Ordinarily I would’ve shared this latest installment in my #TuesdaysWithJerry series on, well, Tuesday.
But as I spent yesterday on the road from Tucson back to Cali, there simply weren’t brain reserves left to produce a post with any measure of meaning. And yet I don’t want to wait longer to nudge this never-ending survey of A&M Records along.
So … here we are, at the very end of the ‘60s … greeting the incomparable Quincy Jones as he joins Jerry Moss’s and Herb Alpert’s burgeoning artists haven a decade and a half after his emergence as an ambitious trumpeter, an unstoppable talent about to make a deeply lasting impact on 20th century music.
At this point in his illustrious career — with ‘Walking in Space’ marking his A&M debut under Creed Taylor’s CTI subsidiary in late ‘69 — the mighty Q, all of 36, had become arguably the most in-demand and hyper-prolific figure in the biz.
His film score output at the time was virtually unrivaled: that year alone he helmed five soundtracks, including memorable charts for ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,’ ‘Cactus Flower’ and the original/superior version of ‘The Italian Job.’ More impressively, however, this composer/arranger/producer had already worked with almost all the greats: Ella and Louis, Sinatra and Basie and Bennett, Dizzy and Cannonball, Sarah and Dinah. Pretty much everyone but Miles and Monk and Coltrane.
No wonder these two albums — the more pivotal ‘Gula Matari’ arrived mere months later — come overstuffed with brilliance from a who’s-who of jazz legends: Ron Carter, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, Hubert Laws, Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Bob James, Toots Thielemans, Roland Kirk, Bernard Purdie, Eric Gale, J.J. Johnson. For icing, there’s sumptuous soulfulness from Valerie Simpson, of Ashford & Simpson acclaim.
‘New music and old friends’ is how Morgan Ames describes it in the gatefold of ‘Space.’ Cannonball thinks Q takes ‘em to church in his ‘Matari’ notes — and now ‘dig that the church, so firmly implanted in Quincy Jones, has grown into a cathedral.’
What a magnificent feather in Herbie & Jerry’s collective cap.