Spy Music

Spy music is the instrumental style created for the spy films and television of the 1960s, above all the James Bond series, and codified by *John Barry*. It fuses big-band jazz with surf-rock guitar, dramatic brass and strings: twanging electric guitar figures, muted-trumpet and saxophone riffs, minor-key themes of menace and glamour, often with exotic colouring — cimbalom, sitar, Middle Eastern percussion — to mark foreign intrigue. Composers *Henry Mancini*, *Lalo Schifrin* and *Jerry Goldsmith* extended the idiom across film and television, and its themes became chart singles independent of the screen.