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For tonight’s Bond on Vinyl post, we’re listening to music featured in From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Never Say Never Again!
Solomon Schwartz was born in Whitechapel, England, in 1913. The son of Polish and Romanian Jews, he started taking piano lessons at the age of seven, training at a music school to learn piano and composition. By age 12, his first classical composition was broadcast on BBC Radio.
By the early 1930s, he was employed in dance bands and took on the professional surname Stanley Black. “Black,” being a literal translation of the German word for his birth name, “Schwartz”. During World War II, Black joined the Royal Air Force and was assigned to manage entertainment for servicemen at his base. After the war, Black was selected as conductor of the BBC Dance Orchestra, broadcasting up to six nights a week for the next nine years.
In the early 1950s, he was regularly one of the most heard musicians on the radio. Besides his conducting, Black arranged and composed music for nearly two hundred films. He was able to keep conducting and directing broadcast sessions at the BBC studios well into the 1990s.
While Black is known for writing numerous scores for films, radio, and television during his career, my favorite recording of his conducting is this 1987 Canadian release, ‘Incomparable’ (it also came out in Germany, the UK, and the US). For the compilation album, Black led the Mantovani Orchestra (see Bond on Vinyl 104) to play some great film music, including a ‘007 Suite’ of Bond film tracks. These include the common covers like the James Bond Theme, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger, as well as the less heard theme to Never Say Never Again written by Michel Legrand. The whole medley sounds great, and the non-EON Bond track feels right at home with the John Barry music.
149. The Mantovani Orchestra Conducted By Stanley Black – Incomparable
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