DRUMMER’S CAREER TRANSCENDED A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS

The forward-thinking artist, who performed on the soundtrack of the classic holiday special, was known in Halifax for both his playing and love for mentoring and teaching

OIt took a long time for me to realize what had happened and what I had been a part of, in terms of music that touched millions.

JERRY GRANELLI MUSICIAN

ne Christmastime in the early 1990s, jazz drummer Jerry Granelli took a whirlwind trip to Los Angeles from Berlin, where he lived part-time as a music teacher. From there, he flew to his hometown of San Francisco and then onto his adopted home city of Halifax.

In every airport along the way, he heard the bouncy instrumental seasonal staple Linus and Lucy, written by American pianist Vince Guaraldi. Hearing it yet again at the baggage carousel at Halifax Stanfield International Airport, Mr. Granelli groaned: “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

A woman standing next to him was surprised. “You don’t like that?” she asked Mr. Granelli, to which he replied, “Yes, I’m on that – but I’ve just heard it for maybe 48 hours, and I’m not getting paid.”

That story, as told by Mr. Granelli for the 2010 CBC radio documentary Good Grief It’s Serendipity, is part of the saga of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the much-loved 1965 television special featuring the Peanuts comic strip characters, and its accompanying soundtrack album, with which Mr. Granelli had a complicated connection.

As a member of the Vince Guaraldi Trio, he had indeed played on the album and the song Linus and Lucy, adding his brushdrummed virtuosity to the yuletide classic. He wasn’t originally credited as participating in the recording sessions, however, owing to a snafu by the label that released the album, Fantasy Records. While he was paid for the session – $120, which wasn’t peanuts back then – he received neither recognition for the work nor residual royalties for decades afterward.

“He had a fraught relationship with A Charlie Brown Christmas,” his son J Anthony Granelli told The Globe and Mail.

Mr. Granelli was eventually credited for his contribution to the album. The belated formal acknowledgment was an ironic twist in the story of a forward-thinking artist who had already left pop-oriented jazz and the Guaraldi Trio behind by the time the TV special aired on CBS.

Mr. Granelli’s post-Guaraldi career was marked by experimentation, serial collaborations and an approach to life he called “nowness.” His résumé notes associations with jazzers Charlie Haden and Mose Allison. Active in the psychedelic rock scene of late-sixties San Francisco, Mr. Granelli told stories of doing sessions with Sly Stone, building an extra-loud amplifier for Jimi Hendrix and getting Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick to babysit his kids.

In 1993, he led a band that included saxophonist Kenny Garrett and guitarists Bill Frisell and Robben Ford on the album A Song I Heard Buddy Sing, based on the Michael Ondaatje novel Coming Through Slaughter. The record earned both a Grammy and Juno nomination.

To be pigeonholed as the Charlie Brown drummer cut against Mr. Granelli’s essence. If jazz trumpeter Chet Baker was all about “let’s get lost,” the free-thinking Californian was deeply in favour of being present.

Mr. Granelli died at his home in Halifax on July 20 at the age of 80. He had been hospitalized last December owing to internal bleeding, and spent the next two months in the ICU before being released.

He was a spiritual seeker and a boundary-pushing musician known for his story

telling and affable demeanour. “He always looked like he was mid-joke, with a twinkle in his eyes and a sly smile,” photographer Catherine Stockhausen, who shot portraits of Mr. Granelli several times years ago, told The Globe.

In Halifax, Mr. Granelli will be remembered as much for his mentoring and teaching as his playing. As one of the cofounders of the TD Halifax Jazz Festival, he introduced an educational component to the festival experience with his annual two-week Creative Music Workshop.

His teaching also included a course on the evolution of jazz. “On the first day of class, he said we’d all get an ‘A’ no matter what,” recalled Ms. Stockhausen, who took the course. “He just wanted us to enjoy and learn about jazz.”

Mr. Granelli had come to Nova Scotia in the 1980s on the advice of Chogyam Trungpa, a Buddhist teacher who had established a monastery in Cape Breton in 1983 before settling in Halifax. Among the guru’s disciples were Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Faithfull and Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, whose song Refuge of the

Roads from her 1976 album Hejira was inspired by Mr. Trungpa.

Mr. Granelli took a uniquely holistic approach to music. “Jerry was about getting musicians to bring a self-awareness to their craft,” said Laura Simpson, a Halifax music-industry veteran and co-founder of the Side Door live-music platform. “He felt he was a vessel for music, and his Buddhist beliefs were a huge part of who he was.”

Long estranged from A Charlie Brown Christmas, Mr. Granelli was reunited with the album judged by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the top five Christmas albums of all time when he took part in Good Grief It’s Serendipity, a project led by his manager, Colin MacKenzie.

“He didn’t want to talk about the album for the longest time, but the radio documentary opened a little door,” Mr. MacKenzie said.

After the documentary aired, Mr. Gra

nelli put together a trio with bassist Simon Fisk and pianist Chris Gestrin for the touring show Tales of a Charlie Brown Christmas.

“It took a long time for me to realize what had happened and what I had been a part of, in terms of music that touched millions,” Mr. Granelli said in the documentary about the TV special that was reputedly watched by half the entire American viewing audience upon its network debut in 1965.

The Charlie Brown soundtrack album was later inducted into both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. In the liner notes for the album, jazz critic Ralph Gleason wrote about the genre Mr. Granelli worked in: “Jazz is a music of individualism. As such, it is truly a music of people, not styles. Each person develops his own sound, his own voice, his own musical personality, which in some is expressed only in their own playing.”

The paragraph was in praise of Mr. Guaraldi, but its sentiments could apply just as easily to Mr. Granelli himself.

“When he left the Vince Guaraldi Trio, he had walked from what everybody expected him to do,” said his son, a bassist who often performed with his father. “He couldn’t do it anymore. At any point in his career, there wasn’t a lot of choice in the music he decided to pursue. He had to do what he had to do.”

Gerald John Granelli was born in San Francisco on Dec. 28, 1940, the only child of Jack Granelli (a buyer for a poultry market) and housewife Ida Granelli (née Icardi). Both parents had emigrated from Italy as small children. His father was an Italian wedding drummer on the side. By the age of four, the musically precocious Mr. Granelli had memorized and could play Open the Door, Richard! by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five band.

His father would take him out once a week to the jazz clubs of a thriving postwar San Francisco scene. When Mr. Granelli’s bebop-drummer uncle Pete Granelli snuck his 12-year-old nephew into a club to see saxophonist Charlie Parker, it was a transformational experience. “I started sneaking out to the Koo Koo Club on Haight Street,” Mr. Granelli would later say. “I’d try to play, and they’d throw me out.”

His biggest influence was the Dave Brubeck Quartet timekeeper Joe Morello. “For two years, Morello taught me technical aspects of playing and never once tried to influence the way I played,” Mr. Granelli once reminisced of his teenage training.

Mr. Granelli studied percussion at San Francisco State University for a year, but as he was already playing in the clubs, he left school.

In 1962, the original Vince Guaraldi Trio had a pop hit with Cast Your Fate to the Wind. After drummer Colin Bailey and bassist Monty Budwig left the trio to move to Los Angeles, the 21-year-old Mr. Granelli was given an audition by Mr. Guaraldi at a weekend engagement in Sacramento.

“There was no rehearsal, really,” Mr. Granelli said in Good Grief It’s Serendipity. “I think I played way over my head, in terms of terror providing the real motivation to go beyond myself.”

He got the gig, rounding out the new iteration of the trio with double bassist Fred Marshall. Playing in a Hollywood club, the group was visited by legendary trumpeter Miles Davis, a fan of Mr. Guaraldi’s, who would sit near the piano and request Star Song, a favourite of his.

“Miles came in every night and listened to the trio, which was frightening,” Mr. Granelli once recalled.

The drummer left the Guaraldi trio in 1964 to join pianist Denny Zeitlen’s trio, a more wide-open jazz experience. Mr. Granelli also took on session work, appearing on everything from beer commercials to the We Five’s pop hit You Were on My Mind, a cover of a song first recorded by Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia.

Later in the decade, Mr. Granelli embraced San Francisco’s psychedelic scene as a member of the experimental music collective Light Sound Dimension (LSD).

In the 1970s, he toured with jazz-blues pianist Mose Allison and moved to Boulder, Colo., where he studied Tibetan Buddhism and started a creative music program at Naropa Institute, which had been founded in 1974 by his guru, Mr. Trungpa.

After settling in Halifax in the 1980s, Mr. Granelli worked with a number of musicians on a flurry of albums, including 1990’s One Day at a Time, featuring Mr. Haden and Mr. Ford; 1999’s Music Has Its Way With Me, with alternative hip-hop artist Buck 65; and 2015’s Juno-nominated What I Hear Now.

The thrice-married drummer became a Canadian citizen in 1999. His final album was Jerry Granelli Plays Vince Guaraldi & Mose Allison, released in the summer of 2020.

“He’d call me a couple of times a week,” said his manager, Mr. Mackenzie. “It was never, ‘Let’s make a record’ – it was, ‘Let’s make three records.’ ”

Two days before he died, Mr. Granelli held a workshop for the TD Halifax Jazz Festival, on art in everyday life.

“In our last phone conversation, he told me he was getting ready to teach,” Mr. Granelli’s son, J Anthony Granelli, said. “It was apropos. He was an amazing musician, but he was a teacher, in the biggest sense of the word. That is what he loved.”

Jerry Granelli leaves his daughter, Alexis Granelli; sons J Anthony Granelli and Vajra Granelli; and five grandchildren.