The Quintessence

Having enjoyed some Quincy Jones's '50s and '60s big band arrangements for the likes of Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra, I thought it just as well to check out an example of the the music released under his own name. Here, with his orchestra in 1961, is his sole release on the Impulse! label The Quintessence which I bought second-hand last year on CD.

The orchestra sound fantastic, as one might expect when it featured such notable players as Freddie Hubbard, Clark Terry, Thad Jones, Curtis Fuller and Oliver Nelson, the last-named then on the verge of beginning his own career as a composer/conductor/arranger. Three of the tracks are Jones originals, with another two by his assistant, trombonist Billy Byers. The covers include the Benny Golson number 'Little Karen', and a high-octane version of Thelonious Monk's 'Straight, No Chaser'.

Its eight tracks barely extending to half an hour, this is a short album, but an impeccably sharp one. The sleeve notes, courtesy of Lennie Hayton and Lena Horne, are unusually amusing for a record of this vintage, which is a bonus.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

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Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

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