Last post on 1966-67 - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=139629
Refer to my profile for all posts in the series
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Quincy first reteamed with Sidney Poitier for a very different film than In the Heat of the Night: the class divide romcom For Love of Ivy. Collaborators included Maya Angelou for two songs, blues guitarist B. B. King to play those, and Shirley Horn lushly singing the tremendous title song penned by Quincy and Bob Russell (his Banning lyricist who sadly died from lymphoma two years later). For my money the MVP of the album remains the unidentified piano player. Expect a pleasant if insubstantial mix of blues, jazz, folk, and pop that’s easier on the ears than Walk, Don’t Run.
1968 also included the British thriller A Dandy in Aspic, The Counterfeit Killer, The Hell with Heroes, and Jigsaw - all constituting a bad case of being attached to middling content. His sole British work the following year was thankfully the opposite of that, as Michael Caine’s crime caper movie The Italian Job was a big hit in its home nation. Quincy tried writing a score that sounded like only a Brit could have penned it, delivering the easygoing On Days Like These, darker tones for the Mafia, parodic British outbursts for the crime lord played by Noel Coward, and defiant Cockney anthems for the film’s iconic Mini Cooper chase. The latter even featured rhyming slang that Quincy learned from Michael Caine for the riotous Getta Bloomin’ Move On finale, a piece guaranteed to enthrall as many listeners as it drives insane. Perhaps the only thing wrong with the score is how disparate all those pieces are, a small price to pay for something this outrageously entertaining.
The Western Mackenna’s Gold, produced by Dimitri Tiomkin (yes, really) and starring Gregory Peck, had its release delayed so it could be shortened by an hour. Critics savaged it and Peck later called it “wretched,” but in India it proved remarkably popular and stayed the highest-earning foreign film at the country’s box office for decades. Assistant orchestrator Fred Steiner later described Quincy as being sick and up against “a terrible deadline,” but he still managed to turn in a catchy fusion of rousing Hollywood Western scores and quirkier Italian Western music laced with some of his 1960s pop style. Quincy got another Grammy nomination for Best Score, though the music also became infamous thanks to David Letterman’s frequent parodic use of its song Old Turkey Buzzard.
The Lost Man reunited him again with Sidney Poitier. Blending orchestra, electronics, and tropical percussion, Quincy’s score may elicit some comparisons to Ennio Morricone’s music for Burn! from the same year. The album’s juxtaposition of edgy instrumentals and soulful songs seemed to anticipate the impending sounds of blaxploitation films. Like In the Heat of the Night, it’s a work less about themes and more about attitude. It got him a second Grammy nomination for Best Score in the same year; you might think Quincy cancelled himself out, but Burt Bacharach’s material for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was probably winning regardless.
Two hit comedies rounded out 1969 in film. Cactus Flower, his grooviest score, had Quincy toggling between psychedelic arrangements of songs from the Monkees and Lulu and versions of his love theme arranged by Jimmie Haskell (suggesting Quincy was overstretched this year). Equally groovy material also accompanied the sex farce Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, though that score is more notable for Quincy’s lively blues/rock adaptation of Handel’s Messiah. Also starting in 1969 was The Bill Cosby Show, the actor’s first show after the end of I Spy, for which Quincy “wanted to try totally improvised scores. We had all the themes written out and could just jam.” Quincy had different artists play on each episode across two seasons, and the original round of jam sessions - fun if a tad anonymous - finally made their way on to an album in 2004.
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His sole non-film record from 1967-69 achieved significant success: Walking in Space, his first of many albums for Herb Alpert’s A&M Records. Debuting covers of songs from the recent hit musical Hair and a joyful arrangement of the gospel tune Oh Happy Day (and also debuting the composer’s afro), Quincy proved he could capably evolve with the times. Gula Matari followed a year later with equal acclaim if not exactly equal coherence, the program containing a gospel/blues Simon & Garfunkel cover, allusions to Africa with Quincy’s titular jazz tone poem, his second arrangement of the Miles Davis piece Walkin’, and the swaggering Hummin’, though all the individual parts should still enthral provided you have the appetite for Major Holley’s duets with himself (bass & grumble-scatting). There was also Quincy’s riotous jazz-funk take on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s score from the 1970 film version of the Harold Robbins novel The Adventurers, released as the Quincy-produced Harold Robbins Presents Music From The Adventurers. The sex noises in Coming and Going may seem like a bit much, but with an album related to a trashy adaptation of a trashy book perhaps going too far was the point after all.
Funk also dominated Quincy’s score for They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, the 1970 sequel to In the Heat of the Night which put Sidney Poitier’s detective on a case in San Francisco. The sonic mix wasn’t as unique or compelling as the earlier Southern-fried score for Virgil Tibbs, but helping to offset that was the new theme Quincy wrote, a spirited and catchy jam extensively revisited throughout the score. Blaxploitation took off in American film a year later with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Shaft, and with that latter film came a popular funk style of scoring that influenced many future films and TV shows, but it’s worth noting that Quincy beat it to the punch by a year, and did it rather well too.
They Call Me Mister Tibbs! remains Quincy’s sole 1970 score to get an album, understandable as the other films were the so-so The Out-of-Towners by Neil Simon, the comedy misfire Up Your Teddy Bear, and Sidney Lumet’s deeply flawed Last of the Mobile Hot Shots. Being the first ever Black music director of the Academy Awards was easily the most notable thing he did for films in 1971, and no albums followed for his final Sindey Poitier team-up Brother John or the mediocre romance Honky, though the theme for another Lumet collaboration (The Anderson Tapes) made a jazz album. His only 1971 scores to get their own records were those for Bill Cosby’s Western Man and Boy (Quincy “supervising” J. J. Johnson’s laid back folk-funk) and the heist comedy Dollars, the latter helmed by In Cold Blood director Richard Brooks and stylized as $ despite that not being plural! Aside from a reunion with Little Richard and some of the sonic creativity from In Cold Blood, Dollars served as the 1970s equivalent of Walk, Don’t Run - goofy and all over the place, yet charming if you could navigate its excesses. More of the same followed in 1972’s crime comedy The Hot Rock with a score juxtaposing easygoing vibes with jazzy abstractions; Enimem sampled its main title drumbeat for his 2004 song Like Toy Soldiers.
1972 brought his only known replacement job with The Getaway after star Steve McQueen tossed a completed score by Jerry Fielding; Quincy released a two-track EP with arrangements of his dreamy, downbeat love theme. He also “supervised” Donny Hathaway’s score for the blaxploitation sequel Come Back Charleston Blue, an awkward mix of retro Harlem music, 1970s funk, and electric organ menace that recalled The Slender Thread. Bill Cosby’s short-lived variety show got the bouncy funk fanfares of Chump Change. Much more iconic was Quincy’s raggedy, bass harmonica-powered tune The Streetbeater for Redd Foxx’s immensely popular show Sanford and Son. “I definitely [didn’t] need to see a pilot on [that]. I worked with Foxx years ago at the Apollo [and] all the chitlin’ circuits with Billy Eckstine’s band. I wrote that in about twenty minutes.”
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Non-film work beckoned more frequently. Quincy arranged some of Billy Preston’s jubilant I Wrote a Simple Song and produced Ray Charles’ 1972 protest album A Message from the People which contained his classic rendition of America the Beautiful, but pop elements injected into Aretha Franklin’s Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) were a rare misfire during a stretch when his own albums regularly hit #1 on the U.S. jazz charts. 1971’s sensational Smackwater Jack featured a funky cover of Carole King’s song of the same name and the dynamic album premiere of his Ironside theme. 1973’s You’ve Got It Bad Girl reworked the Lovin’ Spoonfuls’ energetic Summer in the City into a simmering instrumental and debuted a funky arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban jazz standard Manteca. 1974’s Body Heat saw Quincy going deeper than ever into electronics and became his first album to get a Gold certification in the U.S. (selling at least 500,000 units). And he oversaw a star-studded TV tribute to Duke Ellington a year before the jazz legend passed away.
And then it all almost came to a screeching halt.
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Next time: A big scare, an unexpected TV hit, and a film fiasco.
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1968-74: Film & TV scores
For Love of Ivy (1968) - ***½
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7t3T5McilQ
The Split (1968) - not heard
OOP FSM album - https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/cds/detail.cfm/CDID/430/Split-The/
A Dandy in Aspic (1968) - unreleased
The Counterfeit Killer (1968) - unreleased
The Hell with Heroes (1968) - unreleased
Jigsaw (1968) - unreleased
The Italian Job (1969) - ****½
LP program - https://open.spotify.com/album/3D6klQFLS1FBo29LzHlkZc
OOP film program - https://quartetrecords.com/product/the-italian-job/
Mackenna’s Gold (1969) - ****½
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC8KmhFuMsY
The Lost Man (1969) - ***½
https://open.spotify.com/album/7sdd4oavlHUvRWVcUt9uFb
John and Mary (1969) - not heard in full
Maybe Tomorrow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TauTwavkzjA
Lost in Space - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0py8arG8GJI
Silent Movies - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C08xKfgSixs
Cactus Flower (1969) - ****
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw8WPBct97eW0s7Z5yXAozT_9bnipluSD
Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice (1969) - ****
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxv7zOpFwbUV109w5nz7cqEQMPS8yVr3X
The Bill Cosby Show (1969-71) - ***½
https://open.spotify.com/album/0JapPMitYix8B0bQbEzpMP
They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970) - ****
Main Title - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Mx4wqVXfk
The Out-of-Towners (1970) - unreleased
Up Your Teddy Bear (1970) - unreleased
Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970) - unreleased
Man and Boy (1971) - ***½
https://open.spotify.com/album/3XIDEci1Wm2M8weDFcD6rY
$ (1971) - ***
https://open.spotify.com/album/66xWBFsUeOD2UPwJ8PWklV
Brother John (1971) - unreleased
Honky (1971) - unreleased
The Anderson Tapes (1971) - largely unreleased
Theme - https://open.spotify.com/track/3YSmFff9nv1gW0bNQKCXVX?si=957ca531f8444039
The Hot Rock (1972) - ***
Highlights - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQHxyk54Lp4
Come Back Charleston Blue (1972) - **½
https://open.spotify.com/album/6eWskgWcwmM2qE2URYx9uE
Killer by Night (1972) - not heard
https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/cds/detail.cfm/CDID/470/Nightwatch-Killer-by-Night/
The Getaway (1972) - largely unreleased
EP - https://open.spotify.com/album/4jGNlXBrrWFRuwLNpUUg8A
The New Centurions (1972) - unreleased
The New Bill Cosby Show (1972-73) and Now You See It (1974-75)
Chump Change - https://open.spotify.com/track/7k63K7l2tJLMsHi546SiEc?si=92fc496b31e44748
Sanford & Son (1972-77)
The Streetbeater - https://open.spotify.com/track/6kcQuzHHNU0voleA9Jw0Zf?si=342c8c1cad1f4a25
Duke Ellington, We Love You Madly! 1973 TV special
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AQibJ-LYkY
1968-74: The essential albums
Walking in Space https://open.spotify.com/album/0o2ZKR3DbPg23bt11WiWhS
Gula Matari https://open.spotify.com/album/4YYg2f2ca3csQEu5oDha3A
Smackwater Jack https://open.spotify.com/album/7s9qCF31WJcVQf8okNTBAl
A Message from the People https://open.spotify.com/album/2dlMAOsAt5FlIMuKFT4NYa
You’ve Got It Bad Girl https://open.spotify.com/album/4fbKwL6dBzBF07dOkc2yRB
Body Heat https://open.spotify.com/album/3lvSxvMmdUz694tDBXkPmv
1968-74: Other albums
Harold Robbins Presents Music From The Adventurers https://open.spotify.com/album/0JHEetEJyixnVt4YzV81xA
I Wrote a Simple Song https://open.spotify.com/album/02xgi7oFRl22FFr9GU8t1c
Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) https://open.spotify.com/album/1i4CdMNfc1A5Vsnej3OXtp
You Smile – The Song Begins https://open.spotify.com/album/6ahVKlSwwUOIK4cQRXZ3V6
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