Stanley Black

Not to be confused with Universal International's Black Magic or Living Era's Early Black Magic, Dutton Vocalion's "Black Magic/Satan Superstar" combines two highly atypical Stanley Black albums from the 1970s. Most of Black's recording career was spent in the production of easy listening albums that are decidedly different from these byproducts of '70s cinema and pop culture. After a handful of Latin, Brazilian, and easygoing jazz/pop tunes interspersed with beefy funk arrangements of "The Hustle" and the "'Theme from 'Shaft'," the thematic switches over from African-American pop culture to Manifestations of Evil and, more specifically, Satanism, a rather tiresome inversion of Christianity that has provided so many movies with dependably diabolical subject matter. Stanley Black really outdid himself here, as he trundled out Franz Waxman's music from "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; Miklós Rósza's score for the Devil Scene from "King of Kings"; a lullaby from "Rosemary's Baby"; a suite of themes from Val Lewton's 1943 noir horror classic The Seventh Victim, and music from both The men and The Exorcist II. For an even more interesting treatment of the music from Exorcist II, see "Magic & Ecstasy" from Eugene Chadbourne's wonderfully weird album Insect and Western Party. Again, this is quite different from just about everything else in the Stanley Black discography. ~ arwulf arwulf, All Music Guide