"Those Sensational Swing Scores:  Or How I Journeyed from 1949’s Martin Kane, Private Eye to 2018’s King of Thieves in Four Years, Two Months, 17 Days, Six Hours and 43 Minutes"

By Derrick Bang, author of "Crime and Spy Jazz 1950-1970" and "Crime and Spy Jazz Since  1971" (McFarland)

I initially wanted to write the ultimate guide to television’s Peter Gunn. But some quick research revealed that it would be hard to improve upon Joe Manning’s excellent two-part feature story in the June and July 2007 issues of Film Score Monthly magazine; and Mike Quigley’s impressively thorough website guide to that iconic 1958-61 TV series (at www.petergunn.tv). That said, Mike’s meticulously thorough analysis of the show’s music planted a larger seed: perhaps a book about classic TV action jazz? Even there, though, a few existing books — such as Kristopher Spencer’s Film and Television Scores, 1950-1979 — had covered that territory to a degree.

So, go bigger still: a survey of all television and film action/spy/detective jazz, with a focus that I knew hadn’t yet been tackled. All that cool music by Henry Mancini, John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, Edwin Astley, Quincy Jones, Jerry Goldsmith and hundreds more. Aside from some scholarly works that go deep on a small number of TV shows or films — such as David Butler’s Jazz Noir — nobody had undertaken the challenge to discuss so much music in context. This became obvious, as I began to build a library of research material, when I got the distinct impression that many authors merely cited the existence of genre soundtrack albums, perhaps even enthusing about the music itself, but without having watched the TV show or movie from which it sprang. Too frequently, there was no sense of how a soundtrack composer’s efforts helped — or sometimes hindered — the finished product.

Thus armed with an elevator pitch, I approached the McFarland & Co. editor (David Alff) who had shepherded my 2012 biography of Northern California’s famed “Dr. Funk,” Vince Guaraldi at the Piano. David loved the concept; a contract was signed. When pressed for a likely length, I naïvely suggested 125,000 words.

Boy, was that off the mark.

The first phase was the most difficult: determining a list of likely candidates. Paging carefully through Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh’s Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows (ninth and final edition) yielded a lengthy list of potential small screen American candidates; determining likely British entries proved more challenging, as did assembling a similar list of big-screen feature films. I eventually wound up with 486 films from 1950 to the present day, which featured crime/spy/action storylines, and ultimately watched and analyzed 350; the others were discarded for their lack of jazz scores. The task was far more challenging on the small screen, where 750 shows were considered from 1947 forward; 206 ultimately made the cut. And, unlike a movie, which is a single (roughly) two-hour experience with music by (usually) one individual, many of the TV shows necessitated the viewing of at least half a dozen episodes, due to the involvement of multiple musicians.

You didn’t want to be in the room while I was watching each entry, because of all the stopping, sometimes backing up, and resuming … particularly if a soundtrack album existed. As Cinema Retro’s soundtrack fans are well aware, most early albums a) were studio re-recordings; and b) assembled the tracks out of viewing order. So I’d hit a particularly choice Johnny Mandel passage in (for example) 1958’s I Want to Live, and then search the album tracks until finding — or, vexingly, not finding — the cue in question. Over and over and over again. Depending on quality and/or significance, each entry then generated an essay of anywhere from a few paragraphs to three or four pages.

Roughly four years later, the finished result came in just shy of 600,000 words. Okay, fine; first drafts are over-written. As William Faulkner famously advised, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” So I buried hundreds of them in the back yard, and wound up with a more manageable 250,000 words. At which point, I knew that further trimming would have deleted too much “good stuff”; the text would have been compromised beyond repair, destroying the manuscript’s design as a truly definitive study of this jazz sub-genre.

So I threw myself on the altar of McFarland’s mercy, and — to my delight (and considerable relief) — they okayed amending the contract for a two-volume set, thus preserving every word of the final draft.

Having now emerged at the far end of this jazz-laden journey, my music library (and the groaning shelves in our small home) are much richer for the process that led to this just-published result. And if these two books similarly pique your curiosity — and correspondingly deplete your bank account — then I’ll consider it a job well done.

(Derrick Bang has written film, television, music and general entertainment commentary since the mid-1970s, and is the author of several books about Charles M. Schulz and Peanuts. He can be reached at www.screenactionjazz.com.)

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