NEW YORK — The memories come flashing back when Quincy Jones watches the DVD of himself as a young man directing his "dream" jazz big band that barnstormed through Europe in 1960 after unrest in Paris forced the musical they were performing in to close.
Jones recalls that year as a turning point in his career before he went on to become an acclaimed Hollywood and TV composer, producer of pop megahits such as Michael Jackson's "Thriller," and entertainment industry mogul.
"Quincy Jones -- Live in '60" is one of nine DVDs in the recently released "Jazz Icons" series featuring long-lost concert and studio film footage from the 1950s through the 1970s of such influential jazz artists as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Chet Baker. The film was uncovered in European TV vaults and nearly all of the material is being released officially for the first time.
The series' producers, San Diego-based Reelin' in the Years Productions, believe the DVD contains the only known film footage of Jones' 1959-61 big band. The DVD showcases Jones' tight ensemble arrangements and colorful orchestrations, including piccolo-flute duets on "Lester Leaps In," Julius Watkins' French horn solo on "Everybody's Blues," and fluegelhorn and muted trumpet backgrounds on the ballad "The Gypsy" featuring alto saxophonist Phil Woods.
"Quincy Jones is internationally acclaimed as one of the greatest arrangers in history," said "Jazz Icons" co-producer Phil Galloway. "But people don't remember him so much as a great big-band leader, and his 1960 big band is revered as one of the great all-time big bands."
Jones, the only one of the "Jazz Icons" headliners still alive, says that watching the two 1960 concerts filmed in Belgium and Switzerland evokes "a whole collage of emotions."
"That's 40 years ago, and it hits you hard. No. 1, I'd kill for that waistline. I was 118 pounds then. Now I'm about 218," said a laughing Jones, 73, speaking by telephone from his Los Angeles home. "It reminds me of all the struggles we went through, the good times and the bad times."
In 1959, Jones, a trumpeter who had established a reputation as a composer-arranger for Count Basie, Duke Ellington and his old Seattle buddy Ray Charles, got his big break when producer John Hammond asked him to put together a big band for Harold Arlen's blues musical, "Free and Easy," which was to tour Europe before coming to Broadway.
