Stanley Black

Stanley Black ranked among the most productive and wide-ranging British bandleaders of the postwar period, maintaining an almost daily presence on BBC radio while turning out dozens of LPs and motion-picture scores across an unusually broad stylistic range. Born in London on June 14, 1913, he began piano lessons at seven with Rae Robinson, continued at the Mathay School of Music, and won a Melody Maker contest that brought a performance of one of his compositions by the BBC Symphony Orchestra when he was only twelve. At eighteen he joined Maurice Burman’s touring band, later working with British jazz figures Howard Jacobs, Joe Orlando, Lew Stone, and Teddy Joyce, as well as visiting Americans such as Benny Carter; he also recorded “Honeysuckle Rose” with Coleman Hawkins. In 1936 he entered Harry Roy’s employ for four years, an association that included a 1937 South American tour through which he first encountered Latin American music, a vein his later work would repeatedly explore, and he made his earliest film contribution with the score for Rhythm Racketeers. After wartime service he returned to London in 1944 as conductor of the BBC Dance Orchestra, delivering as many as six broadcasts a week for nine years and frequently heading Melody Maker’s lists of radio’s most audible musicians. With the advent of long-playing records he began a prolific Decca contract, releasing up to four albums a year under his own name—among them the Exotic Percussion LP now prized by space-age-pop collectors—while also participating in countless accompanying sessions. He composed music for some two hundred films altogether, including 1948’s It Always Rains on Sunday, 1951’s Laughter in Paradise, and 1957’s The Naked Truth. Black left the BBC in 1952 to become a full-time staff conductor and arranger at Decca, then in 1958 assumed the music directorship at Elstree Studios, where he scored the Cliff Richard musicals The Young Ones and Summer Holiday. A 1965 Gramophone Award recognized his recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, after which he conducted most of Britain’s principal orchestras. Despite progressive hearing loss he continued to lead broadcasts from the BBC’s Maida Vale studios into the 1990s, and he died in London on November 27, 2002.