Bio Full Biography »

Vince Guaraldi was a well-respected jazz pianist whose greatest success came from avenues usually closed to contemporary jazz artists: he enjoyed a hit single at a time when jazz had largely been exiled from the pop charts, and he scored a series of very successful animated television specials, a medium where cookie-cutter pop music was traditionally the order of the day. Vincent Anthony Guaraldi was born in San Francisco, California on July 17, 1928. A loyal son of the Bay Area, Guaraldi graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in the city's Sunset District, and after serving in the military during the Korean War, he returned home and enrolled at San Francisco State University. While attending college, Guaraldi developed a passion for the piano, sparked by the blues and boogie-woogie sounds of Jimmy Yancy, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson. When Guaraldi began following their example on the keyboard, he took a detour into jazz, exploring the work of Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans, as w...