza
