Winner of a Grammy Legend Award in 1992, Quincy Jones is still active within the music industry after a 70-year career. Jones has become one of the most prominent personalities in popular music as a trumpeter and pianist who became an arranger, composer, bandleader, record producer and film & TV producer. Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor.

He moved easily between musical genres, producing pop hit records for Lesley Gore in the early 1960s (including It’s My Party) and serving as an arranger and conductor for several collaborations between the jazz artists Frank Sinatra and Count Basie in the same time period. Leading his own highly-acclaimed big band, Jones toured the world, although it failed to make money, with Jones saying: “We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That’s when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business.”

This 56-track set comprises jazz and big band recordings from his early career leading his own band, and includes all the titles from his original LPs This Is How I Feel About Jazz and Go West, Man! for ABC-Paramount, and The Birth Of A Band, The Great Wide World Of Quincy Jones, I Dig Dancers and Around The World for Mercury. It’s a revealing insight into his skills as a composer and arranger and a feast of highly contemporary and sophisticated top-class big band music.

In 2013, Jones was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as the winner, alongside Lou Adler, of the Ahmet Ertegun Award Now aged 89, Jones was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time.

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