Mystery Score Clips

Yes, it is indeed the 1980's, and as your surmised it's not Delerue.

Yes, started scoring in the '80's, but the birth decade is off.

The composer still does sothing scores the like today, with strings and woodwinds, but it's gotten more lush -- which is a good thing.

Yes, you can rule those two composers out.

Yeah, all weiners are ruled out here.

You got it! Don't know how you got it; must have spent time on Youtube searching her filmography.


The 1984 film "Reflections", by one Rachel Portman.


You win one e-negligee, since you seems to hate the e-bra.

Sounds like MSC45 hails from 1970 to me.

It has that sort of late-'60s/early-'70s instrumentation & vocals.

Also sounds like a comedy Western. I might venture a guess and say it is a DIRTY movie with a DIRTY song, but I would never think of composer Jeff Alexander as "well very well known".

Time to reveal your mystery '70s comedy Western music, jb?

Mystery Score Clip 46

Featuring a composer who never became famous as say Billy Goldenberg or Neal Hefti, but nonetheless did some fine scores, and periodically worked on some famous TV series. He also had a good share or film work.

There's never been a release of the score. The score, as heard in the film, isn't really long, and I would guess this is like 80% of so of the score.

This mature and often delicate score, is a fine work and I'm sure some of you would agree:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84zrEZnWdZI

Yes, a TV movie, 1980's, and a production company I've not heard of, that apparently didn't make very many films at all. American-born composer.

Even though this film is not a sequel to another famous film about this famous person in history, you could say it's sort of like that, and a closer.

Mystery Score Clip 47

Once again we're going back a few decades, to a TV series that last only one season, specifically to the "pilot" (I use that term loosly, which in of itself is a clue, too).

The composer, no longer with us, is known very well to the film scoring community. He also, by the way, scored most the episodes of one of the most famous TV series that ever aired.

You've all seen the name. cobweb will no doubt have him either narrowed down to two or three composers in the first guess or nail him straight off.

The score, as you can hear is very catchy, has a highly memorable, if not really that complicated, main theme, and some jazzy influences. To me, this was a real treat.

No full composer listing is available online yet for the series, but as it so far appears he only did the "pilot".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv_5POLGTCU

Yes, Oliver Nelson indeed.

You also have the year period right, and yes -- it is Universal. And yes, the character is a probing one, in fact you don't know how close you are. The medical profession, I guess that's a half yes.

Revealed, then.

This is a "pilot" for the short-lived TV series, "Matt Lincoln". I say "pilot" in quotation marks because, well, it's a little complicated.

There was a TV movie that was a pilot of sorts for the show, but the lead character was under a different name and some other minor changes.

Then the TV series came and they took the first two episodes the series, and awkwardly cobbled them together into a a new pilot, and titled it "The Cliff". I guess they thought it was a good idea at the time.

Anyway, this is the only "episode" loaded to Youtube of the series. Oliver Nelson is credited in the opening. On IMDb he's also credited for the first pilot called "Dial Hot Line" -- I have no idea if somebody mixed that up with this and submitted it, or if he did both, or if this layed in his score from the first. Who knows. Sadly the end credits were cut off, so my suite fades out before the cut-off, just when some great stuff started.

Matt Lincoln in "The Cliff" deals with two situations; a mother who thinks she can no longer take it, and gives her baby up for adoption, only to change her mind later and steal it from the new parents.

The other is a young loner who "punishes" people who aren't nice to him. People who yell at him, insult him, he'll shoot them. Not kill them, just wound them.

Matt Lincoln runs a emergency call center, a small office where they take calls from troubled people who need help.

I'd say probably 70% of the score is in the suite. There was a lot in the pilot. It was overall well done. I guess the rest of the show was good, too, but probably didn't do well ratigns-wise.


I've submitted the addition to IMDb, since it's user contributed and thus people like Nelon, do not have a full listing even today on IMDb. In fact, I've submitted probably hundreds of missing scoring credits to TV movies and TV series, but they've only take under a hundred. Can't win them all, so they say.

May we ask, jb, if this MSC48 is from a short film (not a television program nor a feature film)?

Is this from the 1950s? And is the other composer deceased as well?

It's less than 2 minutes, and there's no theme music, per se - half of it is simply timpani rolls.

Rather difficult from the sound of this to depict harmonic styles.
The seconds of music near the end of the YT clip brought Alfred Newman to mind, but AN did not do any television that I'm aware of.

Knowing that around 1958, television productions began to be alotted larger budgets for scoring TV with greater amounts of original music, I think lots of pre-'58 TV shows simply had sparse use of music (and most of this was from a studio's library stock).

So ... I'm guessing the range of years for MSC48 could fall between 1954 & 1957.

I'll also take a wild stab at one of the composers being Bernard Herrmann, since IMDB lists Herrmann doing music for a number of shows on which Jerry Goldsmith worked: "The Lineup", "Climax!" & "Playhouse 90".
Alex North also wrote the theme for "Playhouse 90", so he's another candidate.

Don't know any individual segment titles, though I'm sure jb can fill in that detail.

Ah, there's no need to drag this one on any further. Reveal time.


You're listening to score from the TV series "Climax!".

The composer of the episode in questions is none other than Jerry Goldsmith. And who is the other mystery person that's still famous today? Why, James Bond!

If you're like me, you had no idea Jerry ever scored anything that starred James Bond, but he did. In 1954 the series aired an episode titled "Casino Royale" -- the very first appearence of the character on screen.

In it, Bond is an American spy. Didn't really make a difference for the episode.
Actor Peter Lorre does a wonderful portrial of Le Chiffre.


And look -- I didn't even mention Skyf ... never mind.


New clip coming up in a short while. The temp track that was "borrowed" from will be instantly recognizable.

There's zero point in letting this one linger any longer since somebody posted what it was 13 minutes after I uploaded the video. Oh well. :-)


Yes, it is indeed from the TV series "M.A.N.T.I.S", specifically the pilot.

The composer was Joseph LoDuca. No doubt you can hear the temp track he copied, specifically from "Predator", which he made the theme for the pilot.

LoDuca was not hte first composer onboard, in fact he may have been the third. He replaced Terence Blanchard (not idea if he recorded). Also, Walker's website listed she had a score replaced on the series; I am assuming it was likely the pilot, but I don't know for a fact.


The score is big, brassy, exciting,with some ethnic percussion used sparingly, and some synth. It would be great if some label, like LLLR, could release this.


#50 is coming up shortly and it's a special mystery.

Thanks to Youtube's copyright system, my mystery composer was revealed. I was wrong, -- it was tracked. It's two or three pieces, apparently, by a composer named Joyce Cochrane.
One of the cues used was "River Road", from the album Retrospection [Vol. 8]: Discover the Sound of the Fifties. But there's only two tracks on the CD by the composer.

When I have the money, that one is definitively one my list. And I'll have to sample the other volumes.

IMDb shows one TV series for scoring work, one film with stock music, and a couple dozen films with other tracking.

The short promotional ad, "A penny to dream on":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynY1Eb5Q9v0

That's from 1962.