In this great article over at PopMatters, Will Layman considers how Vince Gauraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas very well may be the most successful jazz album ever.

What? More successful than A Love Supreme? More successful than Kind of Blue or Louis Armstrong singing “Mack the Knife”?

Yup.

It depends on how you define success, of course. I don’t claim that A Charlie Brown Christmas is the pinnacle of jazz artistry. But there is no jazz album that is more universally known and loved in the United States. Most people will crinkle their nose if you slip some Keith Jarrett into you car’s CD player. “Why does he moan like that?” You try to hip folks to Coleman Hawkins over dinner and they’re likely to say, “So, do you mainly listen to really old music?” Cassandra Wilson? “That man’s voice gives me the willies.” Friends who aren’t already jazz nuts may tolerate this stuff, but they rarely applaud it.

Wild stuff.