Essential Jazz Masters vs. Craig Riley vs. Jason Nyberg

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Well, here's a conundrum. The Fallout video game series is known for its use of vintage tracks heard on the radio alongside its use of a 1950s vision of a post-apocalyptic future. I've been trying to track down the origins of the the radio songs on the original records.

Unusually, a number of the songs heard on the radio are actually library tracks, leading to confusion about their availability. However, most of these were licensed from the extensive APM Library. This is probably the largest audience plus an extremely rare time where library music is exposed to the public at large and is played in full on the radio instead of being relegated to short snippets in the background.

In 2008's Fallout 3, there's another PA radio heard inside Vault 101 which uses instrumental tracks not licensed through APM, but apparently Westar Music. Thankfully, someone included these track credits in the Soundtracks section of the Fallout 3 imdb page. Most people know the titles performed by the Essential Jazz Masters, but the imdb page shows alternate titles variously attributed to Craig Riley and Jason Nyberg.

Essential Jazz Masters	| Jason Nyberg	| Craig Riley
And All the While I'm Loving You	Consortium of Cool	Frank's Place
Here Come the Cats!	Making Waves	Basie's Up
Jump for Joy	Music to Burn	Be-Bop Shop
Just One of Those Things	Meridian	Solitary Refinement
Slow Summer Swing	Sublime Swing	Hefti
Smoothing the Whole Thing Over	Licorice Stick	Benny

The Jason Nyberg titles are credited to the 2003 album Westar Music WSR149 Effortless & Refined. It contains the most variations of the songs.

The Craig Riley titles somehow seem to be compiled from various albums.

The 2008 Craig Riley album Jazz Club (Instrumental) keeps Frank's Place from Nyberg, but renames the rest of them. Love That Jazz = Licorice Stick, Ivory Ice = Just One of Those Things etc.

The Essential Jazz Masters titles are credited to the 2010 album Jazz Band Serenades.

The 2015 Craig Riley album Making Waves reuses the Jason Nyberg titles, but puts it under Craig Riley. The album also retitles Meridian/Solitary Refinement to Middle of the Road and retitles Licorice Stick/Benny to Classy Clarinet. Consortium of Cool is somehow "Consortium of Cold Cool".


I'm having a lot of trouble with these tracks and composers. It's likely that Craig Riley, The Essential Jazz Masters, and Jason Nyberg are the same person or someone is collecting on the same tracks under different titles.

The first two artist names don't seem to give many results, though Jason Nyberg does pop up as a film composer. Unfortunately, his site is rather sparse and doesn't mention an association with Westar Music and I am not sure which pictures are actually his. There's also a Jason Nyberg who is a spokesperson for Yamaha.

I suppose I am trying to pin down a date of recording. Are these tracks archive recordings that have been reissued onto CD? Were these composed during the modern library music era, CD or digital only? Did Westar obtain these tracks from another library?

[apmnut]

Can't help you, but the only thing I can say is that the tracks sound like they're modern recordings.

[Mr]

Interesting thread!
I played Fallout 3 half to death when it first came out, good times! Probably the first place I ever heard the works of Jack Shaindlin.
Library music is actually much more prevalent in video games than you might think.

The Craig Riley cues seem to originate from Sound Ideas Music. Nyberg also did some work for Sound Ideas, so I'm guessing this is where the cues might originate.
Oh, and "Craig Riley" is actually Canadian Brian Nimens -  who composed for the Parry Music Library, among others... and founded Sound Ideas

Are the cues identical, but released under different titles with different composers? Have you been able to compare them to each other directly?


edit:
Having searched around for a bit, I found all of the Craig Riley cues ("Basie's Up", "Be-Bop Shop", "Benny", "Frank's Place", "Hefti" and "Solitary Refinement") on The Mix VII Broadcast Music Library CD MIX55 "Jazz". They're all attributed to Jason Nyberg - Riley perhaps being the publisher - which explains the composer discrepancy.
Confusingly, all of the cues have multiple releases in Sound Ideas' catalogue - "Hefti" appears on both the Mix VII Broadcast Music Library MIX55, the Mix IX Rhythm Track Library MIX74 and the Mix Signature Collection Combo JAZ02, for instance.

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Yeah, library music is frequently used as video game trailer music, particularly if it's "epic" sounding. Though coincidentally, Shaindlin's "Let's Go Sunning" was used in a Destroy All Humans trailer which had a similar retro aesthetic. Fallout seems to be an exception where the library track is played in full instead of being relegated to a snippet in the background. I can only think of 2009's The Saboteur which uses library tracks played in full on the radio, which drew from the Warner/Chappell library if memory serves.

Though "And All the While I'm Loving You"/Consortium of Cool/Frank's Place seems to make the circuit being heard in 2007's Bioshock in the background of the audio diary "New Year's Eve Alone" and in 2011's LA Noire in the background of an Alaco Gas radio commericial, all of which have a similar retro aesthetic.


The Nyberg tracks also reappear in the Fallout Shelter app and briefly in Fallout 76 in the vault.

Not finding a date for the Sound Ideas album, though can it beat 2003 for the Westar album? The cues are identical to the versions in Fallout 3 albeit without the "static-y vintage radio" effect. Sometimes the exact version is hidden under an alternate arrangement.

Honestly, it's thanks to this site and the previous incarnations that have helped me track down some of the original library records for the Fallout library tracks though even the CDs themselves are hard to find.

Alas, Fallout uses tracks by Harry Bluestone and Gerhard Trede that I haven't been able to pin down outside of the CDs.

[Mr]

Again - very interesting topic! I wasn't aware of these, despite having sunk considerable time into both BioShock and L.A. Noire... though I don't think I ever listened to the radio on the latter, haha.

Happy to be of help! I'm happy I get to learn a few new things in the process
As for Bluestone/Trede, who could be the distributor of both these two and Shaindlin's cues? It's most likely all from one company. I'm a bit unsure who has the rights to what material for these composers.

As for date... that's a hard one. I'll see what I can find. Early 2000's sounds very likely. Give me a sec.


edit:
The Mix VII Broadcast Music Library was released c. January/February 2001. Early February at the latest. I've also just learned that around this time, Westar was Sound Ideas' worldwide distributor (outside Canada). Cool.

[Upgrade]

The end credits for Fallout 3 actually do mention the library tracks alongside the vintage tracks which in itself is uncommon. It also highlights the disparity with the vintage tracks getting a paragraph of copyright info and the library tracks getting a mere “Courtesy of APM Music Inc.”

Alas, the end credits for New Vegas and Fallout 4 do not mention the library tracks.

APM Production Music is a huge umbrella representative for library in the US. They even supplied the background music for Spongebob and Ren & Stimpy which many of the same composers from Fallout crossing over.

As for Fallout, it’s a matter of breaking it down from APM to the constituent CDs which are mostly KPM, Sonoton, Bruton, and Carlin. Then trying to find the original records for Sam Fox, Brull-Harmonic, Cinemusic, and KPM brownsleeves etc.

Bluestone is an oddity and so far none of his work on the Musi-Que label, Cadkin and Bluestone, and Capital Hi-Q seem to match in terms of length and titles, though as we know, titles are often renamed.

Harry Lubin is also mysterious since I have not been able to find physical examples of his Harrose record label before it was bought by Carlin then Warner/Chappell.

At least these artists only had one song each. Gerhard Trede is the most represented library artist in Fallout with 10 tracks. He seems to have had a tighter control on his tracks with his Gerhard Trede reord label which is evident on the Mozart Edition labels. I believe I tracked down a couple of tracks on CBS EZ Cue, but I need to get a copy to be sure. “Jolly Days” and “Fox Boogie” elude me still though they were released on Selected Sound CDs outside of the Gerhard Trede Collection CDs, but they don’t match his work on the Selected Sound LPs.

[Mr]

A bit of a belated addition, perhaps, but I've since found out that both Sound Ideas and Westar were/are subsidiaries of the Brian Nimens Corporation Limited - there's probably a lot of overlap.

A thread on Westar is now up here.