Remembering Quincy Jones
The legendary music producer lived a full life on borrowed time
Quincy Jones, who passed Sunday at the age of 91, lived a long, full life, most of it deeply involved in music. Over half that life was on borrowed time.
It was 1974. By that point, Jones had enjoyed a full career, coming up through jazz. He’d begun as a trumpeter, moving to leading his own band. He could compose, arrange and produce, working with the likes of Frank Sinatra (such instantly recognizable standards as “Fly Me to the Moon” and “The Best Is Yet to Come”) and Lesley Gore (hits like “It’s My Party” and “You Don’t Own Me.”).
This led to film work. He got his start when editor Ralph Rosenblum suggested to director Sidney Lumet that Jones’ musical style would be a better fit for the score to The Pawnbroker, a devastating character study of an emotionally closed down Holocaust survivor played by Rod Steiger.
Over the next decade, he composed the scores to films like In Cold Blood, In The Heat of the Night, The Italian Job and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
Those credits came with some reluctance in Hollywood. He’d later recall how his first Hollywood meeting had a producer immediately leave the room after entering because he didn’t know Jones was Black.
The author of In Cold Blood drew Jones’ ire.
“Truman Capote, that motherfucker, he called [director] Richard Brooks up on In Cold Blood and said, ‘Richard, I don’t understand why you’ve got a Negro doing the music for a film with no people of color in it.’ And Richard Brooks said, ‘Fuck you, he’s doing the music.’ Richard was tough,” Jones told GQ six years ago.
He’d come up with sounds that made their way into the pop culture landscape — the Ironside theme (used in Kill Bill) and “The Streetbeater,” which was used as the recognizable theme for the then hugely-popular Sanford and Son. He’d even come up with music that would hit that pop culture later with 1962’s “Soul Bossa Nova,” which would later get used in the Austin Powers movies.
AUDIO: Quincy Jones “Soul Bossa Nova”
He’d also shown an inclination to expand beyond jazz, as he produced Billy Preston’s 1971 album I Wrote a Simple Song, which gave Preston his first big hit with the funky instrumental “Outa-Space.”
He’d already accrued a hefty list of credits by the time he’d hit his 40s, which is when he was hit with a brain aneurysm.
“It was scary. Like somebody blew my brains out. The main artery to your brain explodes, you know,” he said to GQ.
Surgery went well, but revealed a problem. Doctors found a second aneurysm, one that could go at any time, but one that couldn’t be fixed until he recovered from the first operation.
Jones later spoke about how precarious his situation was, how he was told he had a one percent chance of survival. Things were grim enough that funeral arrangements were made.
He survived the second surgery, but what had been planned as a memorial at LA’s Shrine Auditorium went on as scheduled. Jones, a 41-year-old man, got to attend his own funeral, a doctor in tow to keep him from getting too excited. The likes of Marvin Gaye, Richard Pryor and Sarah Vaughan were there.
Jones wasn’t above tempting fate after he recovered. At first.
He’d been told by doctors that he could never play the trumpet again, that to play the instrument with the required intensity would put too much pressure on the brain clamp that was keeping him alive.
Jones went to Japan for some tour dates and stubbornly thought he could still blow. One night on stage, he felt another pain in his head. It turned out he was starting to loosen the clamp.
This time, he listened to the doctors. His trumpets joined others (including one of Dizzy Gillespie’s) in a display at his home, a reminder of an instrument which brought him great joy and success but would kill him if he ever tried to play again.
Had things gone another way, Jones might not have even gotten that far. He was born in the South Side of Chicago. His mother, Sara, affected by mental illness in a way that medical professionals of the era didn’t fully grasp, was institutionalized when he was seven.
His father, Quincy, was a carpenter, primarily employed by a gangster. A young Jones was surrounded by the danger and allure of that criminal milieu.
But seven-year-old boys don’t know the code of every street. One day, Jones unknowingly went down the wrong block and was accosted. He was hit with an ice pick to the temple, one of his hands nailed to a fence with a switchblade (a scar he’d have the rest of his life).
“Seven or 8 years old. Fucking South Side of Chicago, they don’t play, man. Harlem and Compton don’t mean shit after Chicago in the ’30s — they look like Boys Town to me. Chicago is tough. There’s something in the water, man,” he said almost 80 years later.
The situation was the cue for a newly blended family (his father had remarried to the mother of one of his friends) to relocate to the Pacific Northwest. They settled in Bremerton, Washington, where his father had taken a job at a naval shipyard.
Jones’ introduction to music came from Sarah, who’d sing gospel songs at home and from a Chicago neighbor who played piano.
The spark would be lit for good by one last bit of crime.
Jones broke into the Bremerton Armory, hoping to find some food. He came across a piano instead, which he started playing.
“Every cell in my body and every drop of blood told me this is what I would be doing for the rest of my life,” he told Stephen Colbert in 2016.
Jones’ work ethic came from his father, who filled the maternal void left by his distant mother and stepmother, who always favored the children she gave birth to over Jones’ sons.
“He was making $55 a week and had eight kids, man, but he gave me everything he had,” he told Midwest Leadership Institute in 2008. “He was an absolute workaholic. He had a saying: Once a task is just begun, never leave until it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”
His willingness to put in the work, along with his talent, would serve him well. So would his ability to make connections.
He started attending Seattle’s Garfield High School which, less than a decade later, would have a young Jimi Hendrix wandering its halls and getting into trouble outside them.
Jones’ connection was a fellow student named Charlie Taylor, whose mother had been one of Seattle’s first society jazz band leaders. Taylor saw Jones’ talent and invited him to join his band.
It wasn’t long before the group was spotted by Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, who’d go on to write for, produce and manage Little Richard. The Bumps Blackwell Junior Band, as they’d be named, would play the region, backing famous names like Vaughan and Billy Eckstine.
It was during these years that Jones would cross paths with another not-yet-famous legend, a piano player, singer and alto sax player, two years his senior known as R.C. Robinson, the initials standing for Ray Charles. He spotted the 16-year-old at a club one night and wanted to pick his brain.
“I asked him,” Jones said in 2008. “‘How in the hell do eight brass players play at the same time and not play the same notes?’ And he said ‘Easy,’ and bang! He hit a Bb7 in prime position and a C7. That was the bebop sound. That opened the door. Because I learn quick, you know?”
Another thing he learned from Charles a year later became another bullet dodged — heroin.
“Yeah, I started shooting,” Jones told GQ. “And then I fell down five flights of stairs, and I said, ‘That ain’t gonna work.’ And it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, because when I was in New York, I was hanging out with Howard McGhee and Earl Coleman and Charlie Parker and shit — I would have been a junkie for life.”
The two became friends, even as their young careers took different paths. Jones went to a couple of schools to study music, but dropped out when he got his first big break — Lionel Hampton hiring him for his band.
His skills ensured his employment as a sideman, but his ideas (he’d been coming up with composing and arranging concepts since shortly after he started playing) ensured he wouldn’t stay there.
The trajectory wasn’t always directly up. A failed tour of Europe in 1959 left him with dark ideations and debts that took seven years to pay off. But between his father passing along his combination of strength and pride and the mentorship of others like Count Basie, he moved forward.
He was going to work less after he recovered from the aneurysms, but the work just took on different forms.
VIDEO: Quincy Jones on Roots
He did fewer scores, only four the rest of his life. He’d receive an Emmy for his work on the well-received and highly-viewed 1977 miniseries Roots, which would carry even greater resonance when the book’s author, Alex Haley, helped him research his family background which had both slave and slave owner.
One of the works of which he was proudest was the score for 1985’s The Color Purple, which earned praise, but yielded disappointment when it was snubbed by the Oscars.
Jones branched out into producing television, including long-running sketch comedy show MADTV and a NBC sitcom that gave rapper Will Smith his big acting break — The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
“Quincy Jones is the true definition of a Mentor, a Father and a Friend,” Smith said Monday. “He pointed me toward the greatest parts of myself. He defended me. He nurtured me. He encouraged me. He inspired me. He checked me when he needed to. He let me use his wings until mine were strong enough to fly.”
Jones continued to put out albums, incorporating more current sounds, gaining his first pop hit in 1978’s “Stuff Like That,” a R&B chart topper which began as an instrumental jam before vocals from Chaka Khan and Ashford & Simpson were added.
His biggest hit as a producer awaited. His work with the Brothers Johnson paved the way.
George and Louis Johnson had backed a number of musicians, including Preston. Jones hired them, first for his 1975 album Mellow Madness (which they wrote four songs for) and then a tour of Japan.
He produced their next three albums, which featured most of the two’s biggest hits, including the smooth R&B of “I’ll Be Good to You” and the killer cover of Shuggie Otis’ “Strawberry Letter 23.”
Jones’ production wasn’t watered down, allowing the Brothers Johnson to retain their funkiness. But it was clean and tasteful enough to allow for crossover success. Looking back, one can see it as the run for what was to come next, courtesy of 1978’s The Wiz.
Jones was working as music supervisor for the film,which he agreed to do as a favor to director Lumet. Michael Jackson was one of its stars and Jones would later describe working with him as a highlight of the experience.
At that point of his career, Jackson was leaving his teens and anxious to strike out on his own as an adult apart from his brothers. He approached Jones to help him find a producer for his first proper solo album.
Seeing the obvious potential in where Jackson could go, Jones offered to do it. The rest was musical and commercial history.
1979’s Off The Wall was a stone cold classic, combining disco, soul and pop, a perfect pairing of artist and producer. The launching point for Jackson’s second and larger wave of stardom, it remains arguably the best album of his career.
Not that the two stopped there, as the follow-up three years later — Thriller — became one of the best-selling albums of all-time.
When asked by the Guardian in 2014 if the atmosphere for those album’s sessions were serious, he said, “Hell, no, man — it was as loose as you can get! We’d be joking and having fun. Are you kidding? You gotta know how to party [laughs]. If you get uptight, the music’s going to sound like nothin’. I used to say, “Always leave a little room for God to walk in the room.”
While the two worked together again on 1987’s successful Bad, cracks appeared in their working relationship, partly because of a collaboration with Prince that fell apart and partly because of Jackson and/or his handlers feeling that Jones, 25 years his senior, wasn’t “current” enough.
The two never worked together again, although Jackson, in the years before his death, was open to it.
“He wanted us to get back together,” Jones told The LA Times in 2017. “But we were close, man. Always close. You can’t do those kinds of records without love, trust and respect. You can’t do it.”
His philanthropic interests took musical form in January 1985, when he was tapped to produce “We Are The World,” a charity single whose proceeds were to go to African famine relief. He used his contacts to bring in a number of people, saying that he’d probably worked with one-third of them for a choral section for a song on a Donna Summer album he’d produced.
VIDEO: U.S.A. for Africa “We Are The World”
Five days prior to recording,which would take place after the American Music Awards, Jones issued an edict, saying, “After the American Music Awards, we all change out of our clothes, ’cause we don’t want to make a hunger record in tuxedos.”
He further set the mood with a sign greeting the 46 artists which read “Check Your Egos At The Door.”
The attitude of Jones and others, like Harry Belafonte (one of those who spearheaded the project) resulted in the signs instructions being followed. In his 2001 autobiography, Q, he said, “I have never before or since experienced the joy I felt that night working with this rich, complex human tapestry of love, talent, and grace.”
After an emotional breakdown in 1989, Jones began to slow down, although never stopped working completely. His latter albums were full of guest stars, as he pulled in artists from differing genres and generations. Where else could you get Ella Fitzgerald and Ice-T on the same album (but not the same song)?
As an example, he hosted Saturday Night Live in February, 1990 to promote Back on the Block, the appearance set a show record for musical guests in episode with Tevin Campbell, Kool Moe Dee, Big Daddy Kane, Melle Mel, Quincy Jones III, Andraé & Sandra Crouch, Siedah Garrett, Al Jarreau, and Take 6 joining Jones.
His latter productions saw him taking on the opportunity to work with lesser-known artists.
For all of his work straddling and eradicating genre boundaries, he never lost the love for the jazz where he got his start, both for those he grew up loving (producing a Duke Ellington TV special in 1973) and younger generations (producing a 2013 album for Emily Bear).
He helped others in his life, stepping in to help another high school friend from the Bumps Blackwell days, singer Ernestine Anderson, from losing her family friend and looking after Norma Pinella, Charles’ final partner, when she was left bereft after his death.
His final years included various guest appearances, a second autobiography, 2022’s 12 Notes on Life and Creativity, and a 2018 documentary, Quincy.
VIDEO: Quincy official trailer
He racked up 28 Grammys over 52 years, starting with his arrangement on the country classic “I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Don Gibson and ending with one for Best Music Film for Quincy. He eventually became an EGOT winner when he picked up a Tony as one of the producers of the revival of The Color Purple musical.
Jones could also provide a combination of honesty and no fucks given as an interview subject, discussing his career and his personal life (where he was not cut out for monogamy), even if one occasionally cringed (he seemingly recoiled when an interviewer would suggest that he could date a woman close to his own age).
But Jones was remembered fondly when he was alive as he is now. Part of Paul McCartney’s social media post yesterday could have been said by Jones’ friends from his days at Garfield High: “We always had fun in his presence and his legend will continue through the years, but it is those private moments we were lucky enough to have with the great man that I will always remember fondly.”
Jones’ combination of skills, drive and ability to work across generations of people born through a whole century allowed him to build him the career he did.
As Stevie Wonder said yesterday in Rolling Stone: “He’s touched every single genre. It brings tears to my heart to think about how and where he came from and to know that he was able to grow through all of it. When I look at life every day and I think about how ignorant and irresponsible that people who don’t get it can be, I’m motivated to continue to talk about life, sing about it, and write about it, because that’s what Quincy did. He connected with people who had those great talents, and he was able to bring out of them the best.”
At the end of the day, Jones made a lot out of 50 years of second chances.
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Great article