Quincy Jones Reflection: The Giant Of Jazz (1977)

Two scores with a tone of righteous fury woven throughout. While there are differences in the approach to the two scores, Quincy Jones did manage to provide a unifying style – no mean feat, considering that the intent behind In the Heat of the Night was to get a Southern, blues-inflected atmosphere to support the angry, anti-racist approach of the picture, while They Call Me Misters Tibbs! had a more open, urban attitude from its San Francisco setting. The music throughout has an edge (the lighter music in the second score is generally source music), with some interesting musical experiments going on (Jones, as one example, used cimbalom to reflect Tibbs' feelings in They Call Me Mister Tibbs!.) The Ryko CD release includes an Enhanced CD portion with film material. The sound throughout the disc is excellent, although the cues from In the Heat of the Night show their age, and the dialogue excerpts sound very rough.

As modern big-band leaders go, Quincy Jones in the '60s would be first choice for many composers who wrote for a television series or the cinema. Though not the original themes, Jones was quite able to produce a full album featuring Henry Mancini's famous songs from movies and the small screen. This collection of the familiar and obscure Mancini done in 1964, preceded famed epic scores written by Jones from films The Pawnbroker and The Deadly Affair. It comprises several well-known hit tunes and a smattering of cuts not easily identifiable as the hummable and memorable Mancini classics…

In a career spanning over seven decades, Quincy Jones has earned his reputation as a renaissance man of American music. Since entering the industry as an arranger in the early 1950s, he has distinguished himself as a bandleader, solo artist, sideman, songwriter, producer, film composer, and record label executive. A quick look at a few of the artists he's worked with - Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Lesley Gore, Michael Jackson, Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Paul Simon, and Aretha Franklin - reveals the remarkable diversity of his career. He has been nominated for a record 80 Grammy awards, and has won 27 in categories including Best Instrumental Jazz Performance for "Walking in Space" (1969), Producer of the Year (1981), and Album of the Year for Jackson's Thriller (1983) and his own Back on the Block (1990)…

"Labor of love" is the inevitable phrase to describe this album on which composer/conductor/arrangers Quincy Jones and Sammy Nestico, both of whom wrote for Count Basie and His Orchestra, assemble a top-flight big band to perform some of their vintage charts. Despite the use of the bandleader's name in the title and the pictures of him with the two principals on the front and back of the album, the music is more "beyond" than "Basie." It is true that both Jones and Nestico are steeped in the Basie band's light, rhythmic approach to playing and their music is imbued with that style. But both are better understood as graduates of the Basie school than true adherents, people who have spent the better parts of their careers applying their knowledge of swing to other endeavors, notably film scores…

What you see is what you get, an excellent little compilation of the various faces of soul-jazz as presented by the Verve label with their amazing array of artists from Hugh Masekela to Willie Bobo and Herbie Mann on the one hand, and Dizzy Gillespie, Jon Hendricks (in an outstanding reading of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man") the Heath Brothers, and Teddy Edwards on the other. The track list is wonderfully varied, too: there's a smoking version of Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island" by Masekela, a pair by Jimmy Smith, and a big band – a new entry by the acid jazz group the James Taylor Quartet, but they get it deep; and Wynton Kelly goes deep into soul and blues with "Escapade." Anyway you cut it, it comes out great.