Jones, Quincy 1933–
Quincy Jones 1933–
Producer, composer, arranger, company executive
Near-death Experience Brought Balance
An Essence magazine article once aptly referred to Quincy Jones as a “synonym for genius and versatility in the entertainment industry.” The multitalented Jones began his remarkable career as a jazz prodigy and eventually progressed into pop music production, film, television scoring, and participation in the vaunted “information superhighway” of the 1990s. He has won 25 Grammy awards and a slew of other honors—some of which reflect his work on the top-selling recordings of the modern era—and coordinated the most successful benefit in music history, the release of “We Are the World.”
Yet Jones has managed to keep his accomplishments and prominence in perspective, maintaining a balance of passion, curiosity, and good humor that impresses his peers almost as much as do his more tangible achievements. His dream project, a history of black music from prehistory to the present, has been in the works for decades and has yet to be realized, but no one familiar with Jones’s drive and sense of purpose would consider this formidable undertaking beyond his grasp.
Born Quincy Delight Jones—as was his father—in Chicago and raised in Seattle, he evinced an early aptitude for music; his mastery of the trumpet led him to bandstands with jazz ensembles by the age of 15. Of course, two years before that, he had felt sufficient confidence in his talents as an arranger to send some charts he’d done to legendary jazz bandleader Count Basie.
Much of Jones’s education came at the feet of greats like pianist-singer Ray Charles and vibraphonist-bandleader Lionel Hampton; the latter hired Jones when the aspiring trumpeter was still a teenager. The talented youth also played with such brilliant jazz figures as singer Billie Holiday, bebop icon and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and bandleader Billy Eckstine. Ultimately, however, he felt more comfortable as a composer and arranger than as a trumpeter. “I always felt that the orchestra itself was my instrument,” he explained to Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore in 1978. “I had to make a commitment at some point, and I was more fearless with an arrangement than with a horn. It was kind of like going to bed with the music, then taking it out on a date later.”
“Picasso’s My Man”
Jones did study formally, attending Boston’s prestigious Berkeley School of Music and working with
At a Glance…
Born Quincy Delight Jones, March 14, 1933, in Chicago, IL; son of Quincy Delight (a carpenter) and Sarah Jones; married four times (third wife was actress Peggy Lipton); children: (first marriage) Jolie, (second marriage) Martina-Lisa, Quincy III, (third marriage) Kidada, Rashida. Education: Attended Seattle University, Berklee School of Music (now Berklee College of Music), and Boston Conservatory; studied arranging with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Career: Played trumpet in Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie bands; wrote musical arrangements for Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughn and others; music director and producer, Barchlay Disques, Paris, 1956-60; Mercury Records, music director, 1961, named vice president, 1964; scored films, including: The Pawnbroker, 1965; In Cold Bloody 967; In the Heat of the Night, 1967; For Love of Ivy, 1968; Cactus Flower, 1969; Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 1969; The Wiz, 1978; The Color Purple, 1994; scored television series: Ironside; Sanford and Son; recording artist on A&M Records, 1969-80; founded Qwest Records, 1981; produced single “We Are the World” to benefit African famine victims, 1986; founded magazine Vibe, 1993; launched multimedia joint venture QDE, 1993; released autobiography, The Autobiography of Quincy Jones.
Selected awards 25 Grammy Awards, including three as producer of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 1982, and six for album Back on the Block, 1991; 1994 Polar Music Prize; Presented with the inaugural “Ted Arison Award” by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA); Harvard Univ., established chair, The Quincy Jones Professorship of African-American Music.
Addresses: Office —10880 Wilshire Blvd., ste. 2110, Los Angeles, CA 90024.
Parisian arranger Nadia Boulanger; Paris, in fact, became his home for some time. It was there that he worked as a jazz producer and led his own ensemble. One of his neighbors in the French capital was quintessential twentieth-century painter Pablo Picasso, who provided a model of creative longevity to the ambitious Jones; indeed, another idol, bop saxophone genius Charlie “Bird” Parker died young, claimed by drug addiction. “Picasso’s my man,” Jones told Rolling Stone’s David Ritz in 1984. “Picasso’s my model. Didn’t moan, didn’t groan, just kept waltzing and wailing and sharpening his chops, even in his nineties. Now, when I was coming up, Bird was the man. No doubt that Charlie Parker was the baddest cat of this century. I mean the motherf—er was ferocious. But unlike Picasso, Bird couldn’t get his ass out of the back alley. He split four decades before he should have. For a kid, that’s not a very productive example.”
On his return to the United States in 1960, Jones signed on at Mercury Records, becoming one of the industry’s first black executives. The following year, he became music director and produced his first hit pop record, Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party.” By 1964, he was a Mercury vice president. Also during this period, Jones broke into film and television scoring, providing themes for such motion pictures as The Pawnbroker, In Cold Blood, and In the Heat of the Night and later the television series, Ironside and Sanford and Son.
Jones’s forays into pop left many jazz aficionados—who had counted on Jones to help preserve the form—nonplussed. He has repeatedly scoffed at such attitudes. “The underlying motivation for any artist, be it [modern classical composer Igor] Stravinsky or [jazz trailblazer] Miles Davis, is to make the kind of music they want and still have everyone buy it,” he asserted to Gilmore. And he has long questioned the concept of the “purity” of jazz, as his words to Down Beat writer Frank Alkyer attested: “Purism? Nothing about jazz is pure. It’s quadrilles, blues, country, marches, Brahms, Beethoven… everything!” He further declared, “Anything that has a pure soul, no matter what you call it, is credible music.”
Jones proceeded to establish his own credibility as a recording artist, exploring funk, fusion, and other contemporary forms on albums like Sounds … and Stuff Like That. While some of his harsher critics carped about his electronic leanings, he felt his background had led naturally to such projects. “I was lucky to come up in an environment where I had to play everything, from bebop and blues to [twentieth-century classical composer Clude] Debussy,” he noted to Rolling Stone’s Gilmore. “I was playing trumpet in an R&B band in Seattle when I was 14, so what I’m doing now isn’t exactly alien to me. That was in 1947, the heart of the bebop era, and there weren’t a lot of cats who shared my view that you should explore music without wearing blinders.” Jones demonstrated a similarly expansive outlook as producer, working with R&B sensations the Brothers Johnson, jazz guitarist George Benson, disco diva Donna Summer, and modern vocal giant Frank Sinatra, among many others.
Near-death Experience Brought Balance
Jones’s star was very much in the ascendant when he found himself in the hospital, undergoing operations to repair two aneurysms in his brain. The year was 1974; the surgery was so fraught with danger that he was not expected to survive. As Rolling Stone contributor Ritz reported, Jones’s closest friends surrounded his hospital bed after the final operation, intending to pay their last respects; very gradually, the stricken patient raised his arm and gave his friends the finger. “If y’all think I’m cutting out,” he murmured, “forget it.”
After coming so close to death, Jones emerged with a new sense of purpose and a philosophy of balance that has served him well in the frenetic world of entertainment. “After I came out of the hospital, I couldn’t believe what I saw,” he told Interview. “Man, all the details of the trees! People’s eyes! Everything was so evident, much more so than before. I could feel the intensity of the breeze, because I was finally paying attention. It affected my perception of my whole existence.” As a result, he reevaluated his work. “Before that, I was doing a lot of things that I didn’t care to do,” Jones averred to Gilmore. “Now, I just do exactly what I love.”
Jones’s involvement in the screen adaptation of the hit musical The Wiz —an R&B reworking of The Wizard of Oz —was especially rewarding, as he enthused to Gilmore at the time: “People used to ask me what the biggest moment of my career was. I would have to say now that it’s The Wiz. Wait until you hear Diana Ross and Michael Jackson singing together! I’ve been in the music business for 30 years, and I’ve never been happier. I feel like I’m 15 years old.” His work on this project led naturally to the production of Jackson’s album Off the Wall —which sold some eight million copies.
When Jones contracted to record the follow-up, he hoped merely to gain a fraction of Off the Wall’s success; the result, 1982’s Thriller, became the biggest-selling album of all time—it moved some 25 million units—and earned Jones three Grammy awards as producer. He worked again with Jackson on the latter’s album Bad; he also revealed to Ritz his peculiar nickname for the star. “We call Michael Jackson ’Smelly’ because he’s so polite and proper we can’t even get him to say the word funky. Honest to God!”
Meanwhile, Jones had launched his own record label in 1981, Qwest, which was distributed by Warner Bros.; his own recordings, not to mention several by artists he produced, were released on the label. Jackson’s massive hits aside, Jones had emerged as one of the most reliable—and relaxed—producers in popular music. As an unidentified “observer” told Ritz, “In a field crowded with egomaniacs, Quincy works by hiding his ego. He’s so modest and cool, you wind up doing exactly what he wants, no questions asked. That’s why his records sound so relaxed. He’s the ultimate mood maker and the most skilled manipulator in the business.” Jones himself explained that “producing is always an obsession” and summarized his approach thus: “Listeners get bored quickly. So vary the sound. Keep the ear engaged and excited.”
“We Are the World”
In 1986 Jones involved himself in a massive undertaking to generate assistance for victims of famine in Africa. Jackson, Ross, Stevie Wonder, and a veritable solar system of pop stars participated in Jones’s charity single for the USA for Africa organization; “We Are the World” raised $50 million, and Jones managed the whole affair with aplomb, demanding of his all-star vocal talent, “Check your egos at the door.” Evidently they did, though cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s version of the recording session in his strip Doonesbury had some of them demanding a receipt.
“My lifetime project, though,” Jones confessed to Ritz, “involves putting this whole Afro-American thing together into a single, cohesive musical expression. I’ve been working on it for 20 years, and I may need another 20 to get through. It’s a symphony, it’s an opera, it’s a minstrel review and a big band bash. I don’t know what it is, except there it is, keeping me up, invading my dreams.” Every time he felt ready to tackle the massive project, he admitted, a new job came along.
Although Jones has not yet realized this dream, he did emerge with an ambitious recording of his own, 1991’s Back on the Block; that album traced a lineage between bebop and rap and enlisted an impressive array of performing talent. Jones took home six Grammy awards as a result, including those for album of the year and best producer. The title track, featuring rap stars Ice-T, Melle Mel, Big Daddy Kane, and Kool Moe Dee, won the statuette for best rap performance by a duo or group. The Grammy awards ceremony took place during the Persian Gulf War, and the producer took note of the crisis in his acceptance speech, urging, “Pray for peace on earth, and when we get peace on earth, let’s take care of the earth.”
In 1993 Jones announced that he was starting a magazine, the slick black music journal Vibe. Though the first issue received mixed reviews, it was quickly established as a standout publication in the field. Also that year, Jones and David Salzman, his partner in television production, formed a joint venture called QDE to provide entertainment on the so-called electronic superhighway; they planned to provide multimedia and interactive programming. They created the hit show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which launched rapper Will Smith into superstardom. They also intended to pursue film production, having negotiated a first-look deal with Warner Bros.
Meanwhile, the entertainment world’s Renaissance Man continued to produce records for other artists, found time to appear at events like the Montreux Jazz Festival, and, in 1994, received the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, Sweden. In his acceptance speech, quoted in Billboard, Jones fondly recalled his past performances there, remarking that “coming back to Sweden is like returning to my old home.”
Jones’s next release, Q’s Jook Joint, was in line with his ultimate goal of a historic view of black music. The album marked 50 years in the music business for Jones and in an interview with Billboard, he explained the vision for the Jook Joint. “On Back on the Block, we had Miles Davis, Dizzy, Sarah Vaughn, and Ella Fitzgerald together—and now they’re all gone,” he explained. “It hit me about what our roots are all about.” He felt like all his idols were dying, so he focused on the idea of a presenting history in a music continuum. “You go and lay out the ’40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and you’ll see a song here that almost represents each period,” Jones added. The success of Q’s Jook Joint also contributed to the appointment of Jones as producer for the 1996 Academy Awards Show.
Q’s Next Frontier
Jones ventured further outside of the music world in the late 1990s with the purchase of two television stations, WATL in Atlanta, and WNOL in New Orleans. He also created a talk show and the launched a web site that featured World Music Artists. The talk show, a nightly variety program, shared the name of his magazine Vibe. Although short-lived, Vibe was hosted by comedian Chris Spencer and aired in competition with Letterman, Leno, and the Keenen Ivory Wayans Show. The show’s guest list, which included Jones, read like the cover of the latest hip-hop and R&B magazines on the news stands. Before it’s demise, comedian Sinbad added a little flavor to the show as host to Vibe’s Hip-Hop parade of stars, but was he ultimately unable to save the struggling showcase.
By the end of the decade, Jones was cashing in on the many investments he made. He sold his share of the TV stations to the Tribune Co., sold Vibe magazine to Viacom, and Warner Music Group was buying out his label Qwest Records. Jones’s final release on Qwest was 1999’s From Q With Love. He continues his association with AOL Time Warner through the Quincy Jones Media Group. The entertainment projects from the media group still included television, films and Internet projects as well as a first-look agreement with Warner Telepictures.
Jones’s concern for the African continent, best expressed through his “We Are the World,” efforts, still endured as well. His Listen Up Foundation sponsored trips to South Africa for teens from South Central, Los Angeles. While there, the teens helped build homes for the disadvantaged and learned unforgettable lessons.
Jones noted in PR Newswire, “One of the most valuable lessons that anyone can learn, that the world is a much bigger place than the communities that they live in, with much bigger problems.” Jones also led an effort to encourage world leaders to help decrease the technological divide that exists in Africa during the World Economic Forum Conference of 2001.
Jones was still being honored during this time for his contributions to the music world. Harvard University established a new chair in his honor, The Quincy Jones Professorship of African-American Music, which was supported by the Time Warner Endowment in 2001. He also received the inaugural “Ted Arison Award” presented by the National Foundation for the Advancement in the Arts (NFAA). The award, named after the late founder of the NFAA, is presented each year to someone who has greatly influenced and contributed to the development of young American artists. According to Dr. William H. Branchs, NFAA president, Jones was an excellent choice. Branchs told PR Newswire. “His efforts to develop young talent have truly made a difference in young artists’s lives.” Jones was also the first U.S.-born musician to be named Commander of the French Legion of Honor.
With more than fifty years in music, the next step for Jones was the inevitable release of an autobiography. The Autobiography of Quincy Jones was published in 2001. With a career that included such a variety of mass communications and civic contribution, and working with entertainers from Billy Holiday and Charlie Parker through to Michael Jackson and beyond, Jones had many stories to tell. But through it all, Quincy Jones remained dedicated to the music. “I used to sit and watch Charlie Parker at Charlie’s Tavern,” he recollected to Down Beat’s Alkyer. “I’d look at him with awe as he would walk over to the jukebox. He’d play [Stravinsky’s] Sacre Du Printemps, The Rite of Spring, and then pull out another dime or whatever it was and listen to a country & western tune…. Everything! That’s how it’s supposed to be.” Like Parker’s jukebox, Quincy Jones’s musical dreams combine the eclectic tributaries of American music into a symphonic ocean. He himself employed a culinary metaphor when discussing his occupational ideal in Interview: “I just want to eat the whole menu, because, man, it’s all so beautiful.”
Selected discography
This Is How I Feel About Jazz, ABC/Paramount, 1956.
The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones, Trip, 1959.
Quincy’s Got a Brand New Bag, Mercury, 1965.
Sounds… and Stuff Like That, A&M.
I Heard That, A&M, 1969.
Walking in Space, A&M, 1969.
Gula Matari, A&M, 1970.
Back on the Block, Qwest, 1991.
Q’s Juke Joint, Qwest, 1995.
From Q, With Love, Qwest, 1999.
Sources
Periodicals
Billboard, July 3, 1993, pp. 8, 77; February 12, 1994, p. 77; Down Beat, October 1992, p. 6; December 16, 1985, pp. 22; March 28, 1998, pp. 68; May 16, 1998, pp. 44; March 31, 2001, pp. 6.
Broadcasting & Cable, March 23, 1998, pp. 98.
Business Wire, January 26, 2001, pp. 91. Essence, May 1994, pp. 110.
Hollywood Reporter, November 10, 1999, pp. 4.
Interview, January 1990.
Jet, May 1, 2000, pp. 35; April 16, 2001, pp. 36.
Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1991, pp. A-1, A-20.
Media Week, November 29, 1999, pp. 8.
Newsweek, August 18, 1997, pp. 66.
PR Newswire, September 21, 1999; September 28, 2000; January 5, 2001.
Rolling Stone, November 2, 1978, pp. 24-6; April 12, pp. 43-6.
Online
http://www.allmusicguide.com
—Simon Glickman and Leslie Rochelle
Jones, Quincy
Quincy Jones
Producer, composer, arranger, trumpeter, and bandleader
Selected productions for others
Quincy Jones is, quite simply, one of the world’s most admired record producers. An award-winning jazz musician in his own right, Jones has overseen the creation of a staggering array of albums, film and television scores, big-band tunes, and pop music, featuring some of the entertainment industry’s biggest stars. As David Breskin notes in Life magazine, however, commercial success is not the best measure of Jones’s accomplishments. “It is range that distinguishes Jones,” writes Breskin. “He has worked with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Eddie Van Halen, Billie Holiday to Diana Ross, [Frank] Sinatra… to [Bruce] Springsteen. No one in the history of contemporary American music has cut so wide a path.”
A child prodigy who was performing professionally at the age of fifteen, Jones has literally done it all in the music business, from supplying scores to Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan to recording his own work on albums such as the platinum-selling Sounds … and Stuff Like That, to engineering one of the biggest-selling records in history, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Critics and clients alike seek Jones out for his dedication to perfection, his affability, and especially, his talent for making memorable music. “Quincy Jones on a roll is something to see,” says David Ritz in Rolling Stone.” No one knows exactly what it is, but in an insecure, neurotic business, where the Billboard charts are revered like the Bible and everyone’s looking for a savior, Quincy’s flaming hot…. He’s an enthusiast who thrives under a barrage of creative challenges and who exhibits uncanny emotional control as he moves from one high-minded hustle to another. With everyone around him going nuts, Quincy has a gift for staying steady, even as he picks up the tempo and drives his crew—singers, secretaries and sidemen—to faster speeds.”
The hectic routine suits Jones just fine. He has lived most of his life at a pace that would exhaust all but the hardiest adventurers. One in a family of nine children, Jones was born in Chicago and raised in Seattle by his father, a carpenter, and a stepmother. Unlike many musicians, who come upon their training by listening to parents or relatives play, Jones learned the trumpet in public school. He showed an unusual aptitude for the instrument, and for music in general, so much so that by thirteen he was sending arrangements to Count Basie and performing with a professional dance band. Jones’s best friend at the time was another young talent, Ray Charles. “Ray would play at clubs, … and I also played all over town, and then we’d get together at the Elks Club after hours to play bop,” Jones remembered in down beat. “In the clubs or at dances, you’d have to play schottisches [Scottish dances], pop songs, r & b, and so on, but when we played at the Elks Club, that
For the Record…
Full name Quincy Delight Jones; born March 14, 1933, in Chicago, III.; son of Quincy Delight (a carpenter) and Sarah Jones; married third wife, Peggy Lipton (an actress), 1974 (divorced, 1986); children: (firstmarriage) Jolie, (second marriage) Martina-Lisa, Quincy III, (third marriage) Kidada, Rashida. Education: Attended Seattle University, Berklee School of Music (now Berklee College of Music), and Boston Conservatory; also studied arranging in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.
Composer, arranger, trumpeter, and bandleader, 1950—. Member of Lionel Hampton Orchestra, 1950-53; toured Europe with his own big band, 1953-60, while providing orchestra arrangements for Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and Peggy Lee; organizing member of Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra for the Department of State, 1956; music director, Barchlay Disques (Paris), 1956-60.
Named music director of Mercury Records, 1961, produced first hit record, Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party,” 1963, promoted to vice-president, 1964. Independent composer and conductor, 1965—, providing scores for numerous television shows and feature films, including The Pawnbroker, 1964, In Cold Blood, 1967, Cactus Flower, 1969, The Hot Rock, 1972, The Wiz, 1978, and The Color Purple, 1985.
Recorded with A & M Records, 1969-80, founded Qwest Records, 1981. Producer of albums, including Michael Jackson’sOff the Wall and Thriller, George Benson’s Give Me the Night, Frank Sinatra’s L. A. Is My Lady, and Patti Austin’s Every Home Should Have One. Producer of single “We Arethe World,” special song to aid famine victims in Ethiopia, 1986. Winner of fifteen Grammy Awards and numerous other citations for musical excellence.
Addresses: Other— 10880 Wilshire Blvd. #2110, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024.
was for us.” Jones told Rolling Stone that he was getting a snobbish attitude about his art until Charles settled him down and gave him a direction for his future. “A blind man said to me, ’Listen to everything you can, and don’t play the fool by putting ropes around yourself, ’” Jones said. “That was Ray Charles teaching me, a know-nothing fourteen-year-old squirt, how to write music.”
The “know-nothing squirt” managed to land a job with the prestigious Lionel Hampton Orchestra when he was still in his teens. After a few years of touring, however, Jones decided to seek more formal musical training. He studied under scholarship at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and later travelled to Paris to learn scoring under the renowned Nadia Boulanger. Throughout the 1950s Jones wrote big-band tunes, performed in Europe with his own group or with Dizzy Gillespie’s band, and produced records for Barchlay Disques, a Parisian company. He returned to the United States in 1960 to work as one of the first black executives in a major recording firm, Mercury Records. He was promoted to vice president of Mercury in 1964.
Jones broke yet another color barrier in 1965 when he became the first black composer to be accepted by the Hollywood establishment. He began to score motion pictures such as In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, and Cactus Flower, as well as television shows such as “Ironside” and “Sanford and Son.” Meanwhile he continued to record his own and others’ work, first for Mercury, then for A & M Records, and finally, in 1980, for his own company, Qwest Records. Although he appreciated every sort of music from Bach to Basie, Jones began to show a pragmatic streak—he was as willing to produce pop music as he was to create original jazz. “I had all the five-star down beat reviews I could use,” he told Rolling Stone.” Hey, man, I wasn’t going to be intimidated by a pure art trip. My new motto was … ’Let’s dance.’ Not that I didn’t love the art. Loved it to death. Still do and always will…. [But] I’m as silly as any kid and wanna stay that way. The kids hear it straight and clean. They know who’s jiving and who ain’t.”
In 1978 Jones worked on the orchestration for the film The Wiz. The movie was not a great success, but it brought Jones together with Michael Jackson, and the two established a professional rapport. Jackson hired Jones to produce a 1981 album, Off the Wall, that went platinum. Two years later the team paired again to work on Thriller. Jones admitted in down beat that he had great trepidations about Thriller.” We cut nine songs, at first, and had it finished, and then threw four out to get four more that were really strong,” he said. “That’s a nice psychological thing to do, because you’re competing with yourself. We had just come off an album that sold eight million [Off the Wall], and it’s scary to go back in after that kind of home run. Our thinking was, ’If we could just catch up with half of this thing, we’d be happy, ’ and little did we know it’d do what it did.” Thriller has sold more than forty million copies worldwide; it won Jones three Grammy awards and the continued respect of his peers in the industry. Two years later he was given the monumental task of organizing and directing more than thirty top stars for the “We Are the World” recording, created to provide relief for Ethiopian famine victims.
Much has been written about Quincy Jones’s style, substance, and production methods. A U.S. News and World Report correspondent writes: “Not only is almost no one else in the business so widely admired, but Jones still manages to bring new vigor and curiosity to each job—a rarity in a jaded industry.” Breskin describes Jones’s “signature sound” as “warm rhythms, lush synthesizer textures, extravagant yet uncluttered string-and-horn orchestrations, a touchable presence to the vocals. All played by a cast of hundreds and recorded with an ear for infinitesimal detail.” The critic concludes that Jones is “the Cecil B. DeMille of record production … loved for his street humor, his thought-fulness and his hard-won joie de vivre.” Jones’s own analysis is simpler. His method, he told Rolling Stone, is to “take the tune home and live with it for days. Live with it in all forms—as a demo, rhythm track, with and without vocals. When it starts boring me, I throw it away. When it starts haunting me, I start considering it. Patience, man. This recording business is about patience—and keeping things relaxed.”
If Jones seems to embrace life more enthusiastically than most, it is due in part to an illness that almost killed him in 1974. That year he underwent several dangerous operations for brain aneurisms—his friends at one point gave up hope. Jones not only survived, he also brought a new philosophy to his work and his personal life. “Coming from a jazz background,” he told Life, “you spend half your life trying to be real hip. It was pathetic how hip I was! But the operation put a lot of things in close-up. A lot of corny things that didn’t count before took on a significance.” Today Jones continues to be involved in myriad projects, including a massive history of black music that has consumed him for years. He told Life that his days are like “running through hell with gasoline drawers on,” but he thrives on the pressure. His work, he concluded in Rolling Stone, is “an obsession. But producing is always an obsession. Fact is, I’m obsessed with this whole business. That’s why I’m so happy, and why I’ll be up half the night trying to figure things out.”
Selected discography
Brand New Bag, Mercury.
Ndeda, Mercury.
The Dude, A & M.
The Best of Quincy Jones, A & M.
Sounds … and Stuff Like That, A & M.
I Heard That, A & M.
Mellow Madness, A & M.
Body Heat, A & M.
You’ve Got It Bad, Girl, A & M.
Smackwater Jack, A & M.
Gula Matari, A & M.
Walking in Space, A & M.
The Birth of a Band, A & M.
The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones, Trip.
The Quintessential Charts, MCA.
Mode, ABC Records.
My Fair Lady Loves Jazz, Impulse.
This Is How I Feel about Jazz, ABC/Paramount.
Selected movie soundtracks
In the Heat of the Night, Liberty.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Bell.
Cactus Flower, Bell.
They Call Me Mr. Tibbs, Bell.
Dollars, Reprise.
For Love of Ivy, ABC.
The Wiz, MCA.
Roots, Warner Brothers.
Selected productions for others
Michael Jacksonv
Off the Wall, Epic, 1981.
Thriller, Epic, 1983.
The Brothers Johnson
Blam, A & M.
Light Up the Night, A & M.
Right on Time, A & M.
Look Out for #1, A& M.
George Benson
Give Me the Night, Clamer Brothers.
Frank Sinatra
L.A. Is My Lady, Qwest.
Patti Austin
Every Home Should Have One, Qwest.
Donna Summer
Donna Summer, Geffen.
Leslie Gore
Leslie Gore’s Golden Hits, Mercury.
Sources
down beat, April, 1985.
Life, December, 1984.
People, September 8, 1986.
Rolling Stone, April 12, 1984.
U.S. News and World Report, February 8, 1988.
—Anne Janette Johnson
Jones, Quincy 1933–
Quincy Jones 1933–
Producer, composer, arranger, record company executive
Near-death Experience Brought Balance
An Essence magazine article once aptly refered to Quincy Jones as a “synonym for genious and versatitlity in the entertainment industry.” The multitalented Jones began his remarkable career as a jazz prodigy and eventually progressed into pop music production, film, telvision scoring, and participation in the vaunted “information superhighway” of the 1990s. He has won 25 Grammy awards and a slew of other honors—some of which reflect his work on the top-selling recordings of the modern era—and coordinated the most successful benefit in music history, the release of “We Are the World.”
Yet Jones has managed to keep his accomplishments and prominence in perspective, maintaining a balance of passion, curiosity, and good humor that impresses his peers almost as much as do his more tangible achievements. His dream project, a history of black music from prehistory to the present, has been in the works for decades and has yet to be realized, but no one familiar with Jones’s drive and sense of purpose would consider this formidable undertaking beyond his grasp.
Born Quincy Delight Jones—as was his father—he evinced an early aptitude for music; his mastery of the trumpet led him to bandstands with jazz ensembles by the age of 15. Of course, two years before that, he had felt sufficient confidence in his talents as an arranger to send some charts he’d done to legendary jazz bandleader Count Basie.
Much of Jones’s education came at the feet of greats like pianist-singer Ray Charles and vibraphonist-bandleader Lionel Hampton; the latter hired Jones when the aspiring trumpeter was still a teenager. The talented youth also played with such brilliant jazz figures as singer Billie Holiday, bebop icon and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and bandleader Billy Eckstine. Ultimately, however, he felt more comfortable as a composer and arranger than as a trumpeter. “I always felt that the orchestra itself was my instrument,” he explained to Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore in 1978. “I had to make a commitment as some point, and I was more fearless with an arrangement than with a horn. It was kind of like going to bed with the music, then taking it out on a date later.”
Jones did study formally, attending Boston’s presitgious Berklee School of Music and working with Parisian arranger Nadia Boulanger; Paris, in fact, became his home for some time. It was there that he worked as a jazz producer and led his own ensemble. One of his neighbors in the
At a Glance…
Born Quincy Delight Jones, March 14, 1933, in Chicago, IL; son of Quincy Delight (a carpenter) and Sarah Jones; married four times (third wife was actress Peggy Upton); children: (first marriage) Jolie, (second marriage) Martina-Usa, Quincy III, (third marriage) Kidada, Rashida. Education: Attended Seattle University, Berklee School of Music (now Berklee College of Music), and Boston Conservatory; studied arranging with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Played trumpet in Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie bands; wrote musical arrangements for Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and others; music director and producer, Barchlay Disques, Paris, 1956-60; music director, Mercury Records, 1961, named vice president, 1964. Scored films, including The Pawnbroker, 1965; in Cold Blood, 1967; In the Heat of the Night 1967; For Love of ivy, 1968; Cactus Flower, 1969; Bob & Carni & Ted & Mice, 1969; The Wiz, 1978; The Cotor Purple, 1994. Scored television series Ironside and Sanford and Son; recording artist on A&M Records, 1969-80; founded Qwest Records, 1981; produced single “We Are the World” to benefit African famine victims, 1986; founded magazine Woe, 1993; launched multimedia joint venture QDE, 1993; selected to serve on U.S. President Bill Clinton’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, 1994; founder of nonprofit organization Listen Up Foundation.
Selected awards: 25 Grammy Awards, including three as producer of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 1982, and six for album Back on the Block, 1991; 1994 Polar Music Prize.
Addresses: Office— 10880 Wilshire Blvd., Ste. 2110, Los Angeles, CA 90024. Record company —Qwest Records, 3800 Barham Blvd., Ste. 503, Los Angeles, CA 90068-1042; 1250 Ocean Ave., #3D, Brooklyn, NY 11230-7420.
French capital was quintessential twentieth-century painter Pablo Picasso, who provided a model of creative longevity to the ambitious Jones; indeed, another idol, bop saxophone genius Charlie “Bird” Parker died young, claimed by drug addiction.
“Picasso’s my man,” Jones told Rolling Stone’s David Ritz in 1984. “Picasso’s my model. Didn’t moan, didn’t groan, just kept waltzing and wailing and sharpening his chops, even in his nineties. Now, when I was coming up, Bird was the man. No doubt that Charlie Parker was the baddest cat of this century. I mean the motherf—er was ferocious. But unlike Picasso, Bird couldn’t get his ass out of the bake alley. He split four decades before he should have. For a kid, that’s not a very productive example.”
On his return to the United States in 1960, Jones signed on at Mercury Records, becoming one of the industry’s first black executives. The following year, he became music director and produced his first hit pop record, Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party.” By 1964, he was a Mercury vice president. Also during this period, Jones broke into film and television scoring, providing themes for such motion pictures as The Pawnbroker, In Cold Blood, and In the Heat of the Night and later the TV series Ironside and Sanford and Son.
Jone’s forays into pop left many jazz aficionados—who had counted on him to help preserve the form—nonplussed. He has repeatedly scoffed at such attitudes. “The underlying motivation for any artist, be it [modern classical composer Igor] Stravinsky or [jazz trailblazer) Miles Davis, is to make the kind of muic they want and still have everyone buy it,” he asserted to Gimore. And he has long questioned the concept of the “purity” of jazz, as his words to Down Beat writer Frank Alkyer attested: “Purism? Nothing about jazz is pure. It’s quadrilles, blues, country, marches, Brahms, Beethoven … everything!” He further declared, “Anything that has a pure soul, no matter what you call it, is credible music.”
Jones proceeded to establish his own credibility as a recording artist, exploring funk, fusion, and other contemporary forms on albums like Sounds … and Stuff Like That. While some of his harsher critics carped about his electronic leanings, he felt his background had led naturally to such projects. “I was lucky to come up in an environment where I had to play everything, from bebop and blues to [twentieth-century classical composer Claude] Debussy,” he noted to Rolling Stone’s Gilmore. “I was playing trumpet in an R&B band in Seattle when I was 14, so what I’m doing now isn’t exactly alien to me. That was in 1947, the heart of the bebop era, and there weren’t a lot of cats who shared my view that you should explore music without wearing blinders.” Jones demonstrated a similarly expansive outlook as producer, working with R&B sensations the Brothers Johnson, jazz guitarist George Benson, disco diva Donna Summer, and modern vocal giant Frank Sinatra, among many others.
Near-death Experience Brought Balance
Jone’s star was very much in the ascendant when he found himself in the hospital, undergoing operations to repair two aneurysms in his brain. The year was 1974; the surgery was so fraught with danger that he was not expected to survive. As Rolling Stone contributor Ritz reported, Jones’s closest friends surrounded his hospital bed after the final operation, intending to pay their last repects; very gradually, the stricken patient raised his arm and gave his friends the finger. “If y’all think I’m cutting out,” he murmured, “forget it.”
After coming so close to death, Jones emerged with a new sense of purpose and a philosophy of balance that has served him well in the frenetic world of entertainment. “After I came out of the hospital, I couldn’t believe what I saw,” he told Interview. “Man, all the details of the trees! People’s eyes! Everything was so evident, much more so than before. I could feel the intensity of the breeze, because I was finally paying attention. It affected my perception of my whole existence.” As a result, he reevaluated his work. “Before that, I was doing a lot of things that I didn’t care to do,” Jones averred to Gilmore. “Now, I just do exactly what I love.”
Jone’s involvement in the screen adaptation of the hit musical The Wiz —an R&B reworking of The Wizard of Oz —was especially rewarding, as he enthused to Gilmore at the time: “People used to ask me what the biggest moment of my career was. I would have to say now that it’s The Wiz. Wait until you hear Diana Ross and Michael Jackson singing together! I’ve been in the music business for 30 years, and I’ve never been happier. I feel like I’m 15 years old.” His work on this project led naturally to the production of Jackson’s album Off the Wall —which sold some eight million copies.
When Jones contracted to record the follow-up, he hoped merely to gain a fraction of Off the Wall’s success; the result, 1982’s Thriller, became the biggest-selling album of all time—it moved some 25 million units—and earned Jones three Grammy awards as producer. He worked again with Jackson on the latter’s album Bad; he also revealed to Ritz his peculiar nickname for the star. “We call Michael Jackson ‘Smelly’ because he’s so polite and proper we can’t even get him to say the word funky. Honest to God!”
Meanwhile, Jones had launched his own record label in 1981, Qwest, which was distributed by Warner Bros.; his own recordings, not to mention several by artists he produced, were released on the label. Jackson’s massive hits aside, Jones had emerged as one of the most reliable—and relaxed—producers in popular music. As an unidentified “observer” told Ritz, “In a field crowded with egomaniacs, Quincy works by hiding his ego. He’s so modest and cool, you wind up doing exactly what he wants, no questions asked. That’s why his records sound so relaxed. He’s the ultimate moodmaker and the most skilled manipulator in the business.” Jones himself explained that “producing is always an obsession” and summarized his apporach thus: “Listeners get bored quickly. So vary the sound. Keep the ear engaged and excited.”
Mounted “We Are the World”
In 1986, Jones involved himself in a massive undertaking to generate assistance for victims of famine in Africa. Jackson, Ross, Stevie Wonder, and a veritable solar system of pop stars participated in Jones’s charity single for the USA for Africa organizaiton; “We Are the World” raised $50 million, and Jones managed the whole affair with aplomb, demanding of his all-star vocal talent, “Check your egos at the the door.” Evidently they did, though cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s version of the recording session in his strip Doonesbury had some of them demanding a receipt.
“My lifetime project, though,” Jones confessed to Ritz, “involves putting this whole Afro-American thing together into a single, cohesive musical expression. I’ve been working on it for 20 years, and I may need another 20 to get through. It’s a symphony, it’s an opera, it’s a minstrel review, and a big band bash. I don’t know what it is, except there it is, keeping me up, invading my dreams.” Every time he felt ready to tackle the massive project, he admitted, a new job came along.
Although Jones has not yet realized this dream, he did emerge with an ambitious recording of his own, 1991’s Back on the Block; that album traced a lineage between bebop and rap and enlisted an impressive array of performing talent. Jones took home six Grammy awards as a result, including those for album of the year and best producer. The title track, featuring rap stars Ice-T, Melle Mel, Big Daddy Kane, and Kool Moe Dee, won the statuette for best rap performance by a duo or group. The Grammy awards ceremony took place during the Persian Gulf War, and the producer took note of the crisis in his acceptance speech, urging, “Pray for peace on earth, and when we get peace on earth, let’s take care of the earth.”
In 1993 Jones announced that he was starting a magazine, the slick black music journal Vibe. Though the first issue received mixed reviews, it was quickly established as a standout publication in the field. Also that year, Jones and David Salzman, his partner in television production, formed a joint venture called QDE to provide entertainment on the so-called electronic superhighway; they planned to provide multimedia and interactive programming. They also intended to pursue film production, having negotiated a first-look deal with Warner Bros.
Meanwhile, the entertainment world’s Renaissance Man continued to produce records for other artists, found time to appear at events like the Montreux Jazz Festival, and, in 1994, received the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, Sweden. In his acceptance speech, quoted in Billboard, Jones fondly recalled his past performances there, remarking that “coming back to Sweden is like returning to my old home.”
Most of all, Quincy Jones remained dedicated to exploring new musical avenues. “I used to sit and watch Charlie Parker at Charlie’s Tavern,” he recollected to Down Beat’s Alkyer. “I’d look at him with awe as he would walk over to the jukebox. He’d play [Stravinsky’s] Sacre Du Printemps, The Rite of Spring, and then pull out another dime or whatever it was and listen to a country & western tune…. Everything! That’s how it’s supposed to be.” Like Parker’s jukebox, Quincy Jones’s musical dreams combine the eclectic tributaries of American music into a symphonic ocean. He himself employed a culinary metaphor when discussing his occupational ideal in Interview: “I just want to eat the whole menu, because, man, it’s all so beautiful.”
Selected discography
Brand New Bag, Mercury.
Ndeda, Mercury.
The Dude, A&M.
The Best of Quincy Jones, A&M.
Sounds … and Stuff Like That, A&M.
I Heard That, A&M.
Mellow Madness, A&M.
Body Heat, A&M.
You’ve Got It Bad, Girl, A&M.
Smackwater Jack, A&M.
Gula Matari, A&M.
Walking in Space, A&M.
The Birth of a Band, A&:M.
The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones, Trip.
The Quintessential Charts, MCA.
Mode, ABC.
My Fair Lady Loves Jazz, Impulse.
This Is How I Feel About Jazz, (recorded 1956 and 1957), GRP/Impulse, 1992.
Back on the Block, Qwest, 1991.
Soundtracks
In the Heat of the Night, Liberty.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Bell.
Cactus Flower, Bell.
They Call Me Mr. Tibbs, Bell.
Dollars, Reprise.
For Love of Ivy, ABC.
The Wiz, MCA.
Roots (television score), Warner Bros.
Also produced albums for various artists, including Michael Jackson, George Benson, Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer, Leslie Gore, James Ingram, the Brothers Johnson, and Patti Austen.
Sources
Billboard, July 3, 1993, pp. 8, 77; February 12, 1994, p. 77 Down Beat, October 1992, p. 6. Essence, May 1994, p. 110. Interview, January 1990.
Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1991, pp. A-l, A-20. Rolling Stone, November 2, 1978, pp. 24-6; April 12, pp. 43-6.
—Simon Glickman
Jones, Quincy
Quincy Jones
Composer, arranger, musician
Q Infiltrates the Establishment
Soundtracks, Sitcoms, and Soul Train
With nearly 50 years in the music business, Quincy Jones has proven to be one of the most multi-talented and prolific artists to ever set foot on a stage or in a recording studio. Known in jazz circles since the 1940s and every other circle since the 1980s, Jones seems to have a desire to dip his feet in every aspect of popular culture, and to great effect. A list of his top five selling singles from Billboardmagazine says it all; “Billie Jean,” “Rock with You,” “Beat It,” “Baby Come to Me,” and “We Are the World.” Sometimes arrogant, always outspoken, and always with his finger on the “sell a million records” button, Quincy Jones can seem to do no wrong.
Quincy Delight Jones was born on the South Side of Chicago and lived there until the age of ten when his carpenter father and step-mother moved to Bremerton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. One of nine other siblings, his first recollections of music were of a 12-year-old neighbor in Chicago, whose stride piano playing filtered through the walls of his family’s Chicago apartment. Jones wouldn’t touch an instrument though until two years later when living in Washington. Having tried out every instrument in his elementary school orchestra, he settled on trumpet and made amazing progress in a very short time; such prodigious progress in fact that by 14 he had written music for Count Basie and Lionel Hampton and was playing with Billie Holiday. Music had become a full time obsession for Jones. Talking with Ebony magazine’s Aldore Collier he enthused, “something just grabbed me and it was like a vice … like an addiction. And I could never get enough music of all kinds.”
Around the same time of his budding music obsession, he met a local musician three years his senior. This blind singer/pianist’s name was Ray Charles and the two formed a group doing club gigs and weddings. Originally self taught, Jones learned to read and write music in Braille from Charles who lost his sight at the age of five. Jones and Charles’s combo played everywhere. From white tennis clubs to black clubs to the after-hours clubs of Seattle, their band began to receive a lot of recognition from more established jazz artists of the day. Asked to join Lionel Hampton’s band at the age of 15, Jones’s heart was broken when Hampton’s wife refused to let someone so young, who should really be in school, join his band.
Jones reluctantly went back to school, and at 18, won a scholarship to the Barclay College of Music in Boston; which he dropped out of shortly after when Hampton asked him once again to join his band. Knowing that to be a musician he would have to get real life experience, in 1951, he joined Hampton and toured the world for three
For the Record…
Born Quincy Delight Jones on March 14, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois. Married three times; with six children.
Joined Lionel Hampton’s band in 1951; selected by U.S. State Department to tour South America and Middle East with Dizzy Gillespie in 1956; named vice-president of Mercury Records in 1964; composed first film score for The Pawnbroker in 1965; suffered near fatal cerebral aneurysm in 1974; started Qwest records in 1980; produced top-selling Thriller LP for Michael Jackson in 1982; started multimedia corporation QDE in 1993.
Addresses: Record company; —Qwest Records, 7250 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90036.
years, taking in sights and sounds that few other 19 year-olds ever get a chance to experience. Playing with brass greats Art Farmer and Clifford Brown and being tutored by Clark Terry, trumpeter for Count Basie and Duke Ellington in the 1940s and 1950s, led to Jones leaving the band in 1954 and moving to New York to be a freelance arranger. Working for the likes of Tommy Dorsey, Ray Anthony, Basie, Cannonball Elderly, and Gene Crape to name just a few, Jones’s reputation was being further cemented in the jazz world.
Q Infiltrates the Establishment
In 1956, Jones was selected by the U.S. State Department to assemble a big band under the leadership of Dizzy Gillespie to tour the Middle East and South America. Jones talked of the trip to Williamsburg, Virginia’s Hall of Arts Foundation, “When they send a black band around the world as ambassadors, you know you’re going to do a lot of kamikaze work, and we did…. We went to Tehran, and Dacha, Karachi, Instanbuland Damascus… it was very exciting. Some of these people had never even seen western instruments before.” After doing the State Department tour, Jones returned to the states and worked briefly as a bandleader for ABC-Paramount records. Conducting for Zoot Sims, Charles Mingus, Benny Carter, and Herbie Mann among others, many of his recordings were collected on This is How I Feel About Jazzwhich was reissued by Impulse! in 1974 and Go West, Man from 1978 also on Impulse!.
Moving house about as much as the number of artists he’d arranged and conducted for, Jones took off for Paris in 1957 to study composition and string arrangement with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. He also worked as music director for Barclay Disques, which through its distribution of American Mercury led to his later association with the successful Chicago based independent label. Being musical director of Harold Arlen’s musical Free and Easy led to Jones leading his own band. The 18-piece band toured Europe and the United States to rave reviews, but with the band members’ families being along for the ride, the entourage collapsed under its own weight and left Jones without a band and heavily in debt. Securing a loan from Mercury Records head Irving Green, Jones in 1960 relocated once again to New York to work as musical director/A&R man for Mercury. Rising to label vice-president in 1964, Jones became a pioneer African-American executive, being the first to hold such a position in a white owned company. While happily still in the music business, Jones found that the corporate life was not for him. Talking to Billboard’s he remembered, “I was behind a desk every day… Awful ! I had to be in there at 9 o’clock, and you had to wear these Italian suits. You had to fill out expense reports and all that kind of stuff. That really made my skin crawl.”
Quite possibly Jones’s biggest coup at Mercury wasn’t his executive position, but his unlikely discovery of Lesley Gore. Hearing her sing at a Manhattan hotel, Jones signed the teenager from New Jersey and went on the produce 13 hit pop singles for her including her biggest hit “It’s My Party” which was number one on Billboards top 100 in 1963 and even enjoyed two weeks at the top of the R&B charts. During his stay at Mercury, Jones also produced jazz vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine and white soul singer Timi Yuro. All the while Jones continued as a recording artist in his own right, which he had done since the early 1950’s for the Prestige and RCA labels.
Hollywood Beckons
Seemingly Jones had conquered many worlds, but one longstanding goal of his yet unaccomplished was his desire to score movies. Unable to find work scoring for the major studios, even with the blessing of Henry Mancini, the man behind the mega hit “Moon River” from Breakfasta Tiffany’s amongcountlessotherfilm scores, Jones turned to the world of independent film. Writing the score for young director Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, the story of a concentration-camp survivor, was a great success for Jones, leading to his quitting Mercury to move to Hollywood to do film scores full time. Jones has scored over 33 major motion pictures including In the Heat of the Night, InCold Blood, Boband Carol and Ted and Alice, Cactus Flower, The Getaway, and A Slender Thread. He has also worked in television, composing the themes for The Bill Cosby Show, Sanford and Son and the pioneering synthesizer based TV theme to Raymond Burr’s Ironside
However, Jones’s tireless schedule was not without its problems and he quickly learned that he was not superhuman. While his musical career had produced virtually nothing but winners, his personal life was experiencing considerable difficulties. First married at age 20, that union ended stormily after 14 years and two children, a second marriage to Swedish model Eula Andersson ended badly, and his third marriage to ex-Mod Squad star Peggy Lipton broke apart in 1986. Of his stormy love lives he was honest, telling Life magazine, “I’d been a card-carrying dog…. I did a lot of mean selfish things. God makes it so that you can be young and a dog. But old dogs are really pitiful.” Jones’s health had suffered too. Always career minded, rarely slowing down and seldom sleeping, Jones had the scare of his life when in 1974 he suffered a near fatal cerebral aneurysm. Two operations and six months of recuperation had changed Jones drastically. He told Ebony in 1990, “The operation taught me how to be here, right here, right now, and live in the present time.” Jones also experienced a nervous breakdown after the dissolution of his third marriage in 1986 where he sought solitary refuge on Marlon Brando’s private island for a month.
On a Qwest to Thrill
Following his sabbatical in 1974, Jones moved away from television and film music to concentrate more on his own music and most notably producing other artists’s material. Although he had produced Leslie Gore in the 1960s and done an album for Aretha Franklin in 1972, Jones was not known as well for his skill in the studio as he was for his arranging and scoring. This would change drastically when in 1978 Jones would be employed to score the film TheWiz. Not only did the score earn Jones a Grammy, it would also be the first time he would work with Michael Jackson, a collaboration that would go far beyond anyone’s expectations and establish both parties as household names. With Jones at the controls, Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall was released in September, 1979 to worldwide acclaim and over six million in sales. The follow up to Off the Wall, 1982’s Thriller, went worlds further and became the best-selling album in history. With sales of over 45 million worldwide, Thriller was inescapable between the years of 1983 and 1984. Jones himself even commented on the overkill in Life stating, “If I never see another Thriller record, it’ll be too soon.” Jones couldn’t have been too annoyed with the record though, as it landed him three more Grammys to add to his other ten. His production style, described in Life as featuring, “warm rhythms, lush synthesizer textures, (and) extravagant yet uncluttered string-and-horn orchestrations” also worked wonders for The Brothers Johnson, Rufus and Chaka Khan, George Benson, Patti Austin, and Lena Home. He also produced Frank Sinatra’s L.A. Is My Lady album in 1984, working again with the crooner to make what many consider to be Sinatra’s finest moments on the 1996 Sinatra and Basie album.
Soundtracks, Sitcoms, and Soul Train
While Jones kept very active producing a multitude of artists, he also found time to start his own record label, Qwest, in 1980. With a roster including many of the artists that he himself produced, the label also boasted a diverse array of talent that moved from R&B crooner James Ingram to British pop stars New Order. Another Qwest release was the soundtrack to the film The Color Purple, an adaptation of the Alice Walker novel, which Jones produced with Steven Spielberg directing. Increasingly Jones’s interests turned towards his various business ventures. Possibly the biggest venture Jones had undertaken was his merger with media mogul David Salzmen to form QDE, whose projects have included Vibe magazine which was started in 1993 as a journai of “urban life” and President Bill Clinton’s televised inaugural party in 1992. He also reentered television in the early 1990s, producing such shows as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, In The House, Mad TV, and Vibe TV .As well as producing television shows, Jones, with Hall of Fame football player Willie Davis, television producer and ex-Soul Train host Don Cornelius, and talk show host Geraldo Rivera, formed Qwest Broadcasting which owned television stations in Atlanta and New Orleans, making it one of the largest minority owned broadcasting companies in the United States.
More than just a business man, Jones has also been an active supporter of social issues including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s Operation Breadbasket and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s People United to Save Humanity. He has also done much to further appreciation of African-American culture through his co-founding of the annual Black Arts Festival in Chicago and through extensive donations to establish a national library of African-American art and music. Certainly his most well-known humanitarian effort has been his instrumental part in the USA for Africa project in 1984, the proceeds of which were to go to help feed the hungry in Africa. “We Are The World,” the single released from the sessions, went on to be one of the biggest selling singles ever and brought together on record for the first time artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Bob Dylan to Kenny Rogers.
Holding several honorary doctorate degrees, one Emmy award, seven Academy Award nominations, and 26 Grammy awards among many others, Quincy Jones has succeeded in virtually everything he’s tried. By his sixties he showed no signs of slowing down, looking instead towards the future with his company QDE. By the late 1990s he had started exploring the realm of multimedia, with his first entry in the field being the Q’s Juke Joint CD-ROM which like his album of the same name, explored the history of African-American music. Talking of his situation to Janet Stilson in Channels, Jones said, “We’re positioned to do every dream I’ve ever had.”
Selected discography
Albums
The Birth of the Band, Mercury, 1959.
The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones, Mercury, 1960.
Newport, Mercury, 1961.
I Dig Dancers, Mercury, 1961.
Quintessence, Impulse!, 1961.
Brand New Bag, Mercury, 1963.
Hip Hits, Mercury, 1963.
Big Band Bossa Nova, Mercury, 1963.
Quincy Jones Explores the Music of Henry Mancini, Mercury, 1964.
Golden Boy, Mercury, 1964.
Quincy Jones Plays for Pussycats, Mercury, 1965.
Walking In Space, A&M, 1969.
Gula Matari, A&M, 1970.
Smackwater Jack, A&M, 1971.
You’ve Got it Bad, Girl, A&M, 1973.
Body Heat, A&M, 1974.
This is How I Feel about Jazz, Impulse!, 1974
Mode, Impulse!, 1974.
Mellow Madness, A&M, 1975.
I Heard That, A&M, 1976.
Roots, A&M, 1978.
Sounds… And Stuff Like That, A&M, 1978.
Go West, Man, Impulse!, 1978.
The Dude, A&M, 1981.
Back on the Block, Qwest, 1989.
Miles Davis & Quincy Jones Live At Montreaux, Reprise, 1993.
Q’s Jook Joint, Qwest, 1995.
Soundtrack recordings
The Pawnbroker, Mercury, 1965.
Mirage, Mercury, 1965.
Walk, Don’t Run, Mainstream, 1966.
The Slender Thread, Mercury, 1966.
Enter Laughing, Liberty, 1967.
In the Heat of the Night, United Artists, 1967.
In Cold Blood, Colgems, 1967.
For the Love of Ivy, ABC, 1968.
Mackenna’s Gold, RCA, 1969.
The Italian Job, Paramount, 1969.
The Lost Man, UNI, 1969.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Bell, 1969.
John and Mary, A&M, 1969.
The Out of Towners, United Artists, 1970.
Cactus Flower, Bell, 1970.
They Call Me Mr. Tibbs, United Artists, 1970.
Dollars, Reprise, 1971.
Man and Boy, Sussex, 1971.
The Hot Rock, Prophesy, 1972.
Come Back Charleston Blue, Ateo, 1972.
For The Love of Ivy, ABC, 1973.
The Wiz, MCA, 1978.
The Color Purple, Qwest, 1985.
Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones, Qwest, 1990.
Sources
Billboard, May 28, 1994; December 16, 1995.
Black Enterprise, February 1995; June 1996.
Channels, June 25, 1990.
Down Beat, April 1985; July 1996.
Ebony, April 1990; November 1995.
Interview, November 1995.
Jet, January 14, 1985; May 6, 1985; September 8, 1986; January 8, 1990; August 6, 1990; November 19, 1990; March 11, 1991; April 22, 1991; November 13, 1995.
Life, December 1984.
Newsweek, April 10, 1995.
People, October 15, 1990; March 18, 1996; May 6, 1996.
Rolling Stone, April 12, 1984; June 16, 1994.
Stereo Review, June 1990.
Vanity Fair, July 1996.
—Nathan L. Shafer
Jones, Quincy
Jones, Quincy
(1933-)
Quincy Jones Entertainment
Company
Overview
After beginning his career as a teenage jazz trumpeter of note, Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., has gone on to become a virtual one-man musical entertainment powerhouse. He boasts a string of stellar credits not only as a musician but also as a composer, arranger, producer, and entrepreneur. And as one of the first African American executives of a major recording company, Jones helped bring jazz into the mainstream by successfully fusing it with the musical traditions of many different cultures. In the process, he broke down many of the barriers that had previously excluded African Americans from certain segments of the music industry.
Personal Life
Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., was born on March 14, 1933, in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Quincy Delight Jones, Sr., worked as a carpenter to support his family during the Great Depression, a period of tough economic times that lasted throughout the entire 1930s. His mother, Sarah Jones, was in and out of mental hospitals during most of her son Quincy's formative years, and it was not until he was an adult that he developed a close relationship with her.
Jones' parents divorced soon after his younger brother, Lloyd, was born, and both boys ended up being raised by their father and his new wife. Jones' stepmother already had three children of her own prior to marrying Jones' father and gave birth to three more during the marriage.
When Jones (or "Q" as his friends called him) was 10 years old, the family moved to Bremerton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. By this time, World War II was raging in both Europe and Asia, and Bremerton was filled with soldiers and sailors waiting to be shipped off to fight somewhere across the ocean. This rather chaotic environment and the small town's busy night life helped foster Jones' early love of music.
Jones has been married and divorced three times, including a liaison (1974-86) with actress Peggy Lipton, best known for her roles in the television series The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks. He has five children: Jolie, Martina-Lisa, Quincy III, Kidada, and Rashida. But Jones' workaholic lifestyle has made him somewhat of a stranger to his family. Only recently has he begun to set aside time to spend with his children.
Career Details
Even as a boy, Jones displayed a special talent for music. At only 13, he met up with a group of other young musicians in the Seattle area who were interested in jazz and began playing the trumpet. He also dreamed of one day composing and arranging his own pieces. His first teacher was a 15-year-old fellow musician named Ray Charles. He explained the basics to his eager pupil, including how a group of musicians could observe the same rhythm while playing different notes. "From that moment on I was permanently hooked on music," Jones remarked years later. The two soon became friends and formed a jazz combo that performed at nightclubs and weddings in the Seattle area. Before long, Jones was composing and arranging their music.
After graduating from high school, Jones studied at Seattle University and then won a music scholarship to attend the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Once he completed his course work at Berklee, he headed to New York City to try his hand at creating recording arrangements for jazz musicians.
It was around this same time (the mid-1950s) that Jones began touring with the big bands of Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton. His travels took him across the globe, and while playing in Europe, he decided to make his home in Paris. There Jones studied with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen and served as the musical director at Barclay Disques. He also composed music for Harry Arnold's Swedish All-Stars in Stockholm and directed the music for Harold Arlen's production "Free And Easy" during its three-month swing through Europe in the early 1960.
While living in Paris, Jones also became acquainted with a number of African American writers who had more or less gone into exile to escape racism at home. Among those he counted as friends were Richard Wright and James Baldwin. They helped raise his consciousness on the subject of race and race relations and made him more keenly aware of his African American roots.
Jones returned to the United States in 1960. After taking part in an unsuccessful American tour with 18 musicians from the "Free And Easy" production, he hired on as the musical director for Mercury Records in New York City.
In 1964, Jones became the first African American executive in a white-owned recording company when Mercury Records named him vice-president. In addition to his administrative responsibilities, he sat in on recording sessions with the Mercury orchestra and wrote and arranged music for popular performers such as Sammy Davis, Jr., Andy Williams, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, and Aretha Franklin. He also arranged and conducted the music for It Might As Well Be Swing, an album featuring the Count Basie Band and Frank Sinatra.
Jones was a pioneer at Mercury in another important way. Never a purist, he liked to experiment with creative fusions of jazz (which was itself a blend of African rhythms, European traditions, quadrilles, blues, country, and marches) and other musical forms, including pop, classical, and rock and roll. Through his composing and producing, Jones was able to integrate jazz into American culture (specifically the entertainment industry) like no one else before him.
In 1965, Jones became the first African American composer of a motion picture soundtrack upon the release of Sidney Lumet's The Pawn Broker. This film was his first foray into Hollywood and garnered much praise for its music. Two years later, Jones composed the music for both In Cold Blood and In the Heat of the Night. Both were nominated for an Academy Award, but Jones was advised not to compete with himself and chose In Cold Blood to represent him. While he did not win an Oscar that year, he has continued to compose for motion pictures and has more than 50 film musical scores to his credit.
On several occasions since 1971, Jones has exercised his creativity on the small screen as well. He wrote the theme songs for the television series "Ironside," "Sanford and Son," and "The Bill Cosby Show," and in 1977 he composed the musical score for the hugely successful miniseries "Roots."
In 1973, Jones co-produced a special program for the CBS network entitled "Duke Ellington, We Love You Madly." It was a project of the Institute for Black American Music, a foundation established by Jones, Isaac Hayes, Roberta Flack, and others involved in the music business to promote recognition of black contributions to American music in general. The show featured performances by Peggy Lee, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Joe Williams, Sarah Vaughan, and a 48-piece orchestra conducted by Jones.
Feeling somewhat burned out by the mid-1970s, Jones took a bit of a break from composing to explore his talents as a vocalist. He made his singing debut on the 1973 Valerie Simpson album You've Got It Bad. The title track remained on the music charts for most of that summer. The following summer, Jones released his very own album, Body Heat, which stayed at the top of the charts for over six months and sold over one million copies. It contained the hit songs "If I Ever Lose This Heaven," "Soul Saga," and "Everything Must Change."
Just weeks apart in 1974, Jones suffered two near-fatal cerebral aneurysms (a bursting of blood vessels in the brain) and underwent surgery to repair the damage. He was back at work within six months touring with a 15-member band. But his close brush with death profoundly changed Jones' attitude about life. He emerged from his ordeal with a renewed sense of purpose and a philosophy that emphasized balance. As he put it, "Now, I just do exactly what I love."
Energized by this change of outlook, Jones teamed up with his band to record an album entitled Mellow Madness that featured Stevie Wonder and other notables on vocals. He also became involved in additional projects that reflected his interest in fusing jazz with other forms of music. One such attempt was The Wiz, an African American version of the classic story The Wizard of Oz. Released in 1978, it starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Then, in 1980 Jones made the album The Dude featuring an all-star lineup of musical talent. It earned him 12 Grammy Award nominations, five of which he won.
Not long after The Dude came out, Jones signed a deal with Warner Brothers Records to start up his own label, Qwest Records. It released Jones' own recordings (1989's Back on the Block was the first) as well as several albums by others that he produced. The company even branched out into television station ownership.
During much of the 1980s, Jones kept very busy as a producer for some of the biggest names in the music business, including Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer, and James Ingram. He also produced and wrote the music for Michael Jackson music videos and albums, including the 1982 mega-hit Thriller, which sold over 40 million copies and still ranks as the best-selling album of all time. Jones won three Grammy Awards for his work on that particular project.
In 1985, Jones scored another success in Hollywood with his compositions for the soundtrack to The Color Purple. This motion picture by famed director Steven Speilberg was an adaptation of the Alice Walker novel of the same title.
Jones turned his attention to other matters in 1986, when a devastating famine in east Africa became the subject of global concern. In an effort to help the victims, he wrote a song entitled "We Are the World" and gathered together a huge star-studded chorus to perform it. Sales of the resulting single raised $50 million for famine relief.
Chronology: Quincy Jones
1933: Born.
1946: Began playing trumpet.
1964: Became vice-president of Mercury Records.
1965: Composed soundtrack for The Pawn Broker.
1967: Composed soundtracks for In Cold Blood and In the Heat of the Night.
1977: Composed theme for Roots
1980: Established Qwest Records and released TheDude.
1982: Produced Michael Jackson's Thriller album.
1990: Founded Quincy Jones Entertainment Company.
1993: Established QDE (entertainment company) and started publishing Vibe magazine.
1998: Dissolved QDE.
The 1990s saw Jones establish the Quincy Jones Entertainment Company, which marked his return to television. It produced the series "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" for NBC as well as a series of syndicated talk shows hosted by Jones' friend, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
In 1993, Jones branched out in yet another direction as the founder of Vibe, a magazine devoted to the African American music scene. Later that same year, he signed a deal with David Salzman to form a joint venture called QDE (Quincy Jones/David Salzman Entertainment). Its goal is to provide entertainment on the Internet and various types of multimedia and interactive programming. QDE proved to be very successful and even expanded into film and television production before the partners split in 1998.
Despite his moves into other forms of entertainment, Jones had not abandoned music. In 1995, for example, he released an album entitled Q's Jook Joint. It featured collaborations with Stevie Wonder, Sonny Bono, and his old friend Ray Charles. The next year, Jones released an album of instrumental music called Cocktail Mix.
Social and Economic Impact
Jones' unique sound, a fusion of jazz and other musical forms, has left an indelible imprint on American culture. His original compositions for movies and television, coupled with his many contributions as both song-writer and producer to the worlds of jazz, pop, rock, and rap, all testify to the depth of his talent. So, too, do the more than two dozen Grammy Awards he has received in recognition of his expertise. Equally notable is his commitment to bringing African American music and musicians to the forefront and underscoring their influence and accomplishments.
Throughout his long career, Jones has avoided stereo-typing himself or his music. Instead, he has strategically marketed a certain approach to music—one tinged with his longtime love of jazz—that appeals to the widely varying styles and tastes of the mainstream as opposed to a specialized audience. Jones has been able to savor his success from his position at the helm of an ever—widening entertainment empire that reaches people not only through music but also via television, films, and videos.
One of the biggest challenges Jones has had to face along the way is racism. It has figured in his roles as a business executive, record producer, and aggressive advocate of African American musical projects. He has also been the target of criticism from those who claim that he compromises true jazz by fusing it with other forms of music in his search for mass-market appeal at a time when pop, rock, and rap dominate the airwaves.
As Jones remarked in the early 1990s, however, "My lifetime project...involves putting this whole African-American thing together into a single cohesive musical expression. I've been working on it for twenty years, and I may need another twenty to get through . . . . It's keeping me up, invading my dreams."
Sources of Information
Contact at: Quincy Jones Entertainment Company
10880 Wilshire Blvd., Ste. 2110
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Bibliography
Billboard Magazine, 3 July 1993.
Billboard Magazine, 12 February 1994.
Downbeat Magazine, October 1992.
Entertainment Weekly, 19 January 1996.
Rolling Stone Magazine, 12 April 1978.
Rolling Stone Magazine, 2 November 1978.
Jones, Quincy
Quincy Jones
Born: March 14, 1933
Chicago, Illinois
African American musician, composer, producer, arranger, and film and television executive
Quincy Jones has worked as a musician, composer, arranger, producer, and film and television executive. He also helped Michael Jackson (1958–), Oprah Winfrey (1954–), and many others become stars.
Early life
Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 14, 1933. His parents divorced soon after his younger brother, Lloyd, was born, and the Jones boys were raised by their father, a carpenter, and his new wife. She had three children of her own and three more with Quincy Jones, Sr. His birth mother, Sarah Jones, was in and out of mental hospitals, and it was not until his adult life that Quincy was able to enjoy a close relationship with her. When Jones was ten years old his family moved to Bremerton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, Washington. He began taking trumpet lessons at school, and three years later he met a fifteen-year-old musician named Ray Charles (1932–). The two formed a band and played in local clubs and weddings, and soon Jones was composing and arranging music for the group.
Music career
After high school and a scholarship at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Jones was introduced to the life of a musician on the road. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993) in 1956 and Lionel Hampton (1909–2002) in 1957, and then he made his base in Paris, France. He studied with composer Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), wrote for Harry Arnold's Swedish All-Stars in Stockholm, Sweden, and directed the music for Harold Arlen's production Free and Easy, which toured Europe for three months, ending in early 1960.
After an unsuccessful tour of the United States with a band made up of eighteen musicians from Free and Easy, Jones worked as musical director at Mercury Records in New York. He became the first African American executive in a white-owned record company in 1964 when he was promoted to vice president at Mercury. He produced albums, sat in on recording sessions, and wrote arrangements for artists at Mercury as well as other labels. Jones wrote for Andy Williams (1928–), Peggy Lee (1920–2002), and Aretha Franklin (1942–), as well as arranging and conducting It Might As Well Be Swing, an album featuring Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) and the Count Basie (1904–1984) Band.
Film and television music
Jones's first venture into Hollywood came when he composed the score (the music that accompanies a movie) for the 1965 film The Pawnbroker. Jones won an Academy Award for his score for In Cold Blood (1967) and went on to write the music for over fifty films. In 1969 Jones signed a contract as a recording artist with A&M Records, and his first album with that label, Walking in Space, won a Grammy for best jazz instrumental (without vocals) album of 1969.
Television has also featured Jones's music, starting in 1971 with musical scores and theme songs for such shows as Ironside and Sanford and Son. In 1973 Jones co-produced "Duke Ellington, We Love You Madly," a special for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), featuring a forty-eight-piece orchestra conducted by Jones. The special was a project of the Institute for Black American Music, a foundation formed by Jones and other musicians with the goal of increasing awareness of the African American contribution to American music and Duke Ellington (1899–1974) in particular. Jones also wrote the score for the successful 1977 television mini-series Roots.
Recording and producing
Burned out from producing film sound-tracks, Jones stopped working for Hollywood in 1973 to explore his own music career as a vocalist. His singing debut was with Valerie Simpson on an album called You've Got It Bad, Girl. The title song from the album stayed at the top of the charts for most of the summer of 1973. Jones's next album, 1974's Body Heat, was an even bigger hit. Containing the hit songs "Everything Must Change" and "If I Ever Lose This Heaven," the album sold over a million copies. In 1974 Jones nearly died after suffering two aneurysms (irregular stretching of blood vessels) two months apart. After a six-month recovery he was back at work, touring and recording with a fifteen-member band, with which he released the album Mellow Madness.
After Jones's 1980 album The Dude won five Grammy awards, he signed a deal with Warner Brothers Records to create his own label, Qwest. It took Jones almost ten years to make his next album, Back on the Block. During that time he produced hit albums for other artists, including Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983), which is still one of the bestselling albums of all time with forty million copies sold. Jones also has one of the bestselling singles of all time, "We Are the World," to his credit. Another triumph for Jones in the mid-1980s was his production of The Color Purple, the film version of Alice Walker's (1944–) novel, which featured the first film performance of Oprah Winfrey.
Later years
In the early 1990s Jones worked on a huge, ongoing project, "The Evolution of Black Music," for which he had been gathering material for years. He was back in television as well; the Quincy Jones Entertainment Company produced the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) comedy Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and as a weekly talk show hosted by Jones's friend the Reverend Jesse Jackson (1941–). Jones also worked on a film biography of the black Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Quincy Jones Broadcasting and Time Warner bought a New Orleans, Louisiana, television station, WNOL, which Jones was to oversee.
Quincy Jones has been married and divorced three times, and his six children have only recently been able to spend time with and come to know their father. The 1990 documentary Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones contains scenes in which Quincy discusses his difficult childhood, his mentally ill mother, and his strained past with his children. The film also contains interviews with Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, and others who describe Jones as a hard worker with a creative brilliance that has influenced popular entertainment since 1950. In 1993 Jones started Vibe magazine, a well-received African American music journal. In 1995 he released Q's Jook Joint, featuring the talents of many of his friends such as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder (1950–). The album was a celebration of his fifty years in the music industry.
In May 2000 the Quincy Jones Professorship of African American Music was established at Harvard University in Massachusetts. In January 2001 Jones received the first Ted Arison Award from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, named for the man who created the organization. Later that year Jones contributed a song to the Ocean's Eleven soundtrack, published Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, the story of his life, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in Washington, D.C. In February 2002 Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones won a Grammy in the best spoken word album category.
For More Information
Bayer, Linda N. Quincy Jones. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.
Jones, Quincy. Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Kavanaugh, Lee Hill. Quincy Jones: Musician, Composer, Producer. Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1998.
Ross, Courtney Sale. Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones. New York: Warner Books, 1990.
Jones, Quincy
QUINCY JONES
Born: Chicago, Illinois, 14 March 1933
Genre: R&B, Pop, Jazz
Best-selling album since 1990: Q's Jook Joint (1995)
Hit songs since 1990: "I'll Be Good to You," "You Put a Move on My Heart"
In a diverse career ranging through six decades of African-American musical styles, from 1950s jazz to hip-hop of the 1990s and 2000s, Quincy Jones has earned his reputation as an American institution, excelling as an arranger, producer, instrumentalist, songwriter, film composer, and solo artist. The key ingredient of Jones's lasting success, apart from far-reaching talent, has been his breadth of vision. Viewing music as a multi-colored tapestry, Jones has repeatedly transcended categorical limitations, infusing his work with a wide array of elements: classical, pop, jazz, blues, and R&B. At the same time he has become one of the top businesspeople within the record industry, proving that art and commerce can reside side by side peaceably. In the 1990s, after health and personal problems threatened a setback, Jones remained active in music, film, and television production, running his own record label and recording all-star albums that reflected his catholic taste.
Young Arranger and Producer
Jones spent his early years on Chicago's South Side, an African-American neighborhood rich with a palette of music during the 1930s and 1940s. Although she suffered bouts of mental illness, Jones's mother was a learned and intelligent woman who instilled in him a love of music. In 1943 the family moved to Seattle, Washington, where Jones learned to play a variety of instruments before focusing on the trumpet. While still a teenager he performed with future R&B star Ray Charles, and after graduation from high school won a scholarship to study music at the prestigious Schillinger House in Boston. In the early 1950s Jones moved to New York City and began working as a musical arranger, overseeing recording sessions for artists such as jazz singer Helen Merrill, trumpeter Clifford Brown, and famed "Queen of the Blues," Dinah Washington. Jones spent a large portion of the 1950s in Europe, where he organized a jazz musical theater play in 1959.
Deeply in debt after continuing to pay the musicians' salaries once the show had dissolved, Jones returned to the United States, where he joined Chicago-based Mercury Records as vice president in 1961. The first African American to hold a senior position within a large record company, Jones produced his biggest pop hit at Mercury with "It's My Party," a 1963 smash by teen star Lesley Gore. At the same time, Jones began releasing his own albums and composing musical scores for Hollywood films such as In Cold Blood and In the Heat of the Night (both 1967). Like his solo albums, Jones's film scores were lush, hip, and atmospheric, appealing to pop listeners while retaining a jazz-based groove.
New Directions in the 1970s and 1980s
Jones continued to work steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s, although a brain aneurysm nearly killed him in 1974. Given a one-in-one-hundred chance of recovering, Jones rebounded with energy and strength, producing some of the most successful work of his career. On albums such as Body Heat (1974), Jones merges his jazz sensibility with 1970s R&B and funk. In the late 1970s he began collaborating with pop star Michael Jackson, overseeing production on Thriller (1982), the best-selling album in recorded history. For Thriller, Jones constructed a thick, dense series of beats that found a winning middle ground between R&B and pop. "We Are the World" (1985), a single that Jones produced for the relief organization USA for Africa, brought him further acclaim on the basis of its all-star vocal cast and humanitarian message.
By this time, Jones possessed the clout to assemble diverse groups of performers under one roof, a testament to his stature within the music industry. Released on his own Qwest label, Back on the Block (1989) was one such effort, a collection of jazzy R&B featuring guest artists such as Ray Charles, rapper Kool Moe Dee, and keyboardist Herbie Hancock. In 1985 Jones again turned his energies to Hollywood, producing the film The Color Purple, starring actors Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover. The heavy responsibilities of Jones's new endeavor took a toll: In 1986 he suffered an emotional breakdown, followed by divorce from his wife, actress Peggy Lipton, in 1990. After taking time to refocus on a quiet island in Tahiti, Jones bounced back by founding Vibe, a magazine devoted to hip-hop and rap culture, in 1992. He also produced the hit television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which starred rapper and actor Will Smith and ran from 1990 to 1996.
1990s Diversity
Jones continued to record during the 1990s, his work displaying more of a contemporary R&B feel than the swinging jazz arrangements he created in the past. As cultural critic Gerald Early noted for PBS television network's American Masters program in 2001, Jones is a "culminator," rather than an innovator. Rarely inaugurating new styles, Jones instead assembles the finest work of the past into a new, exciting brew. Q's Jook Joint (1995) is an attempt to fit a range of twentieth-century African-American music, from 1940s vocal jazz to 1970s disco, within the context of a modern R&B album. Again Jones gathers an all-star lineup, including R&B singer Brian McKnight and jazz flutist Hubert Laws.
Despite Jones's historical jazz sensibility, the album is weighted toward the contemporary. "You Put a Move on My Heart," featuring young R&B singer Tamia, is a strong ballad, informed with the slow-building passion of religious gospel music, while Michael Jackson's 1979 hit "Rock with You" is updated with an electronic funk arrangement by teenage R&B star Brandy. Critics note that other songs are less successful: The jazz-styled funk of "Cool Joe, Mean Joe (Killer Joe)" is a bit too clean-sounding, and vocal group Take 6 is unable to handle the tricky phrasing on the jazz standard, "Moody's Mood for Love." The disappointment of such tracks points to the down side of Jones's eclecticism. His familiarity with so many different styles sometimes prevents him from digging into the emotional core of his material. As a result, critics have observed that Q's Jook Joint has the feel of a discursive survey, rather than a detailed exploration. On the whole, however, the album emerges as a worthy effort, informed by Jones's vast knowledge and discernment.
While Jones continued to score films during the late 1990s, working on the hit movie Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), he also devoted time to more personal projects. In 2000 he released Basie and Beyond, a tribute to great jazz bandleader Count Basie. One of the few pure jazz works of Jones's later career, the album features a large orchestra consisting of top players such as percussionist Paulinho Da Costa. Although only one of the songs, "For Lena and Lennie," is actually associated with Basie, Jones and arranger Sammy Nestico capture Basie's gently swinging rhythmic style. Like Jones's R&B albums, Basie and Beyond is more pleasant than trenchant, the music gliding on a feathery bed of sound. On "Grace," an elegiac mood is created through trilling woodwinds and dark-sounding brass, but the arrangement never attains the level of complexity that would make it truly memorable. Still, Basie and Beyond qualifies as a laudable attempt to bypass mainstream pop audiences in favor of reaching a loyal jazz base.
Since the 1950s Jones has continuously sought to balance his various influences and instincts, creating music that looks to the past while staying rooted in the present. Defining the range of possibilities for the contemporary African-American musical artist, Jones excels in every field of entertainment. Regardless of style, his work is informed with unerring professionalism and taste.
SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:
The Birth of a Band (Mercury, 1959); Walking in Space (A&M, 1969); Body Heat (A&M, 1974); The Dude (A&M, 1981); Back on the Block (Qwest, 1989); Q's Jook Joint (Qwest, 1995); Basie and Beyond (Warner, 2000).
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Q. Jones, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (New York, 2002).
david freeland
Jones, Quincy
Jones, Quincy
March 14, 1933
The music producer and composer Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in Chicago and learned to play the trumpet in the public schools in Seattle, Washington, where his family moved in 1945. Jones sang in church groups from an early age, and he wrote his first composition at the age of sixteen. While in high school he played trumpet in rhythm-and-blues groups with his friend Ray Charles (1930–2004). After graduating from high school, Jones attended Seattle University, after which he enrolled in the Berklee School of Music in Boston. He traveled with Jay McShann's band before being hired by Lionel Hampton (1908–2002) in 1951. Jones toured Europe with Hampton and soloed on the band's recording of his own composition, "Kingfish" (1951).
After leaving Hampton in 1953, Jones, who had an undistinguished solo style on trumpet, turned to studio composing and arranging, working with Ray Anthony, Tommy Dorsey, and Hampton. During the 1950s, Jones also led his own big bands on albums such as This Is How I Feel About Jazz (1956). In 1956 Jones helped the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993) organize his first State Department big band. From 1956 to 1960 he worked as the music director for Barclay Records in Paris, where he also studied arranging with the renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979). He also worked with Count Basie, Charles Aznavour, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Horace Silver, and he led a big band for recording sessions such as The Birth of a Band (1959). Jones served as music director for Harold Arlen's blues opera Free and Easy on its European tour. Back in the United States in the early 1960s, Jones devoted his time to studio work, attaining an almost ubiquitous presence in the Los Angeles and New York music scenes.
Jones began working as a producer at Mercury Records in 1961. After producing Leslie Gore's hit record "It's My Party" (1963), he became Mercury's first African-American vice president in 1964. He increasingly made use of popular dance rhythms and electric instruments. In 1964 he also scored and conducted an album for Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, It Might As Well Be Swing. He recorded with his own ensembles, often in a rhythm-andblues or pop-jazz idiom, on albums such as The Quintessence (1961), Golden Boy (1964), Walking in Space (1969), and Smackwater Jack (1971). Jones also branched out into concert music with his Black Requiem, a work for orchestra (1971). Jones was the first African-American film composer to be widely accepted in Hollywood, and he scored dozens of films, including The Pawnbroker (1963), Walk, Don't Run (1966), and In Cold Blood (1967).
In 1974, shortly after recording Body Heat, Jones suffered a cerebral stroke and underwent brain surgery. After recovering he formed his own record company, Qwest Productions. Throughout the 1970s Jones remained in demand as an arranger and composer. He also wrote or arranged music for television shows (Ironside, The Bill Cosby Show, the miniseries Roots, and Sanford and Son ), and for films (The Wiz, 1978). During the 1980s Jones expanded his role in the film business. In 1985 he co-produced and wrote the music for the film The Color Purple and served as executive music producer for Sidney Poitier's film Fast Forward (1985).
Jones's eclectic approach to music, and his ability to combine gritty rhythms with elegant urban textures, is perhaps best exemplified by his long association with Michael Jackson. Their collaborations on Off The Wall (1979) and Thriller (1984) resulted in two of the most popular recordings of all time. Jones also produced Jackson's Bad (1987). During this time, Jones epitomized the crossover phenomenon by maintaining connections with many types of music. His eclectic 1982 album The Dude won a Grammy Award, and in 1983 he conducted a big band as part of a tribute to Miles Davis at Radio City Music Hall. The next year he produced and conducted on Frank Sinatra's recording, L.A. Is My Lady. He conceived of USA for Africa, a famine relief organization that produced the album and video We Are The World (1985). In 1991 Jones appeared with Davis at one of the trumpeter's last major concerts, in Montreux, Switzerland, a performance that was released on album and video in 1993 as Miles and Quincy Live at Montreux. During this time Jones also continued to work with classical music, and in 1992 he released Handel's Messiah: A Soulful Celebratio n.
By 1994, with twenty-two Grammy Awards to his credit, Jones had become the most honored popular musician in the history of the awards. He also wielded enormous artistic and financial power and influence in the entertainment industry and was a masterful discoverer of new talent. In 1990 his album Back on the Block, which included Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald in addition to younger African-American musicians such as Ice-T and Kool Moe Dee, won six Grammy awards. He continued to expand his activities into the print media, including the magazine Vibe, aimed primarily at a youthful African-American readership. He also produced the hit television series Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which began in 1990. That same year Jones was the subject of a video biography, Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones.
Jones won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995 and the Henry Mancini and Oscar Micheaux Awards in 1999. In 2001 Jones published Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. Celebrities and musicians paid tribute to Jones in October 2004 at the United Negro College Fund's "Evening of Stars," honoring his lifetime achievements and commitment to helping others.
See also Jackson, Michael; Music in the United States; Recording Industry
Bibliography
Horricks, Raymond. Quincy Jones. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Spellmount, 1985.
Jones, Quincy. Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Sanders, Charles Leonard. "Interview with Quincy Jones." Ebony (October 1985): 33–36.
Shah, Diane K. "On Q." New York Times Magazine (November 18, 1990): 6.
jonathan gill (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005
Jones, Quincy
JONES, Quincy
Composer and Producer. Nationality: American. Born: Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., in Chicago, Illinois, 14 March 1933. Education: Attended Seattle University, Washington; Berklee School of Music, Boston; also studied with Boulanger and Messiaen in Paris. Family: Married 1) Jeri Caldwell, 1957 (divorced 1966); 2) Ulla Anderson, 1967 (divorced 1974); 3) the actress Peggy Lipton, 1974 (divorced 1990); seven children in all. Career: 1950–53—trumpeter and arranger for Lionel Hampton; then freelance arranger for Ray Anthony, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and Peggy Lee; 1956—musical director, Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra; arranger for Barclay Discs, Paris; 1961—music director, then vice president, 1964, Mercury Records; composer of instrumental works, and for TV series Hey Landlord, 1966–67, The Bill Cosby Show, 1969, and Sanford & Son, 1972–77, and for the mini-series Roots, 1976; 1990s—executive producer of TV series The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Jesse Jackson Show, In the House, Mad TV. Awards: Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, 1994. Agent: Rogers and Cowan Inc., 1888 Century Park East, Los Angeles, CA 90067–7007, U.S.A.
Films as Composer:
- 1960
Pojken i trädet (The Boy in the Tree) (Sucksdorff)
- 1964
The Pawnbroker (Lumet); Mirage (Dymtryk)
- 1965
Made in Paris (Sagal) (songs); The Slender Thread (Pollack)
- 1966
Walk Don't Run (Walters); The Deadly Affair (Lumet); Enter Laughing (C. Reiner)
- 1967
Banning (Winston); In Cold Blood (R. Brooks); In the Heat of the Night (Jewison); Ironside (Goldstone—for TV)
- 1968
A Dandy in Aspic (A. Mann); Jigsaw (Goldstone); The Counterfeit Killer (Leytes); For Love of Ivy (Daniel Mann); The Split (Fleming); The Hell with Heroes (Sargent); MacKenna's Gold (Lee Thompson); Split Second to an Epitaph (Horn)
- 1969
The Italian Job (Collinson); The Lost Man (Aurthur); Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (Mazursky); Cactus Flower (Saks); John and Mary (Yates); The Out-of-Towners (Hiller); Blood Kin (The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots) (Lumet)
- 1970
They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (Douglas); Eggs (Hubley—short); Of Men and Demons (J. & F. Hubley—short); Up Your Teddy Bear (The Toy Grabbers) (Joslyn); Brother John (Goldstone)
- 1971
The Anderson Tapes (Lumet); Honky (Graham); $ (The Heist) (R. Brooks)
- 1972
The Hot Rock (How to Steal a Diamond in Four Uneasy Lessons) (Yates); The New Centurions (Precinct 45 Los Angeles Police) (Fleischer); The Getaway (Peckinpah); Killer by Night (McEveety)
- 1976
Mother, Jugs, and Speed (Yates) (songs)
- 1985
Portrait of an Album (+ d); Fast Forward (Poitier); Lost in America (Albert Brooks) (song); The Slugger's Wife (Ashby); The Color Purple (Spielberg) (+ co-pr)
- 1988
Heart and Soul (Pasquin) (+ co-exec pr)
- 1990
Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones (Weissbrod—doc) (+ ro)
Films as Music Director:
- 1971
Man and Boy (Swackhamer)
- 1972
Come Back Charleston Blue (Warren) (+ song)
- 1978
The Wiz (Lumet) (+ songs)
- 1985
The Slugger's Wife (Ashby) (exec music pr); Fast Forward (exec mus pr)
Publications
By JONES: articles—
Vanity Fair (New York), July 1996.
On JONES: books—
Horricks, Raymond, Quincy Jones, New York, 1986.
Cuellar, Carol, Quincy Jones: Q's Jook Joint, Miami, 1996.
Kallen, Stuart A., Quincy Jones, Edina, 1996.
Kavanaugh, Lee H., Quincy Jones: Musician, Composer, Producer, Berkeley Heights, 1998.
On JONES: articles—
Cinestudio (Madrid), April 1973.
Dirigido por . . . (Barcelona), September 1974.
Ecran (Paris), September 1975.
Film Dope (Nottingham), no. 28, December 1983.
Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), July 1996.
Variety (New York), 18 November 1996.
Jet, 31 May 1999.
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With the incorporation of jazz and pop styles into film music in the 1950s and 1960s, it was inevitable that composers from such backgrounds would be commissioned to compose film scores. Quincy Jones's experience as an arranger, composer, and performer made him particularly adept at matching the disciplines of these styles to the demands of the medium.
Jones has brought to film music a range of influences from Latin stylings to American blues. Such influences are apparent in his first major score, for Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker. The urban realism of Lumet's film is balanced by equally authentic musical accompaniment, showing not only Jones's facility with jazz, but also with Puerto Rican and other ethnic musical idioms. Jones's handling of these elements led to his scoring a number of crime films and social dramas with contemporary urban settings. In many of these works, he combined modern rhythms with melodic pop themes reminiscent of the work of Henry Mancini.
This approach made Jones a natural choice for contemporary directors seeking a "new" sound. The score for Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night employs bluegrass and blues elements appropriate to its Southern setting while Jones's music for Richard Brooks's In Cold Blood incorporates unusual percussive effects, throbbing bass lines, and even a use of bottles at one point. Jones has also continued to work on and off for Lumet, serving as arranger and conductor for the filmmaker's production of The Wiz, adapted from William F. Brown and Charlie Smalls's hit Broadway musical. Jones gained further recognition in the motion picture industry as one of the producers and the musical coordinator for Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. Assembling a team of composers, orchestrators, and musicians, Jones constructed a score that combines a broad spectrum of musical influences, from African rhythms to jazz and blues. The music also contains more traditional approaches to film scoring, as in a lyrical symphonic theme which bears in its principal woodwind line a resemblance to Georges Delerue's main theme for Our Mother's House. Above all, Jones's work for The Color Purple demonstrates his ability not only to handle a variety of musical styles but also his influence as a producer.
The Color Purple aside, from the mid-1970s on Jones became less active in films, turning his attention more to arranging and conducting and, in particular, to his film and television production company, Quincy Jones Entertainment. He also established his own broadcasting company to acquire television and radio properties. And in recent years he has become an elder statesman among American (and even more specifically, African-American) composers/arrangers/music producers. In 1990, he was the subject of a documentary/homage, Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones, a portrait in words, music, and images in which his "genius" is acknowledged by a diverse group of celebrities, from Dizzy Gillespie to Ice T, Miles Davis to Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand to Big Daddy Kane.
—Richard R. Ness, updated by Rob Edelman