More than 50 years after its debut, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” remains one of the most beloved holiday specials ever created. It owes no small part of its longevity to its music, composed by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. This holiday season, Atlanta drummer and songwriter Jeffrey Bützer and keyboardist T. T. Mahoney will perform their annual “A Charlie Brown Christmas” concert, a tradition now observed for over a decade. This year, the show travels to several venues around Georgia, beginning with The EARL on Dec. 10. The duo joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to share their love for Guaraldi’s timeless score.
The tradition honoring “A Charlie Brown Christmas” emerged from a series of all-covers concerts the musicians began years prior. “Boy, that’s hard to believe, the 14th year,” said Mahoney. “Jeffrey and I, somewhere back there in the mid-aughts, I guess, started doing these one-off tribute shows. We did them for Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen — people kind of that ilk. We just found that we really enjoyed them and had a natural chemistry doing that, and bringing in different singers, and sort of a larger musical family that would work on these.”
The bandleaders had, from time to time, floated the idea of creating a show for “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” since it was such a favorite for Bützer and so many other musicians in the scene. They expected it to be a casual, fun, one-time performance. “It’s really become something much more than we anticipated when we started — something that’s just really neat for us, and from what we gather from the community of people that’s grown up around it, kind of a special part of people’s holidays,” said Mahoney.
Throughout the evolution of their annual tribute, Bützer and Mahoney have added special guests, opening sets and even peppered in a few bonus holiday classics along with Guaraldi’s music. “Anybody that’s gone knows that we do a lot of the songs from Phil Spector, the Phil Spector ‘Christmas Gift For You…’ The show’s got a little more involved in terms of the amount of people that play in it, the opening acts,” Bützer said. This year’s line-up includes Chad Shivers and the Frigidaires performing music from the Beach Boys’ and the Ventures’ Christmas albums.
But for the concert’s creators, nothing encapsulates the spirit of Christmas like Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack, with gems like “Christmas Time is Here” and “Skating.” “There’s a real quietness and a meditative quality to the album that actually, in a weird way, runs counter to the frenetic tempo of the month of December, with shopping and holiday parties and different events,” said Mahoney. “I think it reflects a side of Christmas that’s less in evidence, maybe, than it ought to be, and that’s the quieter, more contemplative side.”
