M Squad: Right up our (dark) alley

Aside from jazz-oriented film and television soundtracks, I’m also constantly on the prowl for previously undiscovered compilation albums that focus on this vibrant genre. A recent visit to Bandcamp uncovered two releases by a Southern California combo appropriately dubbed M Squad, fronted by veteran guitarist/composer “Burnin’ Mike Vernon.”

He’s my kind of guy.

 

“As a kid,” Vernon recalled, in the December 2025 issue of Vintage Guitar magazine, “I couldn’t wait to hear the ‘Perry Mason’ theme or ‘The Fugitive.’ It was magical. I started collecting that stuff a long time ago, just for fun.”

 

Originally based in Texas, Vernon spent the 1970s performing in various jazz, blues, rock and western bands while studying Spanish guitar at the University of Texas-El Paso. In 1979, he founded the instrumental group Perry Mason & the Defendants, which performed throughout north Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma during the early 1980s. In 1987, after returning to Austin, he founded the surf rock group 3 Balls of Fire, a popular combo still going strong. 

 

Apparently not kept busy enough, and more recently dividing his time between Austin and Los Angeles, Vernon founded M Squad as a means of sharing his ongoing devotion to crime and spy jazz. This Southern California-based combo’s first album, Live on the Sunset Strip, was released in August 2020. Vernon plays electric guitar, electric sitar and baritone guitar; he’s supported by Ted Hamer (piano, organ, celeste and vibes), Doug Snyder (double bass), Chris Roberts (drums) and Nelson Bragg (bongos and percussion). Drummer/percussionist John Palmer guests on a single track.

 

Most of the 22 tracks have a funky, jazz/surf rock vibe that is a lot of fun. The album kicks off with a driving cover of Earle Hagen’s theme from I Spy, complete with cheeky police siren sound effects and Vernon’s saucy improv bridge, bookended by the arrangement’s brief slides into swing time. Vernon and Bragg’s bongos go to town during an equally propulsive reading of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible theme, and the combo’s handling of Count Basie’s M Squad theme swings like crazy.

 

The combo’s suitably moody reading of Mancini’s title theme to Experiment in Terror opens with a melodramatic audio clip from 1947's Big Town After Dark. (Thanks to my buddy Scott, for identifying it!)

 

John Barry’s title theme for Goldfinger is cleverly blended with a nod to that score’s “Dawn Raid on Fort Knox” cue, and a growling arrangement of Barry’s theme for Thunderball is appropriately dramatic. The mood is more playful and larkish in covers of Nelson Riddle’s Route 66, and three Henry Mancini classics: a swaying, bossa-hued Mr. Lucky; an impish, guitar-fueled reading of “The Pink Panther”; and a terrific, percussion and electric keyboard cover of A Shot in the Dark (a marvelous Mancini title theme that never got the attention it deserved).

 

Inventive as Vernon is, the results aren’t always entirely successful. The band’s attempt at Laurie Johnson’s The Avengers fails to catch that theme’s dramatic heft (although the swing bridge is cool); and the roaring brass is deeply missed in Vernon’s handling of Fred Steiner’s Perry Mason theme. 

 

The album concludes with a terrific, percussion-fueled reading of Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme. If that didn’t bring the house down, it should have.

 

The group’s second album, released in July 2025, is much more brooding and atmospheric, as befits its title: To Kill a Dead Man. Vernon’s core quintet is present, with additional support from Gabe Lazar (flute), Jim Bacchi (vibes); Nico Leophonte (drums), Mike Robberson (double bass) and Steve Refling (Hammond organ). This album is dominated by Vernon originals, and at times the overall listening experience feels like the soundtrack to a film that never was made.

The playlist opens with “Danger,” a slow, melancholy cue that suggests film noir title credits. “A Marked Man” is a pensive, late-night, dark alley theme that anticipates bad behavior by somebody. The speculative “Dark Eye” evokes a montage sequence: perhaps a private investigator knocking on doors to check out a lead, with musical pauses for each failure. “Dope Street” is hazy and eerie, with unsettling flute touches: deliberately disorienting, as befits the title. 

 

Familiar covers include a dynamic, finger-snapping handling of Jerry Goldsmith’s title theme to Our Man Flint, powered by a rolling bongo beat; a cool, mid-tempo reading of Pete Rugolo’s title theme to television’s Richard Diamond, highlighted by a lovely piano bridge; a splendid arrangement of John Barry’s title theme to From Russia with Love, blending low guitar notes, sparkling piano and sleek walking bass; and an appropriately angry guitar and piano, as befits Barry’s title theme to the film Beat Girl.

 

The noir atmosphere is established further by two short cues: “Elegy for a Loser,” boasting solo guitar and subway sound effects; and “Blue Interlude,” similarly blending solo guitar with late-night traffic sounds.

Both albums deserve pride of place in any collection of crime/spy jazz.

Spotlight on Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky

Film music journalist/historian Jon Burlingame has been an invaluable resource over the years; he’s also a thoroughly entertaining writer. I’ve long followed his Los Angeles Times and Daily Variety articles, and I often refer to his books: 1996’s TV’s Biggest Hits, updated and expanded last year, as Music for Prime Time; and 2012’s The Music of James Bond.

His just-published newest book is the perfect topic for this post: Dreamsville: Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn and Music for TV Noir. Had it existed while I was working on my crime/spy jazz project, it would’ve been footnoted extensively in the first volume’s Chapter 2. 

 

Jon was gracious enough to spend nearly an hour discussing what led to this book, at this particular point in time. After all, we’re talking about two TV shows — Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky — that are more than six decades old. Aside from creator/producer/director/writer Blake Edwards, they also share a second, equally important individual: Mancini. The impact his music had on that show — and on TV and film scoring at that time, and later — cannot be overstated.

 

That became the obvious starting point for our chat.

 

“I’ve been a fan of Peter Gunn dating back to my childhood, via early 1960s reruns,” Jon explained. “When I got older, and moved to Los Angeles for work reasons in 1986, I discovered that the show was running five days a week on local television. I was thrilled, and started recording them. (This was long before they were commercially available on DVD.) I’ve also been a Mancini fan, dating back to the 1960s. I later had the opportunity to interview him and Blake Edwards, when I was writing regularly for the Los Angeles Times, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

 

“I wanted to contribute something to the Mancini Centennial, which is this year. I knew that two solid books on Mancini’s life and career already existed: his 1989 autobiography, Did They Mention the Music?; and John Caps’ excellent 2012 book, Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music. What was missing, though, was an in-depth look at that three-year period from 1958 to 1961, which became the launching pad for Mancini and his entire career. He and Edwards formed such a solid bond that Edwards essentially made Mancini his in-house composer for the rest of his career. 

 

“That period also led to Mancini’s big-screen success with “Moon River,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “The Pink Panther,” “The Baby Elephant Walk” and all manner of other hits during the 1960s and ’70s. So I thought that a book focused on that three-year period, with Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky, was worth doing.

 

“Besides,” Jon added, with a chuckle, “at my age, I didn’t want to write a book that I wouldn’t have fun with, and I knew this would be fun to write ... and it was.

“Actually, the research was more fun than the writing!”

 

Jon’s prose is engaging, as always, but I’m also impressed by the wealth of detailed information.

 

“The book is designed to satisfy two different constituencies,” Jon admitted. “First, it’s a ‘TV book’ about two shows, so I felt obliged to write about every episode of both shows, listing director, writer, guest cast and a little bit about the plot. 

 

“The second constituency is music fans, and/or people interested in Mancini, and his career. As a result, it was important — to me — to single out the musicians who played on all those shows. Luckily, it was mostly the same guys who played on every episode of both: Ronnie Lang, Gene Cipriano, Bob Bain, Ted Nash, Pete Candoli, Dick Nash, John(ny) Williams and others ... a real Who’s Who of late 1950s West Coast jazz.”

The beat goes on: No Sudden Move

Belfast-born David Holmes initially seemed an unlikely candidate for film scoring, having focused his early career on DJing and solo albums devoted to electronica, trip hop, big beat and good ol’ fashioned rock ’n’ roll. That said, his overall music knowledge — and personal collection — have long been impressively extensive, and his career trajectory changed completely when he was hired by director Steven Soderbergh to score 1998’s erotic neo-noir, Out of Sight. It proved an artistic match made in heaven, leading to many more collaborations over the years: most notably (for our purposes) all three Ocean’sheist dramedies. Their newest team-up is the just-released No Sudden Move.

Fans of slow-burn crime thrillers will love it.

 

Scripter Ed Solomon’s noir-ish saga is given precisely the right look and atmosphere by Soderbergh and production designer Hannah Beachler. The post-WWII Detroit setting emphasizes the deplorable racial divide between cozy white neighborhoods and decaying inner-city Black districts, and the wary mistrust this prompts from both sides. But Solomon hasn’t merely written a mordant, attitude-laden crime drama; many of his plot elements — and twists — are drawn from actual historical events.

 

Down-on-their-luck criminals Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle) and Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro) are hired by a shady go-between (Brendan Fraser) for a “babysitting” job. (That’s “babysitting,” as in “guard at gunpoint while something goes down elsewhere.”) Their task: to watch the family of low-level General Motors executive Matt Wertz (David Harbour), while he’s escorted to his office by third gunsel Charley Barnes (Kieran Culkin), in order to retrieve a certain document from a certain safe. Curt, Ronald and Charley will remain masked the entire time; if everybody cooperates, everybody lives.

 

Everybody cooperates, but the plan still goes awry. In the aftermath, Curt and Ronald are on the run, having done the one thing both hoped to avoid, by antagonizing rival crime lords Aldrick Watkins (Bill Duke) and Frank Capelli (Ray Liotta). Unless the besieged duo can find and leverage the aforementioned document — a true Hitchcockian MacGuffin, until it suddenly isn’t — their hours are grimly numbered.

Holmes’ working relationship with Soderbergh is quite unusual, if not unique. The composer always delves deeply into a script’s period, setting and atmosphere, in order to “feel” the story, and the characters within it. Holmes then assembles a massive assortment of era-specific songs, cues, riffs and so forth.

 

“I sent him so much music from the era,” Holmes explained, “different moods, instrumentals, songs and soundtracks that had a certain feel.”¹

 

Soderbergh became quite enchanted by one cue: Henry Mancini’s unsettling title theme to 1962’s Experiment in Terror. This became the acorn from which the mighty oak of Holmes’ score developed.

 

“It was a beautiful place to start,” Holmes continued, “to explore a broader meaning, so I studied the instrumentation of it. I could hear the cimbalom, the guitar, drums and upright bass. It had a certain feeling that was exciting.”²

Greetings!

Welcome to ScreenActionJazz.com, the companion blog to my two-volume study of this genre — Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen, 1950-1970 and Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen Since 1971 — published by McFarland & Company.

If you've somehow found this blog before first, you can place advance orders via the McFarland links to the right. 

(And if you've arrived after finding the URL in purchased copies of one or both books, you've made a starving author very happy.)

My goal, with these two books, was to provide a contextual survey of action/spy/detective/crime jazz, from its television and film origins (1949 and '50, respectively) to the present day: a celebration of all the cool music by Henry Mancini, John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, Edwin Astley, Quincy Jones, Laurie Johnson, Jerry Goldsmith and hundreds more. Unlike the few existing books on this topic, I wanted to discuss the way in which a score is used within a movie or television show: how and why a composer's efforts helped — or sometimes hindered — the finished project.

And — equally important — the degree to which a director knew how to employ the cues for maximum impact (along with the lamentable cases where a director clearly didn't have the slightest idea how to effectively place music).

This project began not quite five years ago, as a pitch for a single volume not to exceed 125,000 words. (Boy, that was naïve!) After spending months building lists of potential candidates that fit the plot criteria, I wound up with 486 films and 750 TV shows; they were whittled down to 350 and 206, respectively (the others discarded for their lack of jazz scores).

Then came 3-1/2 years of viewing, listening, analyzing and then writing, with the resulting manuscript running just shy of 600,000 words. Okay, fine; first drafts are over-written. Several rounds of judicious pruning later, I wound up with 250,000 words: still far too many. But at this point, I knew that further trimming would have deleted too much of the "good stuff." The text would have been compromised beyond repair, destroying my intent to supply a truly definitive study of this jazz sub-genre.

Fortunately, the kind folks at McFarland agreed with my proposal to re-write the contract for a two-book set, thus preserving every word of that final draft.

Of course, a project of this sort begins to go "out of date" the nanosecond after publication. While it's true that the golden age of jazz scores is decades behind us, with scant few new ones debuting, it's important to acknowledge those that do arrive. That'll be one of this blog's functions: to serve as an ongoing update.

Late 2019's Motherless Brooklyn, to cite a recent example, arrived after these books "went to bed." Its sensational jazz score, boasting considerable work by Wynton Marsalis (among others), will be covered in a future post.

Of equal importance, this blog also will allow me to discuss films and TV shows that I either overlooked — such as 1989's Harlem Nights (and how I missed that one is a mystery for the ages) — or simply didn't know about until recently, such as the 2016 miniseries Four Seasons in Havana.

I also expect to hear from readers demanding to know how I possibly could have forgotten about this movie, or that TV show. All such input is welcome, although please take note of the books' limitations (and mine). Although intended to be a definitive study of American and (to a slightly lesser degree) British output, I had to hold the line at only occasional acknowledgments of international entries from farther afield. As an obvious example, I've no doubt an entire book could be devoted to 1960s and early '70s Italian spy jazz, given all the secret agent knock-off movies that were cranked out, in the wake of '60s Bondmania. Ergo, please don't take it personally if I've omitted one of your favorite films or TV shows, or completely "overlooked" a particular composer. Or two. Or three. Such decisions were borne of practicality, not prejudice.

I hope this becomes a lively forum where fans can help each other empty their bank accounts, in pursuit of ever more sensational jazz scores.

Let's keep on swinging!