A much-needed look at an overlooked side of the genius of Quincy Jones – not his jazz work, not his productions for famous soul artists, but instead his huge legacy of soundtrack material – a part of Q's career that really took off in the 60s! By the time he started working in films, Jones had already had a decade under his belt as one of the hippest arrangers, leaders, and composers in jazz – and the film business really respected those talents, and allowed Quincy to bring some really fresh styles into play – modes that really opened up the vibe of American cinema, and also paved the way for the funky styles of the 70s! As that decade approached, Jones left behind the cinema to take on some more higher-profile records of his own – but all the charms of those great albums can be found here at their roots – in this stunning collection of soundtrack material, some of which has never been on CD. The package is way more than just a sampler – and includes an album's worth of material from the films The Pawnbroker, Slender Thread, Mirage, The Deadly Affair, In The Heat Of The Night, In Cold Blood, Walk Don't Run, The Italian Job, Lost Man, and John & Mary – plus two versions of the love theme from The Getaway, and a bonus CD with 18 tracks – titled Q's highlights, and featuring tracks from his Mercury records – plus more by Billy Preston, Arthur Prysock, Bill Cosby, Shirley Horn, Letta Mbulu, Toots Thielemans, and others. Even features the "Sanford & Son" and "Ironside" themes!

Reverence and Compassion is a spectacularly soul-stirring, historically monumental, and masterfully synchronized late-career studio masterpiece led by the legendary American vibraphone visionary Milt "Bags" Jackson, originally released in 1993 on Quincy Jones's boutique Qwest label and exquisitely preserved in this definitive high-fidelity restoration archive. Spanning over 61 minutes of profoundly lyrical and emotionally rich instrumental interaction across 12 tracks, this document serves as an absolute peak monument in 1990s sophisticated jazz archaeology. For this unique studio venture, Jackson frames his crystalline, fluid mallet articulations within a luxurious, orchestral setting featuring an elite jazz rhythm core lushly augmented by sweeping string and woodwind orchestrations, executing a highly refined sonic blueprint defined by deep emotional resonance and breathtaking melodic elegance.

The music made by Quincy Jones during the second half 1950s was a stunning example of contemporary jazz during that pivotal decade for the form. Listening back today to these groundbreaking records delightfully illustrate how the dynamic musician, performer, composer and arranger first introduced his extraordinary skills to the world. After spending the first half of the decade working for other musicians, including a number of freelance commissions arranging songs for renowned artists such as Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington, and his close friend Ray Charles, Jones soon decided it was time for him to take the lead. The first album release to feature Quincy as a named artist was the 1955 release on Mercury Records 'Jazz Abroad' on which he featured alongside jazz drummer Roy Haynes. Next up was, 'That's How I feel About Jazz' featuring an all star cast including Art Farmer, Lucky Johnson & Phil Woods - following which he would record and release a further six albums before the end of the 1950s, all for Mercury. Quincy Jones first eight albums, all released during this period, are featured on this 4CD set in their entirety, in glorious re-mastered sound, making this package the most complete Quincy Jones 1950s collection available today.

The Italian Job: 50th Anniversary Expanded Edition presents Quincy Jones’ iconic soundtrack to the 1969 film in a comprehensive and expanded form, highlighting his skill in blending cinematic scoring with jazz-influenced orchestration and playful thematic writing. The score is best known for its memorable main theme “On Days Like These,” alongside the energetic and instantly recognizable “Getta Bloomin’ Move On! (Self Preservation Society).” Throughout the album, Jones combines orchestral arrangements, light jazz textures, and quirky rhythmic motifs to match the film’s tone of stylish crime and comedic heist action. The expanded edition includes alternate takes, film versions, and additional cues that provide deeper insight into the development of the score and its variations used across different scenes. The music alternates between atmospheric passages, suspense-driven cues, and lively ensemble pieces, maintaining a cohesive identity rooted in late 1960s cinematic scoring traditions. Overall, the release stands as both a classic film soundtrack and an example of Quincy Jones’ versatility as a composer working across jazz, pop, and orchestral film music.

In the summer of 1956, the famed Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell arranged for Dizzy Gillespie to embark on a worldwide goodwill-ambassador tour sponsored by the State Department. Gillespie and an all-star big band featuring trumpeter Quincy Jones, the late trombonist Melba Liston, alto saxophonist Phil Woods, and tenor saxophonist Benny Golson performed in Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil to frenzied, beret-wearing fans. Recordings were made but they weren't commercially available and were played only for a select group of musicians before Gillespie's death in 1993. Now the sides have been released, showcasing Dizzy at his bebopping best.

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.

Quincy's Home Again is an album by Quincy Jones with performances by Harry Arnold's Orchestra. The album was recorded in Sweden in 1958 and released by Metronome label. The album was also released in the U.S. as Harry Arnold + Big Band + Quincy Jones = Jazz! by EmArcy. AllMusic gave the album four stars, calling it "an excellent effort featuring a hard-swinging Swedish band that deserved to be better known in the U.S".

Verve Records celebrated the 50th anniversary of Norman Granz's first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert with an all-star get-together at Carnegie Hall. Different groups of top players from Verve's legacy (both past and present) had opportunities to perform, and this CD has many of the highlights. Pianist Peter Delano plays "Tangerine" with a trio; Dee Dee Bridgewater sings "Shiny Stockings" with the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band; Hank Jones pays tribute to Art Tatum; Abbey Lincoln sings "I Must Have That Man"; Joe Henderson meets up with Antonio Carlos Jobim (who made his final concert appearance) on "Desafinado"; "Manteca" features trumpeter Roy Hargrove and trombonist Steve Turre; pianist Yosuke Yamashita pays tribute to Bud Powell; Betty Carter scats on "How High the Moon"; Herbie Hancock and John McLaughlin play a restrained acoustic version of Bill Evans' "Turn out the Stars"; Hargrove teams up with altoist Jackie McLean and guitarist Pat Metheny for "The Eternal Triangle"; organist Jimmy Smith revisits Oliver Nelson's arrangement of "Down by the Riverside"; Art Porter and Jeff Lorber play some crossover, and J.J. Johnson contributes a few trombone solos.

Perhaps the greatest Quincy Jones album of the 60s - a hard-swinging batch of big band bossa tunes - and one of the greatest American takes on the bossa sound ever! Quincy really brings a lot of soul to the set - syncopating the bottom end of the tunes to really bring out the rhythms, and working with a jazzy flourish of horns that creates all these quick and clever little turns in the tunes! The sound's been heard most famously on the incredible track "Soul Bossa Nova" - an original by Quincy for the set, which has gone onto much greater fame through its use in the film Austin Powers, and a bazillion TV commercials!

For years the star cellist and Opus Klassik laureate Raphaela Gromes has taken up the cause of women composers. Three of her albums, acclaimed by critics and listeners alike, have featured music by unknown women composers, and she maintains a long-term working relationship with the "Frau und Musik" Archive in Frankfurt. So it is only natural that her new double album, FEMMES, should lend a voice to outstanding women from nine centuries of music history. No fewer than 23 woman composers found their way onto the double album, from Hildegard of Bingen to Clara Schumann all the way to Lera Auerbach and Billie Eilish, not to mention such famous operatic figures as Susanna from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro or Bizet's Carmen.

Although Miles Davis did not live to participate in Gerry Mulligan's reunion recordings featuring the nonet that played on the famous late-'40s and early-'50s cool sessions, he participated in a reunion concert held at Montreux in 1991. This featured both the Gil Evans Orchestra and George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band, plus additional guests Benny Bailey, Grady Tate, Carlos Benavent and various European players teaming with a gravely ill Davis to perform Gil Evans' marvelous arrangements. Quincy Jones conducted and conceived the idea of using two orchestras, offering majestic surroundings for the solos of Davis, fellow trumpeter Wallace Roney and alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett. Not every moment is golden, but the overall session ranks just a bit below the majestic '50s and '60s dates featuring Davis' trumpet and Evans' arrangements.

Quincy Jones followed up Smackwater Jack and his supervision of Donny Hathaway's Come Back Charleston Blue soundtrack with this, a mixed bag that saw him inching a little closer toward the R&B-dominated approach that reached full stride on the following Body Heat and peaked commercially with The Dude. That said, the album's most notorious cut is "The Streetbeater" - better known as the Sanford & Son theme, a novelty for most but also one of the greasiest, grimiest instrumental fusions of jazz and funk ever laid down - while its second most noteworthy component is a drastic recasting of "Summer in the City," as heard in the Pharcyde's "Passin' Me By," where the frantic, bug-eyed energy of the Lovin' Spoonful original is turned into a magnetically lazy drift driven by Eddie Louis' organ, Dave Grusin's electric piano, and Valerie Simpson's voice…

Quincy Jones had jazz fans wondering when he released his killer Gula Matari album in 1970. That set, with gorgeous reading of Paul Simon's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" with a lead vocal by none other than Valerie Simpson, pointed quite solidly into the direction Jones was traveling: unabashedly toward pop, but with his own trademark taste, and sophistication at the forefront of his journey. Its follow-up, Smackwater Jack, marked Jones, along with Phil Ramone and Ray Brown in the producer's chair, and knocked purist jazz fans on their heads with its killer meld of pop tunes, television and film themes, pop vocals, and big-band charts. The personnel list is a who's- who of jazzers including Monty Alexander, Jim Hall, Pete Christlieb, Joe Beck, Bobby Scott, Ernie Royal, Freddie Hubbard, Jerome Richardson, Ray Brown, Jaki Byard, Toots Thielemans, and many others…

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. Taken from three separate sessions, the bands assembled by Jones are loaded, including Jerome Richardson, Billy Byers, Urbie Green, Clark Terry, Ernie Royal, Snooky Young, Mundell Lowe, Zoot Sims, Phil Woods, and Seldon Powell, Drummer Osie Johnson plays on all tracks, pianist Bobby Scott is a central figure…

Quincy Jones, a legendary musician and a wizard who brought innovation to jazz, pop, film music, and a variety of other genres. This CD contains a carefully selected selection of important recordings from his early and mid-period. By looking at his works from different angles, new discoveries will unfold. The name Quincy Jones transcends the boundaries of music producer and arranger, and is a symbol of the richness and revolution of the American music scene. Working in genres as diverse as jazz, R&B, soul, pop, and film music, he has covered more than 200 songs and filled them with innovative challenges, from the film music of the 1960s to Michael Jackson's "Thriller. Always passionate and inquisitive about music, he blended genres with deep understanding and aesthetics to present new musical expressions and social messages. By looking at his works from different angles, new discoveries will unfold. Commentary: All Days Magazine Editorial Department