They Quincy Jones

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.

First and foremost, Quincy Jones is a musician, composer and arranger of some of the finest music of the 20th Century, and this 4 CD Set houses his very finest work. Eight original albums released by Jones on Mercury and other labels between 1960 and 1963, on which he was leader or co-leader, remain, certainly for jazz fans, the great man’s finest hour. This set includes these integral albums in their entirety and in pristine re-mastered form, complete with full musician lists and release details, to make for perhaps the best collection yet of Quincy Jones’s jazz recordings which pre-date almost everything this giant of a man remains most famous for.

Quincy Jones' edition of Universal's 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection is hardly a comprehensive overview of Jones' career – that, as they say, would take a box set – but it does narrow in on the chart hits he had for A&M during the '70s and early '80s. Pretty much all of his pop crossovers of that era – outside of "'Roots' Medley," "Ai No Corrida," and "Money Runner," a theme song for the movie of the same name, released on Reprise – are here, which means this is very heavy on jazzy funk and jazzy quiet storm. Nothing here doesn't sound like its era, which isn't a bad thing – some of it may not transcend the era, but it's dated in a nice way, and the very best songs, such as the seductive James Ingram-sung "One Hundred Ways," rank among the best of their kind. This may not be among Jones' most influential music, but it's certainly among his best crossover material, and while it may miss a hit or two, it's a fine representative overview of his records of the '70s.

The remix collection that complements Original Jam Sessions 1969 has a handful of stunners, with the rest of the tracks being groovy enough, if only because of Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones' original recordings. Herbert mucks everything up on his track, making Quincy's band sound both death metal and amusement-park carousel. Cornershop relate the wacka-wacka guitar to the sitar in their mix, while Bedrock and Said Mrad both take the deep and creeping noir route with great results. Mix Master Mike and Cosby's rap on "Hikky-Burr" sound like a match made in funk heaven, but the turntable master doesn't do much more than scratch over the original track. Everything else is more pleasing than memorable, with few of the remixers willing to really mess with master Quincy's groove…

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…

With his second and last album under the Creed Taylor aegis, the complexities of Quincy Jones' catholic, evolving tastes start to reveal themselves. We hear signs of his gradual gravitation toward pop right off the bat with the churchy R&B cover of Paul Simon's mega-hit "Bridge Over Troubled Water," dominated by Valerie Simpson's florid soul vocal and a gospel choir. His roots fixation surfaces in the spell-like African groove of the title track, a dramatic tone poem that ebbs and flows masterfully over its 13-minute length. From this point on, it's all jazz; the roaring big band comes back with a vengeance in "Walkin'," where Milt Jackson, Herbie Hancock, Hubert Laws, and other jazzers take fine solo turns, and things really get rocking on Nat Adderley's "Hummin'"…