Quincy Jones – Q´s Jook Joint (1995)

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Q’s Jook Joint is an album by Quincy Jones that was released by Qwest Records. The album reached No. 1 on the Billboard jazz albums chart on December 30, 1995. Q’s Jook Joint won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical in 1997.

The multi-talented Quincy Jones has excelled at idiomatic combinations in his albums since the ’60s, when his mix-and-match soundtracks for television and films alerted everyone that he’d switched from a pure jazz mode to a populist trend.

Q’s Jook Joint blends the latest in hip-hop-flavored productions with sleek urban ballads, vintage standards, and derivative pieces; everything’s superbly crafted, though few songs are as exciting in their performance or daring in their conception as past Jones epics like Gula Matari or the score from Roots. Still, you can’t fault Jones for his choice of musical collaborators: everyone from newcomer Tamia to longtime stars like Ray Charles, rappers, instrumentalists, male and female vocalists, percussionists, and toasters.
The CD really conveys the seamless quality one gets from attending a juke joint, though it lacks the dirt-floor grit or blues fervor of traditional Southern and chitlin circuit hangouts. But no one’s more knowledgeable about the spectrum of African-American music, nor better able to communicate it via disc, than Quincy Jones.

A lot of the songs on this album had been recorded by Q before, some more than once. All the tracks are produced as usual with care, almost to the point of over-production; one wouldn’t expect anything less than that on a Quincy Jones album.
For anybody else, Q’s Jook Joint would have been a smash. Not for Q, though, not at all. The idea to reload old hits from the glamor days with old friends and survivors of the biz was already successfully carried out on Back On The Block – and then Q was right on time as a lot of those stars passed away soon after the recording (Miles, Ella, Sarah).

And now, at a time when the man starts to retreat from active participation in show biz, he decides to record – Rock with You – he recorded it with Michael Jackson, why would he expect to top that? He doesn’t. Is It Love That We’re Missing? from his Mellow Madness album already appeared on compilations, and it’s really not such a great song. So it goes on with almost the entire set. It would have been so much more creative for Q to reconsider his Jazz roots…

One song, however, has that old Quincy Jones magic, At The End Of The Day: casually loaded with heavies like Barry White and Take 6, it features Toots Thielemans at the top of his powers. His harmonica is not from this world.

Looking back to this release, the song At The End Of The Day sounds like an aptly titled swan song for Q’s true gifts. The R&B releases that followed were totally superfluous, as far as creativity is concerned. (There was a release, the labor of love, Basie & Beyond, from the year 2000, that was worth the effort, but that’s another story).

Track listing

1 “Jook Joint” (Intro)  (feat. Kid Capri, James Moody, Stevie Wonder, Lester Young, Brandy, Funkmaster Flex) – 1:32
2   “Let the Good Times Roll”  (feat. Stevie Wonder, Bono, Ray Charles) – 2:55
3   “Cool Joe, Mean Joe (Killer Joe)”  (feat. Queen Latifah, Tone Loc) – 7:32
4   “You Put a Move on My Heart”  (feat. Tamia) – 6:13
5   “Rock with You”  (feat. Brandy, Heavy D) – 4:08
6   “Moody’s Mood for Love”  (feat. Brian McKnight, Rachelle Ferrell, Take 6, James Moody) – 4:18
7   “Stomp”  (feat. Luke Cresswell, Everett Bradley, Melle Mel, Coolio, Fiona Wilkes) – 6:16
8   “Jook Joint” (Reprise)  (feat. Ray Charles, Funkmaster Flex) – 0:56
9   “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me”  (feat. Phil Collins) – 3:57
10 “Is It Love That We’re Missing”  (feat. Gloria Estefan, Warren Wiebe) – 4:45
11 “Heaven’s Girl”  (feat. R. Kelly, Ron Isley, Aaron Hall, Charlie Wilson) – 5:26
12   “Stuff Like That”  (feat. Charlie Wilson, Ray Charles, Brandy, Chaka Khan, Ashford & Simpson) – 5:45
13   “Slow Jams”  (feat. Babyface, SWV, Tamia, Barry White) – 7:30
14   “At the End of the Day (Grace)”  (feat. Toots Thielemans, Barry White) – 7:42
15   “Jook Joint” (Outro)  (feat. Barry White, Tamia, Toots Thielemans) – 0:49