1. Dead End (Galt MacDermot/Gerome Ragni/James Rado)
  2. Walking in Space (Galt MacDermot/Gerome Ragni/James Rado)
  3. Killer Joe (Benny Golson)
  4. Love and Peace (Arthur Adams)
  5. I Never Told You (from That Cold Day in the Park) (Johnny Mandel/Arthur Hamilton)
  6. Oh Happy Day (Edwin Hawkins)

Quincy Jones – leader
Paul Griffin – piano (03)
Bob James – electric piano (01, 02, 04-06)
Eric Gale – guitar (all solos)
Toots Thielemans – guitar (01, 02, 05), harmonica (05)
Ray Brown – bass (03), electric bass
Chuck Rainey – electric bass (04)
Grady Tate (01-03, 05), Bernard Purdie (04, 06) – drums  
Freddie Hubbard – trumpet (solo 02), flugelhorn (all solos)
Marvin Stamm – trumpet, flugelhorn
John Frosk – trumpet, flugelhorn (except 03)
Snooky Young (01, 02, 05), Lloyd Michaels (03, 04, 06), Dick Williams (03) – trumpet, flugelhorn
Jimmy Cleveland – trombone (solo 02)
Tony Studd – trombone 
Kai Winding, George Jeffers – trombone (01, 02, 05)
J.J. Johnson (03, 04, 06), Alan Ralph (03, 04, 06), Norman Pride (04, 06) – trombone
Joel Kaye – saxophone, flute, reeds
Roland Kirk – saxophone (tenor solo 02), flute, reeds
Hubert Laws – saxophone (tenor solo 04), flute (solo 02, 03, 06), reeds
Jerome Richardson – saxophone (soprano solo 05), flute, reeds
Valerie Simpson – vocals (02, 03, 06 – solo 02)
Hilda Harris, Marilyn Jackson, Maretha Stewart – vocals (02, 03, 06)

Produced by Creed Taylor

Arranged and conducted by Quincy Jones, except 05 arranged by Bob James

Originally issued as A&M SP 3023
              also issued as CAMINADO POR EL ESPACIO (A&M HDAS 371-40 [Spain])

Recorded on June 18 (03) and 19 (01, 02, 04-06), 1969, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

01 and 02 published by EMI U Catalog, Inc. (ASCAP)
03 published by Time Step Music (ASCAP)
04 published by BMG Blue/Terlawn Music (BMI)
05 published by Bienstock Publishing Company/Quartet Music (ASCAP)
06 published by Edwin R. Hawkins Music Co./Kama-Rippa-Music, Inc. (ASCAP)

(P) 1969

Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. (1933-2024) not only brought new life to A&M/CTI but he may well be behind its ultimate demise. Creed Taylor and Jones, or Q as he was widely known, came up together in New York City in the early fifties. They were friends and neighbors and often found themselves working on some of the same sessions. Taylor produced Jones’ first album under his own name, This Is How I Feel About Jazz (with sideman including Zoot Sims, Milt Jackson and Charles Mingus) in 1956 and the two worked together again on Billy Taylor’s 1957 album My Fair Lady Loves Jazz (reissued on Impulse in 1964 when the musical was filmed). From there, Q’s career skyrocketed in many different directions. He went to Paris to work at Barclay Records and, while there, studied with the legendary Nadia Boulanger. A lengthy spell at Mercury Records followed, where in addition to recording many albums, he was appointed A&R director in 1961, then vice president in 1964. During this time Jones arranged dates for Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis and others and produced jazz records by Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Eckstine and pop hits for Lesley Gore. Taylor recruited Jones to arrange a substantial part of Ray Charles’ Impulse classic Genius + Soul = Jazz (1961) – including the album’s hit, “One Mint Julep.” It is likely Taylor who nabbed Jones away from his Mercury contract to record his lone Impulse outing, The Quintessence, in 1961, but Taylor had left the label by the time Q came to record the Bob Thiele-produced album. One of Q’s biggest fans, the film director Sidney Lumet, later recruited Jones to score his 1965 film The Pawnbroker, launching the composer on yet another facet of his storied career. In the first four years of his film-scoring life, Quincy Jones scored a remarkable two dozen films – many starring Sidney Poitier (most notably In the Heat of the Night, also with Ray Charles) – and the memorable theme and scores for the first six episodes of the TV show “Ironside” (1967-75).

In 1969, perhaps only Creed Taylor could credibly persuade Q to come back home to jazz – something Herb Alpert no doubt suggested and encouraged Taylor to pursue. But even if Taylor wasn’t footing the bill, the price was probably a bit too high for this particular producer. Acquiring Q meant that this composer-arranger – and a producer in his own right – had the ability to select the songs he wanted to record and choose the sidemen he wanted to work with. This was an unprecedented development in Taylor’s relationship with A&M and likely planted the seeds for the producer’s split from the label.1 Indeed, the two LPs Taylor produced for Jones at A&M have a very different feel and flavor than the other albums in the series, with less reliance on Top 40 hits and more of the artist’s favored themes, longer (and, as a result, fewer) songs and more diverse players getting solo spots. Surely, Q’s albums differed from Taylor’s formula, but they were similarly (and, arguably, better) geared toward commercial ends. They remain among the series’ strongest outings and, ironically enough, influenced Taylor in developing the more album-oriented presentations of his independent CTI albums.

Recorded over two days in June 1969 during a two-week hiatus between films and released five months later, Walking in Space 2 is Quincy Jones at the top of his game. It is a welcome return that sounds years removed from – and ahead of – the previous record under his name, Quincy’s Got A Brand New Bag (1965). From the West Coast, Q brought his musical (and business) partner, bassist Ray Brown, and filled the rest of the chairs with his favorite New York City studio men. “After all the films and tons of TV,” said Jones, “I was more than ready to return to the record business. I wanted to throw away the clock and just stretch out in the studio with my favorite musicians…like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Toots Thielemans, Hubert Laws and Freddie Hubbard. With the first-time pairing of Ray Brown on bass playing his trademark ‘hoong-giddy-ding’ and Grady Tate doing his ‘spang-a-lang’ in the rhythm section, the groove was so hot that I almost had to pour cold water on the two of them.”3 Like a director helming a film, Jones is nominally in charge. But while he lays the foundation and guides the building of the piece, he lets his collaborators do what they do best to bring about his vision. The album is a potent reminder of what Q was initially known for – great charts and first-rate players – and a new way of hearing how well jazz can be popularized without being compromised.

Ray Brown’s bass and Bob James’ electric piano kick off the album’s opener, “Dead End,” by laying down an insidiously funky blues groove that is anything but a “dead end.” Eric Gale wails beautifully on guitar on the first of two pieces from Galt MacDermott’s hit musical Hair.4 Seamlessly plaited by Ray Brown’s supple bobs and bounces, “Dead End” gives way to the album’s terrific title track. Freddie Hubbard and Valerie Simpson (in her vocal debut) introduce us to the epic odyssey, “Walking in Space,” before unleashing soloists Hubert Laws, Jimmy Cleveland (an old Jones compadre), Bob James, the muted Freddie Hubbard, the appropriately otherworldly Roland Kirk and, finally, Eric Gale. Ray Brown and Grady Tate appropriately jettison the groove in and out of musical spheres.

Benny Golson’s “Killer Joe,” gets its strolling pace from Brown on upright bass and Tate on drums and its singing solos from Laws and the again-muted Hubbard. First heard on Golson’s 1960 album with Art Farmer, Meet the Jazztet, “Killer Joe” is now considered a jazz standard, due in large part to Q’s hit cover, which cracked Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at number 74 in May 1970. Jones would cover the song again in 1995 on Q’s Jook Joint, with features for vocalists Nancy Wilson, Queen Latifah and Töne Löc. The Jazz Crusaders’ “Love and Peace” gets its soulful gospel groove from Eric Gale, bassist Chuck Rainey (who would go on to work on a number of Quincy Jones albums and soundtracks throughout the seventies) and drummer Bernard Purdie, with solos from Gale and Hubert Laws, magical on tenor sax. Bob James steps in to provide the Jonesian chart for “I Never Told You,” a haunting though little-known Johnny Mandel tune from the Robert Altman film That Cold Day in the Park, with features for James, Toots Thielemans on harmonica and Jerome Richardson on soprano sax. Finally, Roland Kirk and Hubert Laws bring their signature sounds to rouse the choir into a joyous “Oh Happy Day.”5 The song, Edwin Hawkins’ updated arrangement of an 18th century hymn, concludes the album on a high note, much the way an encore at a concert might. A true revival.

“I just wanted to stretch out,” said Q, “and be free from the limitations of synchronization in the movie business. Along with Isaac Hayes’ ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ [on Hot Buttered Soul], and Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, this record was one of the foundational records of black FM radio.”6 DownBeat awarded Walking in Space four and a half stars, the highest ranking of any of the A&M/CTI records reviewed by the magazine. “All in all, a beautiful album,” concludes writer Harvey Siders. Possibly docking the album half a star for its slick presentation, Siders adds, however, “perhaps a little too beautiful.” The reviewer would have preferred a little less “predictability” and a few more “rough edges” along the way. Still, he concedes that Quincy Jones has perfected something here: “He has a healthy outlook towards the art of jazz that seems to say ‘happiness is a chart that swings.’ Surely, this collection of charts swings unabashedly.”7 Ultimately, Walking in Space reached an impressive number 56 on Billboard’s Top 200 while the album itself earned a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance. “Killer Joe” reached number 47 on the R&B chart and became Q’s first-ever song to break the Hot 100, hitting number 72.

About the cover: “Quincy Jones” (1969 – New York): This iconic cover is the first in the catalog without Antupit’s familiar “frame,” giving Q’s familiar visage an appropriate sense of the weightlessness in open space. Unlike the moody shadow playing over Quincy Jones on the 1962 Impulse album The Quintessence, Turner turns in a mostly unaffected portrait here. Again, Turner knows a great face when he sees one.  It’s all this cover needs; the angle is perfect. “This is the years that Afros were in and man walked on the moon,” Turner said. “It was great to see all these people defying gravity in one way or another. So I shot Quincy on an angle instead of straight on, and the placement on the cover suggested the rest.”8

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Endnotes:

  1. Others noticed, too. In an April 30, 1970, DownBeat article (“The Works of Mann”), Leonard Feather noted that the most successful jazz albums of the 50s and 60s were those where the artist laid down whatever was musically valid to the artist themselves, rather than those subjected to the record company’s commercial considerations. Feather cites Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Herbie Mann as such artists – and hints that the commercial formulas were those very much followed (or set) by producers like Creed Taylor. “Quincy Jones’ Walkin’ in Space [sic],” Feather adds, “is the kind of album many producers would have tried their damnedest to dissuade him from making…but it’s an album that reflects the artistic beliefs of the leader in which a&r man Creed Taylor evidently had faith.” Given how much of the independent CTI output reflected this ethos – and how those records came to define “the CTI sound” – it’s fair to say that Quincy Jones taught Creed Taylor the value of the producer-as-collaborator over what Bob Gluck, author of “You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band,” calls “’the engineer and producer are totally in charge’ model at Blue Note, CTI, and other jazz labels.” (Or, Feather perfectly illustrated the lesson to the aggrieved Taylor right here). ↩︎
  2. The album was originally scheduled to be titled simply Quincy Jones. The change was no doubt due to the universal excitement generated by Apollo 11, the first manned mission to land on the moon on July 20, 1969, a mere month after the album was recorded. During that Apollo 11 mission, Jones’ arrangement of Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon” with the Basie band was broadcast back to earth (Paul de Barros, “Q’s Moon Walk: MJF Reprises Quincy Jones’ A&M Years,” “MJF59: Monterey Jazz Festival Magazine, “September 16-18, 2016, p. 20).  ↩︎
  3. Jones, Quincy, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (Doubleday, New York, 2001), pp. 211-12. Interestingly, Walking in Space is one of the few of his own recordings Jones even mentions in the book. ↩︎
  4. Drummer Idris Muhammad, recording at the time for A&M/CTI as Leo Morris, was at the time in the pit band of the original Hair production and is the drummer on The Original Broadway Cast Recording – Hair (RCA Victor LSO-1150). ↩︎
  5. Jones and Brown would cut a substantially different version of “Oh Happy Day” for “The Bill Cosby Show” soundtrack several months later, with Milt Jackson on vibes and Monty Alexander on piano giving the song a bluesier feeling. This version can be heard on Quincy Jones and Bill Cosby: The Original Jam Sessions 1969 (issued in 2004). ↩︎
  6. Quincy Jones with Bill Gibson, Q on Producing, (Hal Leonard Books, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2010), p. 223. ↩︎
  7. Harvey Siders, “Quincy Jones: Walking in Space,” DownBeat, March 5, 1970, pp. 21-24. ↩︎
  8. Turner, Pete, The Color of Jazz (Rizzolli, New York), 2006, p. 35. ↩︎