Personnel:
Orchestras arranged & conducted by Stanley Wilson & Slip Martin, featuring Don Fagerquist (tp), Dick Nash, Frank Rosolino (tb), Benny Carter, Bud Shank (saxes), John T. Williams, Jimmy Rowles (p), Barney Kessel (g), Red Mitchell (d), Alvin Stoller (d)
Reference: JM 1005
Bar code: 8427328470056
Two Original Soundtrack Recordings
JAZZ IN THE MOVIES presents the most celebrated scores by the composers that introduced jazz to motion pictures and television soundtracks. In addition to providing a superbly appropriate setting for dramatic scenes, all the jazz background themes were interpreted by many of the best Hollywood and New York jazz studio musicians.
"Mike Spillanes Mike Hammer stories were the 10-minute egg of hard-boiled crime fiction. The NBC television series, with Darren McGavin just a little too clean-cut as the tec, pulled a fair few punches, but the theme music didnt. Skip Martins soundtrack packed a punch like a lead sap. M Squad was a Lee Marvin vehicle, usually driven at reckless speed, and you wouldnt have known where to put your money in a catchweight between Hammer and Lt Frank Ballinger. There are some pretty good eggs in the studio bands here. The M Squad Theme was by Basie, of course, and a good few of the arrangements and themes by Benny Carter (nice alto playing, too), though Stanley Wilson took care of the rest with snap-brim professionalism.
This is the work that kept many a jazz guy solvent during the later 1950s and 1960s when the big bands werent touring to any great extent and pop was beginning to hustle the market. Its inch-perfect, by-the-book arranging and playing, but the material is raw enough to give these cues a raw immediacy. Only a cynic draws a hard line between commercial music and art. If these were day-job gigs for West Coast musicians, no one got their cigar out till the shift was done. Hammer Blow sums it up perfectly."
Brian Morton (May, 2014)
Jazz Journal
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"A few months ago, I stumbled across some very cool soundtracks from 60s Juvenile Delinquent movies such as College Confidential and Crime in the Streets that had guys like Maynard Ferguson and Conte Condoli in the studios delivering some wonderfully moody and hip sounds. The Spanish reissue label Fresh Sound Records just put out a couple more of these delights, and theyre even better!
The Music from M Squad had the show starring Lee Marvin (or is it James Coburn? Were they twins?)backed by an orchestra conducted by Stanley Wilson performing tunes penned by Count Basie, Johnny Williams and Benny Carter. Carter plays alto here as well, along with Don fagerquist/tp, Rosolino/tb and Alvin Stoller/dr and Dick Nash/tb included in the studio orchestra. Youre gonna LOVE the M Squad Them and The Juke Box isnt too far behind. The music from Mickey Spillanes Mike Hammer is arranged and conducted by Skip Martin, and boasts a reed section of Bud Shank, Paul Horn, Gus Bivona , Ted Nash and Bob Cooper as well as a rhythm section of Larry Bunker/dr, Red Mitchell/b, Jimmy Rowles/p and Barney Kessell/g. The band swings as crisply and as hard as anything that Woody Herman was doing at the time, and the solos, while short and to the point, snap like snow peas. You can feel the asphalt under your feet on Lenox Avenue Strut while the brew of Folgers is sniffed on Coffee House. When did TV lose its musical edge?"
George W. Harris (May 15, 2014)
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