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Being in Paris also opened Jones to new artistic and intellectual life: ". . . I got to meet incredible people such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Françoise Sagan, Josephine Baker, Pablo Picasso, even Porfirio Rubirosa. That year was wonderful," he told Playboy in 1990. In addition, Jones' time with Boulanger gave him a measure of legitimacy that his jazz experience could not. It also made him a sophisticated man.
He returned to Europe in 1959, this time as the musical director of a show by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer called Free And Easy. Instead of taking the usual route of holding tryouts in various U.S. cities, the producers decided to test the production in Europe for six months. Given a guarantee of two years' work, Jones was able to attract such luminous players as alto saxophonist Phil Woods, trumpeter Clark Terry, trombonists Melba Liston and Quentin Jackson, French horn player Julius Watkins, and reedman Jerome Richardson. The two-year period planned for runs in Europe, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, with an opening on Broadway. It was a dream gig, and many thought it signaled the return of the big band as a viable commercial venture. Down Beat covered the formation of the show's band with great fanfare in the spring and fall of 1959. "It's a fabulous thing," Jones said at the time. "We expect it's going to run a long time on Broadway." The show left for Europe at the end of 1959.
But the play never made it to Broadway. It never made it back to the United States. Indeed, it never even finished its European run. It closed in Paris in March 1960. Instead of dissolving the band, Jones tried to meet the $4,000 to $5,000 per week payroll to keep the musicians working, believing that a group that solid would survive in Europe. In a timely gesture, Norman Granz hired the band for a three-week tour with Nat "King" Cole. There were other gigs, but they were not enough. By the end of 1960 Jones was over $100,000 in debt, a staggering sum of money at the time. Several years later he said, "It was the closest I ever came to suicide."
In the summer of 1961 Jones finally gave up, and the band folded. Keeping the group together was defeating his purpose for having it in the first place. "You're out there for nothing, losing all your money; and your idea was to get a band to play your own music in a seasoned, developed way. You end up being a manager, a road manager, everything else but an arranger," he told Down Beat in 1962. Even in Europe, where the music was supposedly loved and treated with great respect, jazz-at least big band jazz-could not pay its own way.
It took Jones seven years to free himself from debt. He hocked his publishing companies and his songs in an attempt to keep the band afloat. Perhaps he had the last laugh: In the early 1970s, among college undergraduates, especially black undergraduates, some of the most popular records were Walking In Space (1969), Gula Matari, (1970), Smackwater Jack (1971), and Body Heat (1974). Jones had succeeded with a new generation of young people to create music written and arranged for a big band pop sound again-and he even managed to make some of it funky.
After Jones returned from Europe in 1961, Irving Green at Mercury Records hired him as an A&R man (short for artists and repertoire and very much like a producer today). Green promoted him to Vice President the following year, making Jones the first black person with such a position at a white-owned label. In his new role, he worked doggedly as a producer, arranger, and a touring musical director for several artists. He also discovered Lesley Gore during this time and began producing her teen hits. In addition, between 1961 and 1965 Jones made records for Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington, Brook Benton, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Billy Eckstine.
If Jones wasn't busy enough during the Mercury years, he was also establishing himself as a composer of film music, a prospect that eventually lured him from the record company. In 1963 director Sidney Lumet, husband of Lena Horne's daughter, asked Jones to write the music for his movie The Pawnbroker. Lumet specifically wanted a somber but searing jazzlike score, and Jones met his needs perfectly.
After the job, Jones relocated to Hollywood in 1965 to make it as film scorer. That same year he worked on Mirage, a film starring Gregory Peck, and Walk, Don't Run, Cary Grant's last film. When one Hollywood executive learned that Jones was black, he resisted keeping Jones on his project, but Henry Mancini came to Jones' defense. Still, the entrenched industry racism and skepticism about his ability to provide anything other than a jazz-derived arrangement meant Jones had to work his way slowly into the film-scoring game. Benny Carter, an established jazzman and another black then working in Hollywood, got him work doing the music for television shows in the interim.
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