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Quincy Jones’ 10 Best Scores for Film & Television

Quincy Jones' film and TV scores and soundtracks: 10 best.

It also led to an ambitious (albeit short) soundtrack, where Jones tracks a musical sojourn that starts in Africa, travels across the Atlantic in shackles, ends up on auction blocks in the American South and begins to catch a glimpse of freedom during the Civil War. Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and talk show host-turned actor Oprah Winfrey (at the behest of Jones), the film sets its action against a sonic background that integrates classical and period jazz along with blues/ragtime and gospel. Jones wrote in his memoir that In the Heat of the Night was one of 35 film scores he’d composed by the late ’60s that burned him out — “hits and flops, some of which I can’t remember and some of which shouldn’t be remembered.” Conspicuously not in that category is this funky, authoritative orchestral soundtrack, starring Ray Charles on the title track, avant-garde jazz giant Roland Kirk on flute for the frenetic “Cotton Curtain” and Glen Campbell on vocals in “Bowlegged Polly.” Snippets of Sidney Poitier, as Philly homicide detective Virgil Tibbs, are reminders that Norman Jewison’s incisive 1967 film noir about racism in America is the best way to experience the music, swinging between the goofy light and suspenseful dark.

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