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Film gigs did not rain down from on high after The Pawnbroker. “Months go by. Nothing.” Scoring episodes of the short-lived sitcom Hey, Landlord didn’t change anything either. But thanks to one of his jazz collaborators his next movie eventually came his way. His albums with singer Peggy Lee (If You Go and Blues Cross Country) hadn’t been runaway successes, but Lee had loved working with Quincy and recommended him to her friend Cary Grant, doing one last film before his planned retirement. Grant, a capable jazz piano player in his spare time, took her up on the idea and called Quincy personally, the two having briefly met before at one of Lee’s parties. “Cary asked me to meet him at Columbia at two o’clock. My wife had the car. I don’t drive. I jumped in a laundry truck and asked the guy to let me out at the newsstand at the corner. He insisted on taking me right there. When the guy did a U-turn, he drew the attention of Cary and Sol Siegel, the film’s producer. It was so embarrassing.”
The movie was a world away from the darker nature of Quincy’s four films to date, as Walk, Don’t Run was intended as a comedy about Grant playing matchmaker in a crowded apartment during the Tokyo Olympics. As such, the brief was not dangerous jazz and tortured strings but the goofier material of 1960s comedies. Whistling defines a good chunk of his score, as does the harmonica that had started creeping into Quincy’s jazz and pop albums. I’ve seen this score compared to the lighter works of Henry Mancini, and indeed the template for one track seems to have been to approximate Henry Mancini’s Baby Elephant Walk, but I’d argue that overlooks how it’s much closer to the very-much-of-their-era silly scores of Neal Hefti like How to Murder Your Wife and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. The score is generally an easygoing if very dated joy, though the Alvin and the Chipmunks-style voices chirping in one album version of Quincy’s Happy Feet tune will break most listeners.
Walk, Don’t Run did alright at the box office but wasn’t a smash success. Contrary to Quincy’s suspicions, Grant kept his word about retiring, driven both by dissatisfaction with his late career films and wanting to spend more time with his young daughter, and the two guys actually became dear friends. And even with two other albums coming out in 1966 that bore Quincy’s stamp (some arrangements on Tony Bennett’s The Movie Song Album plus arranging and conducting the Count Basie Orchestra for Frank Sinatra’s iconic first live concert recording Sinatra at the Sands), the movie seemed to suggest that he had perhaps made it as a film composer after all.
His 1967 release slate cemented that as an incontrovertible fact.
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First came a reunion with Sidney Lumet for The Deadly Affair, an adaptation of John le Carré’s first novel Call of the Dead. Perhaps taking more inspiration from the protagonist’s troubled marriage than from the spy games, Quincy crafted a stylish score blending orchestral romance with bossa nova, even featuring bossa nova singing star Astrud Gilberto in his theme song Who Needs Forever. The music was a questionable and perhaps even anachronistic accompaniment for a movie about European Cold War spycraft (especially with America’s bossa nova craze fizzling out within a year), and it plays like a one-note score today, but gosh, what a note!
It would be easy to call Quincy’s music for the golf drama Banning a kind of Mancini score, though that would overlook how Quincy had been just as much a writer of that sound outside of films as Mancini had been in them during the decade, with much of Banning a blend of Quincy’s Count Basie big band swank and the sumptuous orchestral arrangements he’d provided for several Sarah Vaughan albums. Quincy also penned the first knockout theme of his film career, one that was given lyrics as The Eyes of Love. Balancing that sense of high style was the scoring for the golf scenes and other bustling moments where Quincy emphasized off-kilter percussion, not too far from what Jerry Goldsmith was doing around then. It’s a great score and the most underrated work of his film career, not only because the movie quickly faded into obscurity but because it took until 2021 for Quincy’s score to get an album release.
And there was In the Heat of the Night, Norman Jewison’s acclaimed tale of a Black detective played by Sidney Poitier stuck in a Mississippi town who gets pulled into an investigation by their police chief played by Rod Steiger. For Quincy the assignment was a shift in style; the tone was less jazz and more country, blues, and soul, exemplified right at the start of the film with the title song sung by Ray Charles. Quincy’s score wasn’t exactly singular; unlike Banning it’s not noticeably melodic, and as with The Boy and the Tree the more boisterous brass passages suggest Quincy was aware of Elmer Bernstein’s scores from that era. Plus a good portion of the runtime (at least on album) was the source music he oversaw, ranging from Ray Charles on piano to a song featuring country music superstar Glen Campbell. But what keeps bringing you back is the sonic stew Quincy cooked up: orchestra cross-crossing with saloon piano, Roland Kirk’s flute shrieks, fat electronics, vocal percussion, cimbalom, and guitars, all conveying the the sense that, much like Poitier’s stranded detective, you are never quite on easy footing for very long. Even when heard in the dead of winter, the album seems to summon the muggy heat of summer as soon as you push play.
In the Heat of the Night is an optimistic film, with Steiger and Poitier’s characters suggesting hope for racial reconciliation in the midst of America’s civil rights movement. Its 1967 small town twin, an adaptation of Truman Capote’s true crime book In Cold Blood about the murder of a family in Kansas, had no such optimism. Shot on location in black and white, director Richard Brooks’ work is recognized as one of the more chilling movies of its decade. Quincy’s score, which he developed on and off for close to a year, was shockingly modern for its time, with the composer not just doing weird instrumental effects (like atypical mutes) but also experimenting with percussion and samples - vocal scatting, mouth pops, empty soda bottles, etc. There are a few moments of serenity, but the work is more defined by the mean cacophony of jazz and blues sounds marshalled for the soundscape. It also ended up being a powerful rebuke of Capote, who’d questioned why a Black composer was scoring a movie not about Black people (he wanted Leonard Bernstein, but Brooks held his ground) and later tearfully apologized to Quincy for his prejudice. Rarely had musical creativity in that era been so capably deployed for something so unnerving, with the dissonant organ-heavy finale music scaring one of the performers out of the room during the recording sessions.
At the Academy Awards the following year Quincy was nominated for this score and his song from Banning (the first such nominations for an African American), plus In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture. A Grammy nomination for Best Score followed for In the Heat of the Night. Quincy lost each individual award, but his 1967 was still a sensational year, especially once you account for Ironside. The seven season show starring Raymond Burr as wheelchair-bound investigator started as a movie-length pilot Quincy scored, and when it became an episodic series Quincy added a distinctive electronic wail to the main title piece, the first time a TV audience had ever heard the Moog synthesizer in a show. Quincy scored the first eight or so episodes before handing things off to Oliver Nelson and Marty Paich, two other jazzmen turned score composers (Nelson played in the recording sessions for The Pawnbroker). Quincy re-recorded the theme for a later record, and the wail turned into one of the more repurposed aspects of his scores, showing up in places like Tupac’s song Guess Who’s Back and Kill Bill.
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Next time: More awards, a surprise hit in India, Quincy’s best film score, and his grooviest film score.
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1966-67: Film & TV scores
Walk, Don’t Run (1966) - ***
https://open.spotify.com/album/0ojhv91D7zIm9nM6L1anI4
The Deadly Affair (1967) - ***½
https://open.spotify.com/album/2ntG85kFFz9J8sOFdzqKPl
Enter Laughing (1967) - Not heard
http://www.kritzerland.com/enterSyn.htm
Banning (1967) - ****½
https://lalalandrecords.com/banning-limited-edition/
In the Heat of the Night (1967) - ****
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlZ97lhc8zc
In Cold Blood (1967) - *****
https://open.spotify.com/album/7gAax1aiv5glXulIHYoVPo
Ironside theme, pilot & season 1 episodes (1967-68) - largely unreleased
Main and end title - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KE-Ze-VPeE
1966-67: The essential albums
Sinatra at the Sands https://open.spotify.com/album/2m0W0n7zBYmRNs1QAgoa6Z
1966-67: Other albums
The Movie Song Album https://open.spotify.com/album/0viEs6bCf3nP560AFtCDcn
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