Vince Guaraldi Trio - Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus

This deluxe edition greatly expands Vince Guaraldi Trio’s landmark achievement, which included the Grammy® winning hit “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” (No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart).The set features 16 bonus tracks including alternate takes and previously unreleased music along with new liner notes. Recordings were transferred by Plangent Processes, with remastering by Paul Blakemore. LP lacquers were cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed on to 180-gram vinyl at RTI. Both physical formats also include new, in-depth liner notes by jazz writer Andrew Gilbert (San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, KQED Arts).

Even without the presence of his tune “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” a genuine and all-too-rare instrumental hit that reached No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart, Guaraldi’s 1962 album Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus was a landmark achievement that introduced a trio with a singularly alluring sound. The combination of burnished lyricism, rhythmic subtly and exquisite dynamic calibration set it apart, but the group’s impact flowed equally from its repertoire. Guaraldi wasn’t the first American jazz artist to delve into the Brazilian songbook. But Jazz Impressions was an early harbinger of the jazz scene’s pervasive, unprecedented and enduring adoption of bossa nova (which means “new thing” or “new wave” in Portuguese). Winning the Palme d’Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1960, Black Orpheus caught the ear of countless jazz musicians, and Guaraldi was smitten.