Vince Guaraldi’s career, or rather the legacy of his career, is a curious thing. His name is absent from the index of Ted Gioia’s authoritative The History of Jazz. Nor was it mentioned, even in passing, during the 19 hours of Ken Burns’ documentary series Jazz. When the great jazz critic Nat Hentoff belatedly wrote an essay about him in 2010 – 34 years after Guaraldi’s sudden death, aged 47 – it was in the context of rediscovering a lost figure, noting that Guaraldi had never been on the list of nominees for the Jazz Hall of Fame, and comparing him to the largely forgotten swing-era trombonist Jack Jenney.
