Last post on 1968-74 - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=139860
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Several factors have been credited with pushing Quincy away from scoring in the mid-70s.
His film career didn’t rise in prestige after In the Heat of the Night, with many subsequent jobs coming on lesser films. With the old studio system having collapsed, director or producer relationships were the new currency, and Quincy’s only enduring one of those was with Sidney Lumet. He was too curious to reside in just one musical role or genre for too long, and he didn’t want to go out like Bernard Herrmann, the film composer Quincy revered above all others whose profile had faded in the wake of his partnership with Alfred Hitchcock imploding during the making of 1968’s Torn Curtain. Scoring deadlines were occasionally rough. Film sound mixes sometimes stripped the fidelity out of his music mixes. And surely the guy who once said he would need to learn to be good at not just music but also the music business would have recognized - even with the example of his mentor Henry Mancini - that it was not easy to make a lucrative, hit-making career purely out of film music.
Quincy also suffered a devastating brain aneurysm in August 1974, something he later compared to having sixteen strokes at once. Doctors uncovered a second one on the way while operating on him, metal plates had to be put in his head, and for a while he was thought to be on death’s door (chances put at 1 in 100), resulting in his friends putting on a memorial concert including performances by Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, and Cannonball Adderley. Quincy survived, but while he didn’t stop being any less of a night owl or a workaholic as he got back to music making, scoring clearly wasn’t a near-term priority. When Ironside composer Oliver Nelson, a man the same age as Quincy with an even more obsessive focus on his many projects in and outside of Hollywood, died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of only 43, perhaps that choice seemed even more sound.
Yet even if the injury hadn’t happened he may have pulled back anyway. Quincy often described scoring as an extremely rewarding process, one where you could be boundlessly creative and try things that wouldn’t succeed in a commercial record context. But he also acknowledged that he missed making music for music’s sake after a while. Film composing could be a lonely experience, just him sitting in a room jotting down notes without engaging with anyone else on the production for days, and part of the impetus for making Walking in Space in 1969 had been to get back in a studio with others and have fun. There would be a lot more of that in the years to come.
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After Quincy came across a demo of George and Louis Johnson, guitar- and bass-playing brothers who’d backed Billy Preston and the Supremes earlier in the decade, he pulled them into his band and had them pen four of the songs on Mellow Madness, his first album released since his aneurysm and a clear sign that he continuing to migrate from pure jazz towards R&B, funk, and soul. It sold well but also ended the streak of praise and awards he’d been on since Walking in Space (the same could be said for the subsequent I Heard That!!, salvaged only by his jubilant theme for the PBS kids show Rebop). Quincy wasn’t done with the brothers though, producing three albums for them over the next three years that all went Platinum (hitting one million copies sold) and generated the hit original singles I’ll Be Good to You and Get the Funk Out Ma Face plus their awesome covers of Strawberry Letter 23 and Come Together.
Quincy headlined his own R&B/funk/disco fusion album with 1978’s Sounds…and Stuff Like That!!, the first of his own records to go Platinum, likely on the strength of the album opener Stuff Like That which featured Chaka Khan right as the singer was starting her solo career independent from the band Rufus. She also wasn’t the only featured singer on the verge of solo stardom as Patti Austin (Quincy’s goddaughter) and Luther Vandross each appeared on several tracks. The album’s hidden strength though is its ultra-cool cover of Herbie Hancock’s Tell Me a Bedtime Story. It’s fun to speculate whether the latter track’s sensational style would’ve graced several films if he’d continued his pre-aneurysm scoring pace, but then maybe not since two of his four post-aneurysm scores had nothing to do with that sound, including the one he did before that album.
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Roots, the epic miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel of American slavery (a novel Quincy had helped finance), remains a landmark of American television and received unprecedented viewership in January 1977. But prior to airing the network’s concerns about the brutality (and selling enough ad space, in Quincy’s telling) led it to try to dump the show over eight consecutive nights rather than the originally-planned weekly release schedule. For Quincy, working on his first score since 1972, not only was this frustrating as a Black American but it was also frustrating as a composer. He’d gone home in December 1976 thinking he could start scoring the two episodes in early January and was startled to learn over the phone that not only did he have to come back but he also had a month or so to score all eight episodes. Longtime TV composer Gerald Fried was later brought in because (as he put it) Quincy had no main theme three weeks before airtime, knocked out a sweeping dramatic melody and the rest of the first episode’s score, and then scored the other episodes himself. Quincy only got a partial credit for the first episode’s score and later grumbled about feeling that the network kicked him off the show once the white characters showed up, though he also conceded to Jon Burlingame that he got too “myopic” about the first episode and didn’t work as quickly as he should have owing to being too close emotionally to the content.
But the show’s massive success quickly catalyzed demand for a soundtrack album. Quincy scrambled to get one out as soon as possible - “the fastest I’ve ever done anything in my life” - and understandably the resulting LP released in February 1977, the immensely named Roots: The Saga of an American Family - Music From and Inspired By the Daniel Wolper Production of “Roots”, was a mess, a 28-minute mix of several short performances of Fried’s theme, dialogue, source music, and other material Quincy either wrote for the first episode or arranged after. It sold exceptionally well (Quincy’s third record to go Gold or better), and the score won an Emmy Award that fall. Still, both composers got screwed; Quincy was put in an unwinnable situation after a five-year scoring hiatus, while Fried’s name was omitted from the album cover and none of his episodic scoring from this or the sequel miniseries that aired two years later has ever been officially released.
Quincy’s next gig was a fiasco: the 1978 adaptation of the Broadway musical The Wiz, a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz from the Black experience. The very adult Diana Ross made for an odd casting choice as child Dorothy, Joel Schumacher’s script jettisoned much of the stage story and dialogue in favor of self-help platitudes, and director Sidney Lumet was an awkward fit for a fantasy musical. Lumet needed someone to rearrange most of the show’s songs, develop new ones, find singers, and conduct, and even though Quincy wasn’t a fan of the songs his loyalty to Lumet compelled him to say yes. Sometimes Quincy was rather faithful to the Broadway version (adding a keyboard and orchestral flourishes to the ragtime He’s the Wizard, for example). In other cases he threw in sounds that he’d recently been exploring, namely electronics and harmonica. Some songs had minor tinkering, including upping the tempo of Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News. And a few moments of score sparkled, including the overture and Quincy’s epic ending. But the compromises inherent in the production bled into the music. Hiring Diana Ross necessitated new parts and even new songs, most of them downbeat bummers. Other aspects of the show weren’t even attempted, including having Richard Pryor sing any of the wizard’s songs. And despite Quincy’s best efforts he couldn’t remedy his initial concern: few of the songs were great, with only the conclusive Home having much staying power. He was fond of saying that a great song can elevate a lesser singer but a great singer can’t save a lesser song, so perhaps the same was true of arrangers.
The Wiz didn’t make its budget back in theaters, though Quincy attributed some of that to the challenge of getting it shown at “white theaters,” but the 1978 soundtrack album still went Gold and Quincy - who surprised himself by having a great time working on the movie - got an Oscar nomination and won a Grammy for his adaptation work. The bigger reward was reencountering the talented singer playing the Scarecrow, only nineteen at the time (Quincy first met him when he was twelve at Sammy Davis’ house) and looking for someone who could produce his next solo album. That singer’s name was Michael Jackson.
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Next time: Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves. Also Quincy phone home.
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1975-78: Film & TV scores
Rebop (1976-79)
You Have To Do It Yourself - https://open.spotify.com/track/3dpVZj0W95eIRqTeBLyHBP?si=67c83850d5d747c1
Roots (1977) - ***
https://open.spotify.com/album/4K2JMg8oaIOw4DFLQh4NUJ
The Wiz (1978) - ***
https://open.spotify.com/album/2QrINaaKpAWNtQfjzNaP5y
1975-78: The essential albums
Sounds…and Stuff Like That!! https://open.spotify.com/album/1pWRXAydf6sIrojLm5xb9l
1975-78: Other albums
Quincy’s
Mellow Madness https://open.spotify.com/album/398zGWsZLMYEXyOnPe9snO
I Heard That!! https://open.spotify.com/album/097LXhzAzGb19ibuMGyTPJ
Done for the Brothers Johnson
Look Out for #1 https://open.spotify.com/album/5IzEY3pod97kHrdt5Qt1RB
Right on Time https://open.spotify.com/album/5B1f1QwqbRhjWAExB1sofe
Blam! https://open.spotify.com/album/0XJ8s2obGRxafMiD0vpEt2
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