Dinah Washington and Quincy Jones And His OrchestraThe – The Swingin’ Miss “D” (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 52:18 minutes | 521 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © RevOla
Dinah Washington was accompanied by an orchestra organized and conducted by Quincy Jones on this 1957 album, and she was singing to arrangements mostly written by the young bandleader, swing charts of pop standards by the likes of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. The result had much in common with the swing albums of Frank Sinatra in the same period, especially because Jones’ arrangements were heavily influenced by Billy May and Nelson Riddle. Sinatra’s records were regarded as “pop, ” of course, and Washington’s, at least when released on the EmArcy subsidiary of Mercury Records, as “jazz, ” but her precise articulation and attention to lyrical meaning left little room for improvisation, and while Jones allowed for brief solos from a band that included Charlie Shavers, Clark Terry, Urbie Green, and Milt Hinton, the jazz categorization was actually arbitrary. Whatever musical genre you assign it to, however, this is an excellent Washington album. [For the 1998 reissue, Verve added seven bonus tracks recorded around the same time and with much the same personnel, though they were intended as singles and thus are inferior contemporary tunes. Often, however, Washington sounds more comfortable and enthusiastic on these pop and R&B songs than she does on the standards.]
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Quincy Jones – Ultimate Collection (2002)
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 75:34 minutes | Scans included | 3,04 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 1,36 GB
In 1974, Quincy Jones, who already had a wide range of musical credits behind him, opted to enter the R&B mainstream by hiring vocalists and overseeing recordings in a commercial vein released under his name. The first of them was Body Heat, which went gold, and Jones followed with a series of records including 1981’s million-selling The Dude and the 1990 Album of the Year Grammy-winner Back on the Block. Meanwhile, he switched record labels, leaving A&M for his own Warner-distributed Qwest in the early ’80s. That has tended to make the assembly of a comprehensive best-of difficult, but Universal’s Hip-O reissue division specializes in licensing material from other labels to construct its Ultimate Collection releases, and this one borrows seven out of 18 tracks from Qwest to add to Jones’ A&M hits, making it the definitive one-disc compilation of Jones’ pop/R&B recordings of 1974-1999. Jones himself participated in the selection, which does not strictly follow chart rankings, since a couple of R&B Top 20 hits (“I Don’t Go for That” and “Slow Jams”) are missing, while a few non-chart items are included. To get more songs in, the singles edits have been used in many cases. But all the major hits are here. The chronological sequencing allows an appreciation of how Jones’ approach changed over the years. The ’70s stuff, which holds up surprisingly well, is tasty R&B, much of it groove-oriented, up-tempo music. By the late ’80s, however, there are a lot of big, bland ballads that showcase superstar vocalists (Ray Charles, Barry White, etc.) and sound self-important. Like his protégé, Michael Jackson, who went from the rocking “Billie Jean” to the messianic “Man in the Mirror” in the same period, Jones seems to have begun believing his press clippings, and his work suffered accordingly.
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