Since first airing in 1965, the award-winning A Charlie Brown Christmas television program has become one of the most enduring and beloved of holiday specials. Part of its charm lies in the marvelous jazz soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. The Trio's music, anchored by bassist Fred Marshall, is nearly as popular as the show itself.

Bassist Fred Marshall, who grew up in Little Rock and now lives in Berkeley, Calif., is best known as Guaraldi's bassist and creative colleague for the Peanuts soundtracks. While this is impressive enough, it's really just one chapter in the long career of this musician, inventor, welder and artist.

From the jazz-soaked clubs of Little Rock's Ninth Street in the 1950s, through San Francisco's 1960s psychedelic haze, and up through today's hip West Coast jazz explosion, Marshall has always been an innovative, creative force in jazz. With his new band, the Marshall Arts Trio, the inventive man remains as creative as ever.

EARLY YEARS

Marshall, born in 1938, was reared in an artistic Little Rock home. His mother, Helen Marshall, studied art in New York and abroad and was an art professor at Arkansas Tech in Russellville. An extraordinary woman, Helen Marshall was the first person to receive a Masters of Art in humanities from the University of Arkansas. She is now retired and lives in Conway.

Fred Marshall began playing piano at age 5, and picked up the bass and drums while attending Little Rock High School (now Central High School). He joined the musician's union at 14 and played at with the Barnyard Frolics. By the time he was 15, he was part of the thriving Ninth Street club scene, an area Marshall categorizes as "Little Rock's version of Harlem. There were lots of people who came through, people who played with [Count] Basie.

"When I played down there I would have to duck down behind the bass when the police came. Not only was I underage, I was also a white man playing in a black club. I was pigmentally challenged, so to speak."

Marshall attended several colleges in Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, always playing jazz in the evenings. In 1958 he enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute. As the birthplace of bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker and the home base of Count Basie's band, Kansas City, Mo., ranks as one of America's premier jazz towns. As soon as he arrived, Marshall immediately immersed himself in the local jazz community.

"I met Leo Davis, Charlie Parker's teacher, while in Kansas City," Marshall says, and under Davis' guidance Marshall began to study chord changes and jazz theory. Soon he joined legendary alto saxophonist Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson's band. By the end of the 1950s, Marshall had played with Vinson, Etta James, Dinah Washington and Terry Gibbs.

Looking back on his time in Kansas City, Marshall recalls one afternoon with particular fondness. A friend took him to visit a woman "who served us tea, and we sat and talked for a while. My friend told her how I really liked her son's music, and I realized that this was Charlie Parker's mother."

Marshall was awestruck, remarking that Charlie Parker's music "had made me get into music in the beginning."

THE WEST COAST AND GUARALDI

In the early 1960s, Marshall moved to San Francisco, where he was the house bassist at a club called Bop City. During this time, Marshall played with such jazz stars as saxophonist Ben Webster and fellow Little Rock native Pharoah Sanders. He also gigged with Maynard Ferguson, Dexter Gordon, Joe Henderson, Jimmy Rushing and many others.

About this time, Marshall was recruited by San Francisco pianist Vince Guaraldi. "Vince called and asked me to audition, it was 1961 or '62," Marshall says. "He had played with various Latin jazz stars, including Cal Tjader and Mongo Santamaria."

Following in this Latin groove, Marshall joined Guaraldi's trio, and they recorded The Latin Side of Vince Guaraldi and From All Sides, a collaboration with Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete.

"We were playing at this club called the Trident in Sausalito, [Calif.] and Lee Mendelson came in. He had invented this new form of television called 'the special.' Mendelson asked Vince to do the music for a special on Charles Schultz's comics."

The Vince Guaraldi Trio recorded the soundtrack to the first televised Peanuts special, A Charlie Brown Christmas. The show was a huge success, attracting a 45 percent share of viewers when it aired on CBS in December 1965.

For Marshall, the Peanuts project was an important reaction to the times.
"We were on the road with [political comedian] Dick Gregory at the time that [President John F.] Kennedy was killed, and I was discovering politics. I had not paid much attention to anything but notes up until then."

In the face of the turbulent political climate of the mid-1960s, Marshall and Guaraldi saw the Peanuts soundtrack as a way to counter the violence of the times.
"There was so much going on, but what we were doing with Vince was nothing but pretty," Marshall says. "That's where Vince and I really hit it off, and that's what the Peanuts songs were all about -- it was about making something pretty."

While Marshall was an integral part of Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas recording, for more than a decade the CD version of A Charlie Brown Christmas incorrectly listed the wrong musicians, and left Marshall and drummer Jerry Granelli off the credits. In 1999, Fantasy reprinted the CD cover to remedy this serious omission. While these inaccurately labeled CDs are still available, the bassist you hear on the soundtrack and the annual television broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas is Fred Marshall.

EXPERIMENTATION, SCULPTURE AND INVENTION

After several years with Guaraldi, Marshall and Granelli left the trio and formed their own band, called, simply enough, The Ensemble. Sometimes playing as a trio, sometimes as a quartet, Marshall and Granelli began to experiment with a less structured, more spontaneous style of jazz than they had been able to play with Guaraldi. They also recorded a live album with vocalist Jon Hendricks.

In addition to being a musician, Marshall is also a sculptor and welder, and has taught these skills at various schools. He and his mother had several joint exhibits in Little Rock in 1961, shows that featured his sculpture and her abstract paintings.

While welding one day in the mid-60s, he created an instrument that blended an Indian sitar with a guitar -- something he called the Megatar. While constructing it, he asked jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery about the proper way to amplify the instrument, and Montgomery told him "you need a thing called a pickup." Montgomery gave him an old pickup from one of his guitars, and the Megatar was born. Marshall holds patents on the Megatar and on an amplifier he invented.

The Ensemble became a fixture on the San Francisco music circuit, playing music influenced by jazz, but more experimental and open. They shared the stage with the Jefferson Airplane the night that singer Grace Slick first appeared with the band. Marshall also remembers when a young singer named Janis Joplin first opened with Big Brother and the Holding Company:

"Janis was kind of terrified, and I remember telling her I really liked her James Brown stuff -- 'I like the part where you holler.' "

It was about this time that Marshall began to collaborate with light technician Bill Ham, the man who invented the light show, a prominent feature at many 1960s rock concerts. Marshall and Ham formed Light Sound Dimension (as befit the times, it was also known by the acronym LSD). A mixture of cutting-edge light show technology and experimental music, Light Sound Dimension played venues ranging from the San Francisco Museum of Art to the Fillmore Auditorium. LSD also shared the stage with the Grateful Dead, and the Dead opened for LSD during a 1971 European show. Ham and Marshall continued to perform together as LSD up through the 1990s.

During the 1970s, Marshall's focus continued along the realm of free-form experimental music, mixing dense sound and jazz improvisation. In addition to playing bass, Marshall is also an excellent guitarist, and played that instrument in his trio Delta Nine.

Reviewing Delta Nine in 1977, the San Francisco Examiner called Marshall's music "complex and generally brilliant." Marshall's Delta Nine has shared the stage with cutting-edge musicians such as saxophonist John Zorn and eccentric guitar gurus Eugene Chadbourne and Henry Kaiser.

Not satisfied with just being the father of the Megatar, Marshall began to discuss a new, portable design for an upright bass with the Zeta Company. After a decade of consultation with Marshall, the Zeta Uprite was developed in 1994, and is now marketed by Gibson Guitars. Based on a design by Marshall, this small, portable bass sounds like an acoustic upright, but is small enough to put in an airplane's overhead compartment.

Marshall is also an active educator, and has taught bass and music theory classes and seminars for years. In 1975, he published a bass method/theory book, A Visual Approach to Music, an innovative concept that relies on a series of grids to help develop improvisational skills. In a somewhat different direction, Marshall also established a music and meditation retreat for jazz students.

Marshall's career is a study in how creativity, allowed to follow its own course, can produce engaging, eclectic results. A warm, inviting man who laughs easily, Marshall is modest about his many achievements. Clearly, the muses have treated him well. All his skills required years of study and practice to master. The amazing thing about Marshall is that he's largely self-taught. When asked about the skills needed to invent and patent an amplifier, Marshall just laughs and attributes it to "intuitive electronics."

MARSHALL ARTS TRIO

After growing up in an artistic home, it's fitting enough that Marshall's own home is a creative haven. Marshall's wife, singer Beverly Bivens, was part of the group We Five, who had a hit with the song "You Were on My Mind."

This musical environment rubbed off on their son Joshi, a prodigious saxophonist. When Joshi was young, he kept asking his father numerous questions about jazz technique and theory, and it wasn't long before Marshall dusted off his bass and formed the Marshall Arts Trio with Joshi and drummer Steve Rossi.

The Marshall Arts Trio has been together for nearly a decade. Blending blues and bop with some elements of free jazz tossed in, the trio has been playing to critical acclaim on the West Coast since the early 1990s. It has just produced a CD, available through the Web site:
www.fredmarshall.com

With Marshall Arts, Fred Marshall continues what he has been doing since he first started piano lessons in Little Rock -- living a life dedicated to the creation of good music.

Originally appeared on July 16, 2000, in the Arkansa Democrat-Gazette