Jerry Granelli


Jerry Granelli is an American-born Canadian jazz drummer. He is best known for playing drums on the soundtrack A Charlie Brown Christmas with the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

Biography

Born in San Francisco, Granelli was involved with the city's hard bop scene from a young age. A day spent with drummer Gene Krupa in 1948 informed his passion for percussion and eventually led to him studying with Joe Morello.
In the 1960s he recorded and toured with the Vince Guaraldi trio, appearing on Vince Guaraldi, Bola Sete and Friends and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Granelli was only paid $120 dollars for the recording session of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and has never received any royalties from the television special or its soundtrack. Despite this fact, Granelli says he is not bitter: "It’s become one of the soundtracks of people’s lives,” he says. “There is such a human quality to it.”
Jerry also acted as a session drummer during this period. Among his many sessions was the recording of the Sylvia Tyson penned "You Were On My Mind" by folk group We Five, which won a Grammy award in 1965 for Best Performance by a Vocal Group. Later in the decade, he joined the Denny Zeitlin trio with Charlie Haden. The soundtrack went on to become a triple-platinum award winning album.
Since the 1990s, Granelli has lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1999. In 2010, he released his first solo album, 1313. Granelli tours jazz festivals and holiday venues with his one-man show Tales of a Charlie Brown Christmas, which retells the three-hour recording session in 1965 that culminated in the timeless Christmas classic. Granelli recalled in a 2016 interview: "We did it all in one day over three hours, but Vince did us a favour and paid us for two sessions."

Discography

;With the Vince Guaraldi Trio
;With Jane Ira Bloom
Selected