Quincy Jones And His Orchestra - The Quintessence (1970s US Impulse! Stereo Vinyl LP)

Quincy Jones And His Orchestra - The Quintessence | Vinyl LP - 1970s US Impulse! Stereo Reissue (AS-11, ABC-era green labels)

By late 1961 Quincy Jones was only twenty-eight but already a rising arranger and a Mercury executive, and this was the band he could barely afford to keep. It had grown out of the orchestra he put together for a European tour of the musical Free and Easy, a venture that left him deep in debt when the show folded but gave him a big band full of the best players in New York. Bob Thiele brought them into Capitol Studios over three sessions late in 1961 for what became Jones's only album for Impulse!. The lineup is a roll-call: Freddie Hubbard, Thad Jones, Snooky Young and Joe Newman on trumpets, Phil Woods and Oliver Nelson in the saxophones, Curtis Fuller and Melba Liston on trombones, Milt Hinton on bass. The writing is shared around, Jones's own "Quintessence" and "Hard Sock Dance" next to Billy Byers charts, Benny Golson's "Little Karen" and a punchy reading of Monk's "Straight, No Chaser". "For Lena And Lennie" salutes Lena Horne and Lennie Hayton, who returned the favour in the liner notes.

The record did not chart, and Jones soon went back to Mercury, but it has aged into one of the high points of modern big-band writing, arrangements dense with detail and played with real snap. It is worth being clear about which pressing this is. The 1962 original was cut by Rudy Van Gelder; this is the 1970s ABC-era Impulse! reissue with the green labels, its lacquers cut at Longwear Plating rather than by Van Gelder, pressed at Columbia's Terre Haute plant. It comes in the gatefold sleeve with Pete Turner's cover photograph and the Lena Horne and Lennie Hayton notes inside.