On Earth as It Is on Television

Not only was he one of the finest comedians America has ever produced, Jackie Gleason applied his prodigious talents to music as well. With a strong jazz roots background (leaning to mesmerized idolatry when dealing with good trumpet players), Gleason developed a chart-topping series of mood music albums in the '50s, citing his reason for their existence: "Every time I ever watched Clark Gable do a love scene in the movies, I'd hear this really pretty music, real romantic, come up behind him and help set the mood. So I'm figuring that if Clark Gable needs that kinda help, then a guy in Canarsie has gotta be dyin' for somethin' like this!"…

Ronald Binge was responsible for creating in 1951 the ‘cascading strings’ sound that made the Mantovani Orchestra famous throughout the world. This was achieved purely by clever scoring, dividing the violins into several parts, each allotted a different melody-note in turn, which they sustain and then fade out, until called upon to move elsewhere. Binge’s inspiration came from his love of church music, particularly Monteverdi. Composers of sacred music had to allow for the long reverberation inevitable in cathedrals, and this is reflected in their writing. The first big success was ‘Charmaine’, followed by many others that made Mantovani’s albums million-sellers, especially in the USA. Binge’s association with Mantovani dates from 1935 when he played in, and did all the arrangements for, Mantovani’s Tipica Orchestra…

Werner Müller (1920-1998) was an orchestra conductor and popular music arranger during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1946 Müller joined the orchestra of Kurt Widmann, one of the most successful bands in Berlin. In 1949 Müller, age 30, started his musical activities in radio at the RIAS Berlin. He was concertmaster for RIAS radio and of Hans-Georg Arlt Tanzorchesters with 18 radio channels. After almost two decades in Berlin, he moved to Cologne, where he conducted performances of the WDR orchestra on radio and television.
He also contributed numerous albums to London's Phase Four label, the longest-running of the Space Age Bachelor Pad series.