Quincy Jones: whats so great about this?

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_Man!

i just got a white label promo of this, i dont get it- Quincy is the CONDUCTOR or the date, but he didnt arranged any of it and he doesnt play tpt on it. why should this be his album shouldnt it be released under art peppers name?

[HolgerFreimutSchrick]

wrong link. try it with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_Man!

[Pete C]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_Man!

i just got a white label promo of this, i dont get it- Quincy is the CONDUCTOR or the date, but he didnt arranged any of it and he doesnt play tpt on it. why should this be his album shouldnt it be released under art peppers name?

Why Art Pepper, rather than any of the other "all-stars"? According to the original cover, the session was "supervised by Quincy Jones," but indeed they don't seem to be his charts.

http://www.discogs.com/Quincy-Jones-Go-West-Man/release/2454118

Edited January 29, 2012 by Pete C

[BillF]

Yes, Quincy's link with that one has always been tenuous, to say the least. I have most of those tracks on this album, and they're completely out of character with the main session, a great big band date. That said, I like those West Coast tracks, too:

[Pete C]

wrong link. try it with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_Man!

For some reason, the exclamation point is not staying with the link, and it goes to a bad page.

Let's see if this works

Yes, it works.

Edited January 29, 2012 by Pete C

[king ubu]

I'd put it under Leroy and Shelly - they're on the most tracks

Also that Q didn't arrange it isn't that special for a Q album, is it?

Edited January 29, 2012 by king ubu

[Christiern]

Quincy Jones has a history of taking credit for the work of others, going back to his "Free and Easy" European tour where Melba Liston's charts became his (she told me about this). He committed major "theft" while in charge at Mercury.

I touched on that in an early blog entry,

[king ubu]

Thanks for bringing that post back up, Chris!

It's of course this "theft" I was alluding to.

[Pete C]

Quincy Jones has a history of taking credit for the work of others, going back to his "Free and Easy" European tour where Melba Liston's charts became his (she told me about this). He committed major "theft" while in charge at Mercury.

I touched on that in an early blog entry,

Hey Chris, I was trying to go back to early posts in your blog, and it seems that many of the posts marked 2008 or 2009 were written much more recently. What's the story?

[Christiern]

Hi Pete, good to see you over here.

Unfortunately, Google's Blogger does not have an option for storing posts. There are some entries that one wants to get out of the way, but might wish to restore at another time (Holiday stuff, for example), so I have been changing the post date to 2008 or 2009, just to park the damn things.

If anyone knows a better way, please tell me. The Googleistas really ought to have foreseen this.

[Larry Kart]

Chewy -- Assuming your topic title ("What's so great about this?") is a question about the quality of the album and not about Jones' right to put his name on it, the answer is that there's some very good music there, especially on the date with the sax section. I particularly enjoy the opportunity to hear Pepper alongside Carter, his early boss and one of his models.

[JSngry]

Quincy got his name on the album for the same reason Stan Kenton, Count Basie, Woody Herman & a bunch of other people got their names on album covers for doing little more than getting/keeping the players together and rehearsing/conducting/etc other people's charts. They didn't create any of the music, but they did provision it, and the record date got made under their province and would not have taken the form that it did otherwise.

For better or worse, that's the way corporate business gets done, and for better or worse, music at this level of the business is very much corporate. "Quincy Jones" rapidly became a "corporate" idea rahter than an individual one, and that idea has grown and become institutionalized. And if not Quincy to do it, then who? From a strictly business standpoint, it seems to me that the man decided that he was going to run his business instead of having his business run him. Decades of questionable (at best) ethics in terms of full and proper credit apart, That drive to own rather than be owned is not in and of itself to be disparaged. Especially in the record business of (most of) Jones' time. Quincy could have easily spent his life as Duke Pearson, or Billy Byers, or any other number of arrangers/contractors who had to wait to get calls before they they could make calls. Quincy said fuck it, I'm going to be the guy who makes the calls to the guys who make the calls. Somebody gotta be that guy, might as well be me.

It ain't pretty, it ain't, but, yeah, somebody do gotta be that guy. Shit don't get done without that guy, not anything of scale, anyway.

At least the arrangers got credit this time.

[Christiern]

Sorry Jim, it's not as simple as you seem to think. As an apologist for Quincy Jones, I'm afraid you have flunked.

[Bill Nelson]

There's one Mercury LP,'Quincy Jones Explores the Music of Henry Mancini', where the liners extoll the sole arranging skills of Q. A keen look at the front cover will reveal, on the sheet music for 'Moon River' perched on a piano top, "Arr. Bill Byers" in small print under the large point upper-cased, "QUINCY JONES ORCH." (I'll bet a proofer from Mercury's art department was summoned to Q's office.)

According to AMG, Byers was indentured to Quincy's right hand for five years at Mercury. No doubt it meant food on the Byers' family table and shoes for the kids. With Q in the position to 'make the call', Byers was eventually rewarded with his own album, 'Impressions of Duke Ellington', a swinging big band LP for the Mercury Perfect Presence Sound series.

[Pete C]

Hi Pete, good to see you over here.

Unfortunately, Google's Blogger does not have an option for storing posts. There are some entries that one wants to get out of the way, but might wish to restore at another time (Holiday stuff, for example), so I have been changing the post date to 2008 or 2009, just to park the damn things.

If anyone knows a better way, please tell me. The Googleistas really ought to have foreseen this.

I use Blogger and all of my posts since 2006 are there, and in date order, so I'm not sure what you mean. If it's just a matter of taking old posts down without losing them, I have two suggestions. First, go into edit on a post you want off the blog and do a save as draft. If that doesn't work, see what happens if you change the post date to a future date--I think they'd disappear from the live blog, but you'd still have them in storage to repost at a later date with a changed date if you choose.

Yesterday would have been Singing Sumo/Dobie's birthday, and I posted your blog link at JC on the "Sayonara Singing Sumo" thread, since you had mentioned that he was instrumental in getting you to start pouring out the memories.

Edited January 30, 2012 by Pete C

[Christiern]

Thanks, Pete, for the Singing Sumo gesture—I'm glad to hear that his memory is kept alive. Also, thanks for the future date suggestion—that makes a lot of sense.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

yea, i knew i smelt a rat. i knew there is no way a link between art pepper and thriller could be this strong. i knew something was up

[ValerieB]

Yes, Quincy's link with that one has always been tenuous, to say the least. I have most of those tracks on this album, and they're completely out of character with the main session, a great big band date. That said, I like those West Coast tracks, too:

i've had this album since i was a very young girl, which is a very long time ago!! LOL

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

so, bobby scott is saying in his later that chris is the only person to touch upon the Quincy subject, but many others were affected by it such as Al Cohn, and Thad Jones. hey, so mercury was run or financed by the chicago mafia, right? i wonder what quincys "role" in all this, was...

[Bill Nelson]

"Listen kid, you ask too many questions. Keep it up and a cigarette machine might land on your fingers."

[Christiern]

Or worse: your Blue Note collection!

[Larry Kart]

Though I'll say (contra Sangrey) that Q's methods of appropriation were both notorious and close to unique (in part that's because his victims were his present and former colleagues in terms of age and mileu, to whom his relationship was not that of a Kenton, a Basie, et al. -- indeed many of them were older figures, and Q's behavior was regarded as something of a scandal by his peers at that time, not as a variation on SOP), coming at the Q question from a somewhat different perspective, who has thoughts about what was the last distinctive Q chart or composition -- this because his style as an arranger in particular was quite distinctive and (if one is in that mood) also clever and charming. Certainly the charts on "This Is How I Feel About Jazz" are his work and probably his best. Otherwise, I'd say that a while down the road "For Lena and Lennie" definitely was his. What of note am I missing?

[JSngry]

Though I'll say (contra Sangrey) that Q's methods of appropriation were both notorious and close to unique (in part that's because his victims were his present and former colleagues in terms of age and mileu, to whom his relationship was not that of a Kenton, a Basie, et al. -- indeed many of them were older figures, and Q's behavior was regarded as something of a scandal by his peers at that time, not as a variation on SOP),

First of all, the original question was "why is his name on this album", and I gave what I thought was a realistic answer - because he had the juice to get the date done. So in that regard (only), yes, comparisons to Kenton, Basie, & Herman are wholly appropriate.

As far as his MO being somehow unique and/or scandalous, I hardly think so, although the degree of success he leveraged it to is somewhat rare. But if you think that one arranger "taking credit" for another's work is somehow unique, please guess again. Stories abound, and not all of them are a simple matter of "ghost-writing" to meet a deadline or to farm out a too heavy workload.

Two examples = Budd Johnson claims he never saw Gil Fuller write a note in his life (and he wasn't saying that to indicate that Fuller worked expeditiously or anything like that), and Nelson Riddle reportedly covered Les Baxter's ass with neither verbal or financial acknowledgement, Baxter reportedly having much better personal skills than musical ones (and Riddle being the exact opposite). That neither Fuller nor Baxter had the ambition/audacty/gumption/whatever of Quincy Jones (although Baxter was a pretty big guy at Captiol in his time...) means only that Jones was more ambitious than these guys, not that he did anything more egregious than them.

Arranging used to be a highly competitive field, back in the day when real people played real parts written on real paper. Competition was fierce, ambition not unusual, and "manipulation" far from rare. Did everybody do it? Ho, not even. But is every "big name" in the business able to honestly take credit for every piece of work that bears their name? Hmmmmm....

That everybody "feels sorry" for Quincy Jones' "victims" is understandable enough, but to think that he was the only guy who's ever done anything like this is just absurd, especially considering that he did it in a corporate environment, where ambition is rewarded, and means not question unless and until too much noise gets made.

Do I "approve" of it? Hell no. Am I offended by it? Not any more than I am by any other corporate stooge's ambition-driven grabs and runs, which is to say that such a world is not my world, so whatever is done in that world usually serves to gladden me that I am not in it.

What I want to know is this - who ghost-wrote the Walking In Space & Guala Matara albums? I see Bob James creditied with one tune on the former, but that's it.

[Christiern]

Jim, sometimes when you don't really know what you are talking about, it is best not to talk. Sorry, but, this is not the routine identity theft you describe, and which we already know about.

[fasstrack]

Hi Pete, good to see you over here.

Unfortunately, Google's Blogger does not have an option for storing posts. There are some entries that one wants to get out of the way, but might wish to restore at another time (Holiday stuff, for example), so I have been changing the post date to 2008 or 2009, just to park the damn things.

If anyone knows a better way, please tell me. The Googleistas really ought to have foreseen this.

Do you mean STORING or DATING posts? Now I'm worried that a blog I started (and appears right before yours) will disappear in the cyber-ether.

I'm temped to defend Mr. Jones here, if only b/c I have an unfortunate habit of rushing to defend those attacked. But he's rich and doesn't need my help. I really liked his big band (the one stranded in Europe---which circumstances might have been the reason for his later MO.) What do I know? I'm neither Freud nor God, and anyway don't care that much. But that band and tunes like Jessica's Day are what I prefer to focus on. He CAN write when he wants to, and sure could then.

We've been through this before and I'm not going there, but I do sometimes find the motives for attacking the successful (often under the self-righteous aegis of 'afflicting the comfortable') suspect. Life---and the people populating it---is not 'black' or 'white'----but complex and different things at different times. Human behavior may by turns repulse or delight me----but hardly anything anyone does surprises me anymore.

Maybe Mr. Q is a bad guy in some ways---never met the man. But I'd wager that many in the music biz---myself perhaps foremost---would not at all mind having their names associated with his. I don't accuse anyone here of jealousy, but generally I'm a bit sick of that sort of thing. I'd prefer to do my work myself and let the universe, whoever or WHEREver she is, sort the other crap out.

Edited January 30, 2012 by fasstrack