Gold: James Bond

purchase [Lulu]


[Un] fortuitously, this comes more or less upon Roger Moore's demise. I had already started in on this topic when I read the news this week about his passing.

More than once, the James Bond series has shown its affinity for gold: the word appears in more than one film title: Goldfinger, GoldenEye, The Man with a Golden Gun. And the metal itself appears even more often - you know, the root of all evil.  Ask yourself: Why does one rock dug out of the ground have such value? Go figure. Gold ... Silver...  Diamonds and more.

The James Bond film series is a serious production process - not least the selection of its music - both throughout each film, but more emphatically, in the film's  intro section. Over the years, the honor of singing the films' intro music has fallen to  the top of the pop: Paul McCartney, Louis Armstrong, Nancy Sinatra, Carly Simon, Rita Coolridge, Tina Turner  ... the list goes on and on. Kind of like  how the list of Bond films that include <gold> goes on and on.
 
The Bond <gold> selection I highlight  spans a number of musical genres, but there seems to be an over-arching theme to them all: lots of [studio] production. I don't mean to necessarily place this in a bad sense. In fact, the Bond music over-production is appropriate, but it's obvious. That's probably a given for anything Bond - the whole operation is tightly managed - and that's part of what makes the series classic.

Herewith, 3 golden Bond theme songs:

Tina:

 

Lulu:

 

Shirley Bassey:

Horns: Spinning Wheel

Blood, Sweat & Tears: Spinning Wheel

[purchase]

Yet another Grammy-winning Jazz-influenced hybrid from NYC, this time from a band which fused pop, rock, blues and jazz instrumentation and style to form Jazz-Rock (which Wikipedia redirects as a synonym for Jazz Fusion, though I would argue that Jazz-Rock is much more pop- and blues oriented).

I have fond memories of discovering this 1969 sophomore self-titled release just to the left of the folk in my father's record collection one evening in the mid eighties, and subsequently staying up all night spinning and flipping it again and again, straining to catch every flourish and nuance, marveling at the interplay of ragged bluesrock vocals and tight horn arrangements. The album fully deserved its 1970 Grammy for Record of the Year, and the song easily merits its own Grammy for best instrumental arrangement accompanying a vocalist; though in a post-Chicago world it can be too-easily lumped together with the cheese, newcomers willing to listen deeply will find the sound as fresh and authentic as it once was, I think.

The horns here would become so much a part of the song that it would seem impossible to cover it without including them; though Vegas legend Jack Jones heads for a fusion lounge singer sound, and Shirley Bassey funks the place up with bass and blueswail, note how in each cover, the horns embed themselves in the arrangement just about where they were for the original.

Jack Jones: Spinning Wheel [purchase]

Shirley Bassey: Spinning Wheel [purchase]