My Buddy

Album3: Quincy Jones, Q – The Musical Biography, Rhino R2 74363-2, 1991.
DVD: Quincy Jones & Claude Nobs Present: Montreux Jazz Festival 1991 & 1992, Montreux, S.a. (track #20).

In the 1984 documentary I Love Quincy, the protagonist surprised the film makers by giving them a tape that he had just found back, advising them to let Ray Charles listen to it, and to film that. On the tape we hear Ray, sitting in a hotel room, briefing Quincy on arranging a few songs for his album The Genius Of Ray Charles, from 1959. One of the tunes is My Buddy (which didn’t make it to any recording at that time). Ray, on camera, finally does an unplugged My Buddy, that Quincy wanted to use for the documentary’s sound score.

Ray’s arrangement suggestion for Quincy (as presented on Pure Genius):

Remarkably, there is also an audiotape of a working session (probably from the early 1970s), where Feller and Charles discussed and worked on the arrangement of the song…

The next thing we know, is that Ray played the song during the 1991 Montreux Festival, that was programmed and presented by Q. This version, so far, was only released as part of Q – The Musical Biography (30 seconds of that can be listened to here).

Montreux ’91:

Finally, Ray performed the song – in an even frailer mode – at Q’s Kennedy Center honoring in 2001: