I’ve got my finger on the pulse
In Chicago in 1944, an 11-year-old boy had begun to hang out with a gang of troublemakers in his rough-and-tumble neighborhood. In the community rec center, they picked a lock and broke into the kitchen to sample lemon meringue pies, and the boy noticed a piano sitting on a small stage nearby.
“I went up there, paused, stared, and then ran my fingers across the keys for a moment,” the boy wrote in his memoirs decades later. “That’s when I began to find peace. I was 11. I knew this was it for me. Music was it. Forever.”
That young boy would go on to be nominated 85 times for Grammy Awards, winning 28. He collaborated with the broadest array of musicians you can imagine — Duke Ellington, Snoop Dogg, Lesley Gore, Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer, Ella Fitzgerald, George Benson, and many dozens more.
That man was Quincy Jones, one of the most accomplished figures in the music business over the last seven decades. He died November 3 at age 91.
The incomparable Stevie Wonder said, “The most important thing Quincy taught me was, ‘Don’t stop until you know you got it like you want it, until it feels right, it feels good to you. Don’t settle for your vocals just being OK. Make sure that you give it all that you’ve got — not for the money of it, but for the art of it.’ You can look back and hear all of that when you hear the records he made.”
From the jazz records he made in the ’50s to the pop songs he produced in the ’60s, from the R&B LPs he cut in the ’70s, to the multiplatinum albums he produced for iconic stars of the ’80s, Jones showed an uncommon ability to understand and appreciate a wide variety of genres. As a producer, arranger, conductor, songwriter and instrumentalist, and later as a businessman and industry mogul, Jones made his indelible mark, influencing and mentoring many artists and protégés over his seven-decade career.
It might not have worked out that way. When he was just 7, Jones lost his mother to mental illness and institutionalization, and his father remarried and moved his family of eight children and step-children to Seattle. Jones was tempted by “the gangster life,” as he put it, but he was driven by an even stronger passion to create music. He learned trumpet and musical arranging, playing in marching bands and jazz combos alike. He earned a scholarship to Berklee School of Music in Boston but dropped out when jazz giant Lionel Hampton tapped him to join his touring band at only 20.
In New York, he worked with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra at CBS, where he played trumpet behind Elvis Presley’s first TV appearances on “Ed Sullivan.” Jones toured the world as trumpeter and musical arranger for Dizzy Gillespie’s band and also studied music composition and theory with world-renowned music teacher/composer Nadia Boulanger in Paris. “She taught me so much,” Jones said, “and gave me the best advice I ever got: ‘Quincy, your music will never be more nor less than you are as a human being.’ It made me realize the importance of treating people fairly and kindly, and to encourage people to be their best selves.”
In the late ’50s, he formed The Jones Boys, an 18-piece big band he led, who toured North America and Europe to enthusiastic audiences and rave reviews, but the earnings failed to cover costs, and the band was forced to dissolve. “We had the best jazz band on the planet,” Jones recalled, “and yet we were literally starving. That’s when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I was going to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.”
He began concentrating his efforts in recording studios, helping to produce, arrange and conduct orchestras for some of the biggest stars of the late ’50s and early ’60s — Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, Ray Charles, Peggy Lee. He produced all four of Lesley Gore’s million-selling singles (“It’s My Party,” “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” “She’s a Fool” and “You Don’t Own Me”).
For Frank Sinatra, Jones arranged and conducted on two of his most popular albums — “It Might As Well Be Swing” with Count Basie in 1964 (which included the award-winning “Fly Me to the Moon”), and his live LP “Sinatra at the Sands” in 1966. “He took me to a whole new planet,” said Jones. “Working successfully with Frank opened a lot of doors for me.”
But Jones had already opened a few doors through his own efforts in the front office at Mercury Records, where he rose to be vice-president, the first African-American to do so at a major label. By the mid-’70s, in a partnership with Time Warner, he created Quincy Jones Entertainment, which included the pop-culture magazine Vibe and Qwest Broadcasting. He later sold it the 1990s for $250 million.
He also showed a talent for composing and producing film scores, beginning with 1964’s “The Pawnbroker.” He wrote more than three dozen, including “Walk, Don’t Run,” “In Cold Blood,” “Cactus Flower,” “$ (Dollars)” and “The Getaway.” Most notably, he scored the Oscar-winning “In the Heat of the Night” in 1967, with Ray Charles singing the title song. “I loved scoring films,” he once said. “It’s a multifaceted process, an abstract combination of science and soul.”
For a few years in the early ’70s, he recorded several solo albums that fared well on both pop and R&B charts, especially “Walking in Space” (1969), “You’ve Got It Bad Girl” (1973), “Body Heat” (1974), “Mellow Madness” (1975), “Sounds…and Stuff Like That! (1978) and “The Dude” (1981). He also wrote the theme music to such top TV series as “Sanford and Son” and “Ironside” and the first episode of the groundbreaking “Roots” miniseries. During that same period, he worked on successful album projects with Aretha Franklin, The Brothers Johnson, Rufus with Chaka Khan, Donny Hathaway and Billy Preston.
His most famous collaboration came when he supervised the adaptation of the Broadway score for the 1978 film “The Wiz,” where he met Michael Jackson. They hit it off immediately, and Jackson insisted on Jones as producer of what would become his landmark solo album, 1979’s “Off the Wall.” Jones remembered Jackson having very strong opinions about how the tracks should be recorded, and they sometimes disagreed. “I recall Michael thought we needed to get rid of the strings during the intro to ‘Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.’ I said, ‘No, Michael, those will be like a siren calling everyone to the dance floor.’ Sure enough, I was right about that one.”
Their studio chemistry peaked three years later when they recorded 30 tracks and then selected the best nine to comprise the universally appealing “Thriller,” widely regarded as the biggest selling album of all time. It held the #1 slot for nearly 40 weeks in 1983-84, and Jackson credited Jones with pushing him to reach further, higher, deeper. “He’d make you do a thing until it’s perfect,” Jackson said in 1985. “He’d say, ‘It’s beautiful, Michael. We have a take!… Now, can you give us one more?'” It was also Jones who came up with the idea to bring in Eddie Van Halen to record the electrifying guitar solo on “Beat It” and Vincent Price to handle the spooky narration that closes “Thriller.”
Jones went on to produce Jackson’s third multiplatinum album, 1987’s “Bad,” with its five chart-topping singles, and he also shared his studio talents with Donna Summer, producing her 1982 LP and co-writing its hit “Love is in Control (Finger on the Trigger),” and George Benson’s “Give Me the Night” album in 1980.
Some have called his leadership role as producer of the extraordinary “We Are the World” recording session in early 1985 as his crowning achievement. Lionel Richie, who co-wrote the song and helped shepherd the project, said he assumed they would bring in the numerous stars one by one to sing their parts and then put it all together afterwards, but Jones said, “No way, man. We’ll be here for three weeks. We’re going to bring them all together, put ’em in a circle with all the mics, and everyone will sing it looking at each other.” It seemed daunting, but Jones managed to control the concentration of major celebrities by famously posting a sign at the studio entrance: “Check your egos at the door.” Said Richie, “Quincy had everyone’s complete respect and attention, so it worked. He got everyone to cooperate. It was incredible. He was a master orchestrator, not only of music but of personalities.”
Jones still wasn’t done. In 1991, he won the Album of the Year Grammy for his LP “Back on the Block,” which brought together more than a dozen major stars from three generations, including Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Dionne Warwick, Luther Vandross, Ice-T, Barry White, Al Jarreau and Ray Charles. The album topped R&B charts and spawned multiple singles like “I’ll Be Good to You” and “The Secret Garden.”
He followed that up with “Q’s Jook Joint” in 1995, another star-studded affair he produced that topped jazz charts and merged musical styles. Stevie Wonder said, “There was one track where he had Ray Charles, Bono and me doing ‘Let the Good Times Roll.’ The three of us weren’t in the room together, we did our parts separately, but Quincy put it together like we were there at the same time. It’s kind of like making a movie. You have to make it feel like it was right there and then. And he was able to do that, put the pieces together and come up with a great track.”
Jones said at the time, “Music transcends time, and it bridges generations. Bebop and hip-hop, in so many ways, they’re connected. A lot of rappers remind me so much of bebop guys in terms of improvisation, beats and rhymes.”
In a sort of “full circle” symmetry, one of Jones’s early recorded pieces, “Soul Bossa Nova” (1962), was prominently featured in the 1997 box-office smash “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.”
He was married three times, most famously to actress Peggy Lipton (1974-1990), and had seven children. His daughter Rashida, an actress who starred on the “Parks and Recreation” TV series, described her father as “a genius, a giant, an icon, a culture shifter.”
In a 2018 TV interview, Jones was asked how he “worked his magic” in the studio. “I listen to the orchestra like an x-ray machine,” he noted. “I’ve been around it all my life. If it’s too thick, too thin, too slow, too fast, wrong key, whatever, I can just tell. And we do another take and modify it accordingly. I don’t go by surveys or focus groups. I go by my goosebumps. If it gives me goosebumps, it’s right.”
“If an album doesn’t do well, some people will say, ‘it was the producer’s fault,'” Jones said, “but if’s that’s true, then if it does well, it should be his ‘fault,’ too. The tracks don’t just all of a sudden appear. The producer has to have the skill, experience and ability to guide the vision to completion.”
When asked for any words of wisdom, Jones talked about the need to remove negativity from his life. “Holding grudges, allowing anger in, it’s all a big waste of time. Some words from Mark Twain still overwhelm me: ‘Anger is an acid that does more harm to the vessel in which it’s stored than to anything on which it’s poured.‘ Isn’t it amazing it took me until I was 85 to figure that out?”
Rest in peace, Quincy Jones. You’ve brought positive vibes to music lovers everywhere, and you’ll be sorely missed.
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The Spotify playlist below provides a cross section of material Quincy Jones has written, produced, arranged and conducted and/or performed on during his half-century in the business.
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