On Friday, the Marilyn Horne Museum and Exhibit Center will present the last of its holiday events for 2019, a concert featuring the music from the 1965 animated television classic “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
The free concert featuring the Christopher Azzara Trio will be held at the Bromeley Family Theater in Blaisdell Hall. The doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the concert begins at 7 p.m.
There is no admission fee for this open-seating event and tickets are not required.
The score for “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was written by American jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. Its haunting and almost melancholy tones were groundbreaking for television animation at the time. Among the original works composed by Guaraldi for the special was the iconic “Linus and Lucy,” which has since become the de facto theme of all the subsequent Charlie Brown animated films. Another original song for the production, which became an immediate hit, was “Christmas Time is Here” written by Guaraldi and Lee Mendelson.
Friday night’s concert has been named after this song.
Museum Manager Matthew Hileman said, “The museum offered a jazz concert last spring featuring Christopher Azzara, the pianist who will be performing for us on Friday night. As I was sitting behind the audience that night, it dawned on me that this would be a beautiful Christmas concert for 2019. I approached Christopher after the performance last March and he immediately grinned. Guaraldi had been an enormous influence on his career and he was delighted at the idea.”
Christopher Azzara will be joined by Eric Schmitz on drums and Eugene Bisdikian on bass. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” premiered on CBS Television in 1965. The special was based on Charles Schulz’s syndicated comic strip “Peanuts,” which began running in the fall of 1950. It was written over just a few short weeks and was produced in six months on a shoestring budget. The special’s original producers, and the network, expected it to be a failure. However, on December 9, 1965, the show’s premiere was viewed by viewed by over 15 million households and received critical acclaim by television critics of the day. It has aired every Christmas since and has been embraced by generations of fans.
The concert is presented as part of Holidays at the Horne, the Marilyn Horne Museum and Exhibit Center’s annual holiday community engagement programming.
