Richard Mantel, the bandit on the lower right, and I had lunch last week. Richard is an artist and a designer who spent years as an art director with Columbia Records in the sixties and seventies. We’ve been friends for many years. Around the time I met Richard, I was working with George Wein, who had this record over the fireplace behind his desk. Richard has also been the designer of all the beautiful Mosaic Records sets since that company began reissuing those amazing box sets of Blue Note, Commodore, Keynote and other label’s back catalogs. One of Richard’s most famous covers is Thelonious Monk “Underground” for which he won a Grammy award for best record cover design in 1969.

Famous German Hunting Music. That’s scary.

Originally issued in 1970, Soul Rebels was the first album credited to Bob Marley and the Wailers and it was also the band’s first full-length collaboration with producer Lee “Scratch” Perry for whom they had already recorded a string of fairly successful singles. Check it out and the other more than 200 ska, rock steady and early reggae singles cut by Marley before he signed with Island Records in 1973 and became Bob Marley, the international Reggae superstar.

James Brown and his Famous Flames “Try Me!” King Records   A collection of James Brown’s earliest R&B singles from 1959.

Dead Eye and the Desperados “Saloon pour hors-la-loi”   Authentiques Chansons Cow-boys.   On the French label Mode Disques.

Bezerra Da Silva. Thanks for sending this Kyle!

Buddy Morrow “Double Impact” (RCA) Sixties TV themes about guns and poker games.

Shelly Manne & His Men Play PETER GUNN. Music by Henry Mancini from the TV program starring Craig Stevens. Contemporary Records. Shelly Manne (drums); Victor Feldman, Conte Candoli, Herb Geller, Russ Freeman, Monty Budwig. Recorded in January 1959. Manne and his West Coast jazz band interpret a selection of Henry Mancini-composed themes from the popular late-1950s TV show PETER GUNN, including the title track and a variety of atmospheric interludes. Cuts include “A Profound Gass” and “Sorta Blue,” “Soft Sounds” and the shimmering “The Brothers”.

For the most part, television music was a vast jazz wasteland before the Peter Gunn series debuted in the fall of 1958. The show’s score made a name for composer Henry Mancini and changed the sound of televised drama. It was inevitable that Shelly Manne, Hollywood studio mainstay and a proven champion at jazz interpretations of Broadway shows (e.g., “My Fair Lady” also on Contemporary), would give Mancini’s music a more expansive blowing treatment, and the resulting album reminds us that there was more to Peter Gunn than its dramatic theme and the classic ballad “Dreamsville.” Fans of Manne’s Men should note that the album was taped during the brief tenure of alto saxophonist Herb Geller, and that it makes winning use of the vibes and marimba of added starter Victor Feldman.

A low-budget, rip-off album of the cult movie and Jane Fonda embarrassment “Barbarella” performed by “The Young Lovers”. “The Hit Songs of the The Wild Movie & Other Way Out Themes.”   Turns out to be quite funky and hip, especially the sexadelic cut “The Black Queen’s Beads” which DJ’s picked up on at the turn of the twenty-first century. Pretty cool cover too!

“Bang! Bang! Bang!” “Thunderball and Other Secret Agent Themes” Eliott fisher and His Orchestra.   Capitol Records.