By Neil McCormick
We have all been touched by the music of Quincy Jones. The late, great American producer’s invention and imagination weaves through the sound of our times, from the 20th century to the 21st, an invisible thread binding together jazz, swing, soul, RnB, funk, pop, hip hop and everything in between.
He formed a teenage band with Ray Charles in the 1940s, played trumpet backing Elvis Presley’s first TV appearance in 1956, swung with Frank Sinatra in the 60s, became emblematic of a funky sophistication in African-American culture in the 1970s and, in the 1980s, his absorption of all the musical strands of his time bloomed into the most dazzling pop ever heard. They are records that will never be surpassed. Jones was the man. He died on Sunday aged 91.
Quincy Jones connected the dots of American music like no other.Credit: AP
By the time I met him, Jones was a sophisticated elder of the music business, with a patrician air but a warmth allied to a keen intelligence that helped you understand how he had been able to get the best out of so many great musicians over so many decades. When I interviewed him in 2006, he was beginning to look physically frail but waxed passionately about educating young musicians. “Music has been dumbed down,” he insisted. “I don’t think it, I know it. It’s about the roots. We got to get the education system in place to help kids understand what the culture’s about.”
He had enthusiasm, and he had plans, and he left me with this gem, passed from one all-time great musician to another: “Sinatra said, ’Live every day like it’s your last. One day, you be right!”
1. He invented Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was a phenomenal singer, an incendiary talent too ambitious to be stuck as a boy band pinup with his siblings. But it was Jones who gave him the musical ammunition to transform into surely the greatest pop superstar of his times (regardless of how you feel about his tarnished personal reputation). The world-beating partnership began on the set of 1978’s The Wiz, director Sidney Lumet’s flop musical version of The Wizard of Oz. “I saw something in him, how curious he was, and how talented,” Jones said. When Jackson asked Jones to recommend a producer for his first solo album, Jones told him: “I’d like to take a shot at that”.
Michael Jackson (left) holds eight awards as he poses with Quincy Jones at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in 1984.Credit: AP
Jackson’s record company Epic was not enthused by their prodigy linking up with a veteran of big bands and soundtracks (“They said I was too jazzy”), but the duo kicked off with a funk masterpiece, Off the Wall, in 1979. Jones wove together all his rich melodicism and musicality into dance music where every part of the band was syncopating around underlying grooves, giving a platform for Jackson to take off into the ether. It made Jackson a solo star, but Thriller (1982) made them both legends.
2. He gave Frank Sinatra his groove back
Quincy revived Frank Sinatra’s career.
Although primarily associated with black music throughout his life, Jones had a long partnership with the 20th century’s most enduring white singer, Frank Sinatra. They made a series of albums in the mid-60s, helping the ageing star reconnect with a vast mainstream audience by adding a touch of groove and urgency to fresh swing arrangements that tied in with Sinatra’s hip playboy image.
Their first recording together was Fly Me to the Moon in 1964, a propulsive, joyous song with jazz legend Count Basie on piano that positioned Sinatra at the centre of the space race through its association with Apollo missions to the moon.
When he died in 1998, Sinatra left Jones his ring. “I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don’t need a passport. I just flash my ring.”
3. He blew Hollywood’s bloody doors off
Jones stormed the white bastions of Hollywood to become one of the greatest film composers of them all. Following in the footsteps of Duke Ellington (already by that time a legendary pianist when he scored 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder), Jones was only the second African-American to score a major motion picture, Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964).
It is probably significant that most of Jones’s early cinematic work was for film projects with a black or social realism angle. “They didn’t use brothers,” was how Jones later put it, recalling a Hollywood meeting when writer Truman Capote stormed out, disgusted that Jones was being hired to create the soundtrack for a film version of his true crime book, In Cold Blood, frothing “I didn’t know Quincy Jones was a n----.”
Quincy Jones at his home studio in October 1974 Credit: AP
Capote later tearfully apologised, and the soundtrack went on to receive an Academy Award nomination in 1967. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including for Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple in 1985, but won only one honorary award: the AMPAS Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995.
Jones composed over 40 film soundtracks, including his contribution to that most British of film capers, The Italian Job, in 1969. With its cockney slang lyrics by Don Black, Get a Bloomin’ Move On! (better known as The Self Preservation Society) is perhaps one of the unlikeliest entries in Jones’ funky, groovy, jazzy, pop canon. But in his own way, much like Michael Caine’s famous gang of villains, Jones can really be said to have blown the bloody doors off.
4. He spent his life lifting others
The grandson of a slave, Jones rose from humble beginnings to become the most powerful, garlanded and influential African-American in 20th century entertainment. He was born in a poor district of Chicago in 1933, “the biggest black ghetto in the worst depression”. His mother was interned in a mental hospital, and he was raised by his carpenter father, who worked for “black gangsters” who got “run out of town” in a dispute with Al Capone.
At 10, Jones and his brothers were sent to Seattle for their own protection. Jones was on course for a life of crime. “We broke into an armoury to eat some pie. After we got full, we started searching the rooms. I saw this piano in the dark. I almost closed the door but, thank God, I walked back in that room and touched the keys and every cell of my body said this is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. I didn’t know people played instruments back then. After that, there was no turning around.”
Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie pose together backstage at the Grammy Awards in 1986.Credit: AP
Instead, Jones taught himself multiple instruments. In his first band with neighbourhood friend Ray Charles, he indulged an eclecticism that helped shape a boundary-less approach to music. “We played everything, man. Debussy, be bop, rhythm and blues, polkas, salsas, strip music, pop music. We were playing every night till 6 o’clock in the morning, three different clubs, we were total music junkies, man. We didn’t think about money or fame. It was not on our minds. We just wanted the music. That’s all we cared about.”
But to make that music and fulfil his expanding ambitions, Jones had to break down barriers. He got a scholarship to Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music. He moonlighted in jazz clubs, befriending such luminaries as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He started making popular records with such stars of the scene as Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. In 1961, at the age of 28, he was made vice president of Mercury Records, the first African-American to hold such an exalted music business position.
He expanded as an increasingly exalted producer over the next two decades but never forgot the struggle it had taken to get there. He focused on African-American issues and talent, helping nurture the careers of Will Smith and LL Cool J in his role as executive producer of the TV series’ The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and In the House.
Legendary musician Quincy Jones among his many Grammy awards.Credit: AP
In 1985, he responded to a challenge from Bob Geldof to create an American counterpart to Band Aid, in support of efforts to relieve humanitarian disaster in Ethiopia. Jones wrote We Are the World with Jackson, producing a superstar-studded charity recording that went on to sell more than 20 million physical copies, making it the eighth-best-selling single of all time.
5. He made the greatest record in pop history
If you want to appreciate the real genius behind Thriller, take a listen to Donna Summer’s extraordinary State of Independence, which Jones produced in the same year.
The song was originally by Jon and Vangelis. Jones’ production lifts it into another dimension. Instruments melt together in swirling psychedelic fusion.
For the utterly glorious backing vocals, Jones assembled what may well be the greatest choir ever to sing together in one time and place: Lionel Richie, Dionne Warwick, Michael Jackson, Brenda Russell, Christopher Cross, James Ingram, Kenny Loggins, Peggy Lipton, Patti Austin, Michael McDonald and Stevie Wonder. It still sounds like the future, over 40 years later. It is pop. It is jazz. It is pure genius, a perfect example of the musical melting pot that was Jones.
Telegraph, London