1 Main Title from "The Wiz" (Overture, Pt. 1) 2:34
2 Overture, Pt. 2 2:03
3 The Feeling That We Have 3:30
4 Can I Go On 1:56
5 Glinda's Theme 1:09
6 Listen Now! He's the Wizard 2:52
7 Soon as I Get Home/Home 4:01
8 You Can't Win 3:14
9 Ease on Down the Road #1 3:19
10 What Would I Do If I Could Feel? 2:18
11 Slide Some Oil to Me 2:19
12 Ease on Down the Road #2 1:30
13 I'm a Mean Ole Lion 2:23
14 Ease on Down the Road #3 1:24
15 Poppy Girls 3:27
16 Be a Lion 4:04
17 End of the Yellow Brick Road 1:01
18 Emerald City Sequence 6:41
19 So You Wanted to See the Wizard 2:48
20 Is This What Feeling Gets? (Dorothy's Theme) 3:13
21 Don't Noboby Bring Me No Bad News 3:01
22 A Brand New Day 7:51
23 Believe in Yourself (Dorothy) 2:54
24 The Good Witch Glinda 1:10
25 Believe in Yourself (Reprise) 2:13
26 Home 3:27
AMG.com
Director Sidney Lumet's big budget film version of The Wiz, an updated
musical treatment of The Wizard of Oz with songs by Charlie Smalls, is
not remembered as one of the great movie musicals. But you wouldn't
know that from this elaborate double-LP soundtrack album, on which
Smalls's Broadway score is augmented by music written by producer
Quincy Jones, Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, and Luther Vandross.
Jones organized a studio band of New York jazz veterans, including
Toots Thielemans, Eric Gale, Michael Brecker, and Richard Tee, and of
course the cast provides spectacular vocal firepower in the persons of
Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. The result was a Top 40, gold-selling
album paced by a Top 40 single of "Ease on Down the Road" by Ross and
Jackson (outperforming the 1975 version by Consumer Rapport), as well
as the chart single "You Can't Win," by Jackson. Much comparison has
been made between the vocal (not to mention the facial) resemblance
between Ross and Jackson; here's the only place to hear them together.
by William Ruhlmann