Quincy Jones & His Orchestra - Early Years: Six Complete Albums 1957-61 (2023)

Quincy Jones has become one of the most prominent personalities in popular music as a trumpeter and pianist who became an arranger, composer, bandleader, record producer and film & TV producer, and winner of a Grammy Legend Award in 1992, and who in 2022 is still active after a 70-year career, during which he has been involved with the success of illustrious artists from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson. In the era addressed here in the late ’50s and early ’60s he was leading his own highly-acclaimed big band, touring the world, although it failed to make money, with Jones saying : “We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That’s when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business.” This 56-track 3-CD set comprises jazz and big band recordings from his early career leading his own band, and includes all the titles from his original LPs “This Is How I Feel About Jazz” and “Go West, Man!” for ABC-Paramount, and “The Birth Of A Band”, “The Great Wide World Of Quincy Jones”, “I Dig Dancers” and “Around The World” for Mercury. It’s an exciting and revealing insight into his skills as a composer and arranger and a feast of highly innovative, contemporary and sophisticated top-class big band music, underlining the talents that made him such an influential figure in later years.