It is said that everyone knows Quincy Joneseven if no one is sure what Quincy Jones did. If that fact is true then there is a good reason for it. In an outsized and storied career that spanned the music and entertainment industries over eight decades, Jones – who according to his publicist “passed away peacefully” last night, at the age of 91 – is practically everything, everywhere, at the same time, and therefore almost impossible to define. He is a producer, composer, arranger, instrumentalist, impresario, author, mentor, magazine founder, famous father of famous children. Along the way, Jones may have rarely taken center stage, but he imbued a dizzying variety of musical genres—jazz, pop, R&B, easy listening—with sparkle and sophistication , all while shaping the creative trajectory of some of the music industry’s giants. music records, among them Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Michael Jackson.
“I cook gumbo that would make you slap your grandmother,” Jones, an accomplished home cook, once said of his kitchen skills. He worked that same magic in the recording studio, stirring surprising ingredients together, adding just the right amount of spice, heat and sweetness, and always creating a feast for the ears. To put it plainly, Jones is one of the greatest record producers who ever lived.
Jones has released 16 albums under his own name, 10 of which topped the Billboard jazz charts. As a performer/composer/producer, his “Soul Bossa Nova” from 1962, with its playful flutes and fizzing brass, is his most famous song: Jet Age insouciance distilled. It would go on to become a key track in the 1990s lounge music revival, inextricably linked to Austin Power film franchise, using it as its theme song. Jones arranged Sinatra’s 1964 recording of “Fly Me to the Moon”, which five years later, Apollo 10 Astronaut Eugene Cernan plays on a cassette tape while orbiting the Moon. (The notion that Buzz Aldrin playing it on the lunar surface may be an urban—or extraterrestrial—legend, one that Jones is keen to promote.)
He created the soundtrack for the film (Italian work, In the heat of the night) and television (Sanford and son). He produced Jackson’s 1982 Sensationalremains the best-selling album of all time and was one of a trio of records produced by Jones that cemented Jackson’s superstar status. Jones enjoys a rare influence in the industry that allows him to work alongside the ringmaster Lionel Richie, to bring together people like Jackson, Bruce Springsteen,
Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Ray Charles et Bob Dylanas conductor and co-producer (with Michael Omartian) of the 1985 All-Star charity single “We are the world.” Cultural critic Greil Marcus likens the song to a Pepsi jingle, but it has raked in millions of dollars in aid to Africa. (This event was recently featured in this year’s documentary The Greatest Night in Pop Music.)
The video of Jones collaborating with Dylan on the song reveals a producer with an encouraging enthusiasm you might associate with a favorite Little League coach. Jones once said: “The conductor and arranger must take an emotional X-ray of the singer and discover their creative psychology.” Indeed, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine and Peggy Lee are among the many singers he has coaxed into stunning performances, as he has amassed 80 Grammy nominations and 28 wins. . Those awards are next to the Emmys for Roots soundtrack, an Oscar for humanitarian work and a Tony for the 2016 revival of Purpleadded to EGOT status. (Jones co-produced the 1985 film version of Purplethis helped give the talk show host his name Oprah Winfrey on the country map.)
By his own account, Jones was lucky to survive a rough and tumble childhood on the South Side of Chicago, where he was born in 1933. He bears a real scar from those days: “They played nailed my hand to the fence with a switchblade, man,” he said, painting a picture of a dark youth in the era of Al Capone, with roving toughs inflicting violence on a daily basis. day. His father, Quincy Delight Jones, Sr., worked as a carpenter, and his mother, who attended Boston University and spoke multiple languages, suffered from mental illness and required institutionalization. In a particularly grim scene from Jones’s youth, recounted in his 2001 memoir, Qhe watched in horror as she swallowed her own feces. Needless to say, there was little emotional connection between them, a void that Jones describes as the element that shaped him as an artist and a person. For a time, Jones and his younger brother, Lloyd, were sent to Kentucky to live with their grandmother, a former slave who occasionally served fried rats for dinner. Then, at age 11, moving with his father to the Seattle area, young Quincy discovered the piano. “I found another mother,” he wrote in his autobiography.
He quickly picked up the trumpet, the instrument with which he would eventually enter music, and taught himself how to arrange. By age 14, he was playing in the National Guard band (identifying himself as 18). On the way to a show in Yakima, a car carrying Jones and four of his bandmates collided with a Trailways bus. Only Jones survived. (He later survived several brain aneurysms.) After high school, he went to Boston to study at Berklee College of Music, dropped out and was hired by vibraphone legend Lionel Hampton working as a trumpeter, found himself playing before President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953. He was just 19 years old.
His first full-length album as a band leader was released four years later. In between this time (and simultaneously writing charts for Count Basie’s big band), Jones transitioned to a day job as an A&R man at Mercury Records. In 1963, he signed a teenage pop singer named Lesley Gore and collaborated on a song with her: “It’s My Party.” It took Jones’ career to new commercial heights.
But it was Sinatra, he says, who “took me to a whole new planet.” The two seemed to have an instant and unbreakable bond. “The man was larger than life,” Jones wrote, describing the singer’s musical ability as “economy, power, style and pure skill.” Jones continued to work with Sinatra for decades, producing his final studio album, LA is my ladyin 1984. “I worked with him until he passed away in ’98,” Jones recalls. “He left me his ring. I never take it off.”
His creative collaborations with Michael Jackson represent a different kind of stratosphere, with Jones’ production bringing power and brilliance to the albums. Outside the wall, SensationalAnd Bad. Jackson became the reigning pop icon of the 1980s. But Jones’ relationship with Jackson proved more fragile and strained than his relationship with Sinatra. In 2017, he sued Jackson’s production company for $9.4 million in unpaid royalties. (The lawsuit was successful, but the award was later rescinded.) Jones also points out that he went through 800 songs to find the above songs. Sensationalthus implying that even an artist as volatile as Jackson wouldn’t be able to survive without great songs—and a great producer.
Jones is not afraid to offer opposing opinions, making him a dream interview for generations of journalists and documentary filmmakers. When he was nearly 90 years old, he decried the state of contemporary music: “It’s going nowhere now. It was the noise of selling champagne.” (This, from the co-founder of Vibea music magazine he launched to much attention in 1993.) He also pursued sacred cows, claiming Paul McCartney “worst bass player I’ve ever heard.”
Netflix Documentary 2018, Quincyco-directed by his daughter, Rashida Jones, shows the man the full power of conversation, though somewhat hampered by the ravages of time and reputation. It’s a stylish and admirable portrait, notable for its intimacy, placing the man behind so many music superstars front and center: a place that feels fitting. with his exuberant charisma and handsome looks. After all, he was a famous Casanova, boasting in the film about his hobbies, even at the age of over 80 looking back on three marriages, including those to the model-photographer -Swedish actor. Ulla Andersson And Mod squad star Peggy Lipton (Rashida’s mother and Kidada) and collaborated with the actress Nastassja Kinski. He is the father of five other children (Jolie, Rachel, Martina, Quincy III, And Kenya), by four other partners, transforming the extended Jones family into a kind of modern entertainment dynasty.
The boy from the South Side of Chicago has come a long way, with countless accomplishments, not to mention far-flung encounters with the wonderful, famous and historically significant that have made him, as he says, , is “Ghetto Gump. (Many of them paid tribute to Jones in 2023 at a 90th birthday party at the Hollywood Bowl.) 24 years ago, the U2 activist and singer Bono invited Jones to accompany him to an audience with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. At the meeting, Jones was struck by the pope’s shoes, which he called “burgundy shoes.” As he went to kiss the pope’s hand, the producer blurted out, “Oh, my man is wearing pimp shoes.” The Pope “heard me,” he said. It’s impossible not to hear Quincy Jones.
