Bulletin from Quincy's Myspace:
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Hey friends of Q,
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the theatrical release of "The Wiz," Quincy's first collaboration with Michael Jackson.
Read all about it and more at QuincyJones.com.
Best,
QuincyJones.com staff
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Here's what's on his website:
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Today (October 24) marks the 30th anniversary of the theatrical release of The Wiz, the film adaptation of the 1975 Broadway musical that shifted L. Frank Baum’s famed novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to a ’70s urban environment with an R&B-flavored soundtrack.
Although the film was a commercial and critical disappointment at the time of its initial release, it’s looked at more favorably today. As of this writing, the film scored a B+ from the nearly 800 users that rated the film on Yahoo! Movies.
The Wiz is important to Quincy’s career because it marked a few key collaborations, most notably the first time he worked with a young Michael Jackson.
It also reunited Quincy with director Sidney Lumet, who gave Q his American film-scoring big break by enlisting him to score The Pawnbroker in 1964. Quincy and Lumet went on to work on five other films together, including The Deadly Affair (1967), Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (1970), and The Anderson Tapes (1971). In fact, it was Lumet who drafted Quincy into the project, although Quincy was not initially enthused about working on the film. Noting that Lumet had given him his first big break, Quincy wrote in Q, his 2001 autobiography, “I felt I owned him more than one; I owed him a lot.”
Quincy was credited as the music supervisor handling orchestrations, music adaptation, song arranging, dance arranging, and co-writing of additional songs for the film: “Is This What Feeling Gets” and “Can I Go On?,” with lyricists Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson and “Green, Red and Gold—Emerald City sequence,” with lyricist Charlie Small. Q also made an uncredited cameo in the film as Emerald City pianist sporting a stunning gold suit.
“Michael was the best thing that came out of The Wiz for me along with finally getting to work with Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson,” Quincy wrote in Q. “I took great pride in having been one of their friends since the sixties and one of their rare collaborators in the years to follow on several wonderful songs.”
According to Quincy, he first met Michael in 1972 when he was 12 at a party at Sammy Davis Jr.’s home. At the party, friends gathered around the television to watch the Jackson Five’s performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which Davis had recorded on an early version of the VCR. Michael recalls there first meeting at a dinner for Muhammad Ali.
Whatever the case, The Wiz marked their first collaboration, even if it wasn’t particularly successful from a chart standpoint. In the film, Jackson portrayed the Scarecrow, while Diana Ross was cast as Dorothy. The pair sang a duet on the single “Ease on Down the Road,” co-produced by Quincy. Despite the pairing of two Motown stars, the single peaked at number 17 and 41, respectively, on the R&B and pop charts, while the soundtrack album stalled at number 33 and 40, respectively, on the Black and Pop Albums chart. Another song from the soundtrack, “You Can’t Win (Part 1),” was released as Jackson’s first solo on Epic. It peaked at number 42 on the R&B chart.
Yet, despite the lukewarm chart success, The Wiz did have some highpoints. For one, Quincy received his fourth Academy Award nomination for Best Adaption Score, for The Wiz. And of course, Q and Michael would go on to collaborate on such history-making albums as Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad.
It turns out there was plenty of magic in The Wiz’s yellow brick road after all.
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