This material is not short of reissues, and some of the six albums included here can be found on fairly recent collections from Avid, Fresh Sound, Pollwinners, and Lonehill. However, this is the most comprehensive current release of Jones’ studio LPs recorded in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, either side of his not-very-successful European tour in 1960 with the musical Free and Easy. So we have This is How I feel About Jazz; Go West, Man!; Birth of a Band; The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones; I Dig Dancers; and Around The World, originally made for either ABC or Mercury, all gathered in one place. By this time Jones had cut his teeth as an arranger and trumpeter for Lionel Hampton and for Dizzy Gillespie's big band, not to mention freelance charts for many other bands including the Basie Orchestra. All that experience and the cream of East and West coast session players, some of whom doubled in his erstwhile touring band, makes this a very consistent set of material at a moment of consolidation in the post swing era big band. As expected, amid the standards and pieces by other leading composers and arrangers, there are plenty of Jones originals, from the early ‘Stockholm Sweetnin’’, via ‘Evening in Paris’, to ‘Birth of a Band’, and later pieces such as ‘Hot Sake’, and ‘Come Back to Sorrento’.

An essential release if you don't have a Jones collection, and a good gap-filler if you do, with good clear remastering, and solo contributions from a veritable who's who of the jazz world at the dawn of the 1960s.