On the night of January 28, 1985, when he was tasked to gather luminaries from across the pop music spectrum to record “We Are the World,” a song written and proposed as relief to African famine, Quincy Jones was arguably the industry’s most powerful and influential producer. He was nearing his fifty-second birthday and had already built an incomparable career as a musician, performer, arranger, conductor, and composer of film scores and pop/jazz songs, and, of course, producer that spanned 37 years. Eight years earlier, he was the first African American to be nominated for an Oscar for song, “The Eyes of Love” from the film Banning, and score, In Cold Blood. He had plied his mighty trade behind Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Leslie Gore, Frank Sinatra, and most recently with Thriller, achieved historical acclaim, sales, and cultural significance, with Michael Jackson. It was right that he would be at the center of the first and perhaps last gathering of this many celebrated figures of the 20th century musical landscape.
And Quincy Jones had one edict that evening: “Leave your egos at the door.”
Whether generational talents like Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Billy Joel, and even Ray Charles, or newly minted stars like Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis, and Kim Carnes, reading that sign and adhering to its wishes prompted few questions. Egos were not allowed around Quincy Jones. Bring your talent, your passion, your instincts, and your joy to make music – nothing else was required. Jones had done and seen it all by 1985, and he still had so much more in the tank.
Hearing of Jones’ passing this week, reminded me – as all deaths do, especially celebrity deaths – of the passage of time, and how we mark that time. Quincy Jones is unique in that his ubiquitous nature inside the music industry lent to his legend spanning a period celebrated for its evolution, experimentation, expansion, and excellence in music, particularly American music, and more pointedly, Black American music. He was in the middle of a cultural detonation fueled by art, film, and political upheaval, and he became part of its soundtrack. During this period, Jones did not merely traverse several genres effortlessly in all his capacities listed above, but he did what all great geniuses do: evolve, challenge, and create anew. By his very nature and his race and his times, Jones brought to several aspects of the music world a unique slant and view and ears and touch and fierce competition to cull the best from the artists that sought him out and put their egos into his hands.
Trust is what you hear most of all from those who worked with Jones. There was a hands-on quality to his producing, his ability to communicate musically, this wordless intuition to mine the performance needed, the arrangement called for, the musicians best suited to realize it. Using his natural gifts mixed with a voracious hunger to learn his craft and execute it, he knew his calling and followed his bliss from the very beginning.
At just 20, Quincy Jones left a scholarship to what is now called the Berklee College of Music in Boston, a prestigious conclave of the best musicians in the world, to tour with jazz pioneer Lionel Hampton as not only a trumpeter and pianist, but arranger – an explicit talent the prescient Hampton had seen in the young man immediately. It was Jones’ understanding of the nuance of song, finding its secret ingredients and unlocking them that was his first foray into grasping greatness. That led him to New York City, which was then in the 1950s, the center of the musical world to work with such jazz legends as Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Gene Krupa.
Jones’ eventual excelling in film scoring was another mixture of his instincts and growth within a competitive and mostly white community, through television and his work at a record label. These film scores, for which he conducted a great deal of the orchestras, Jones pushed the boundaries of his discovery in sound, a tool he best used in his 1960s work with Sinatra, a man desperate to recapture the sultry power of his halcyon days and in Quincy Jones found a partner and fellow lover of the sweeping aura that Ol’ Blue Eyes once commanded. The two artists – one, a titan, the other, a brash, young musical genius – brought the nostalgia of the crooner’s best work into an age dominated by rock and roll.
Jones performed a similar balancing act by combining the traditional with the progressive in his art with Ella Fitzgerald and much later with the brilliant but intractable Miles Davis, who fought tooth and nail with Jones on a never-ending project to record him live in the winter of his years. Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux would stand as the master’s final recording, captured mere months before his death in 1991.
For Jones, who released a fine solo effort of his own, The Dude, in 1981, it was finding the magic in others that sparked him more than his own singular expression. Even for that record, he allowed others to shine, like the outstanding vocal performances by James Ingram and Patti Austin. He was unselfish, open, and compromising, but also fearless and single-minded in his pursuit of musical translation.
Which brings us back to the 1980s, and Jones’ most lasting pop culture achievement, his three groundbreaking albums with Michael Jackson, long before the eventual self-proclaimed King of Pop began his reign when Jackson was trying to escape his child-star status as part of the Jackson 5, languishing in that nether world between has-been and neophyte. As with Sinatra and Davis, Jones found the sweet spot and let his artist discover and flourish. Their collaboration on Off the Wall may be their finest achievement. Thriller, of course, was a monumental sales and cultural juggernaut, but the former is a more salient example of Jones at his best, guiding a legacy talent through the labyrinth of his origins and on into a new era, combining his natural charms with the dangers of an excitingly unknown future. You can hear Jones and Jackson invent a phenomenon one rhythm, one phrase, one melody at a time.
Quincy Jones was always able to see all of that in his work, the past, present, and future. He brought music to life out of respect for its ultimate power to define the artist and transform the listener. And, for most of his 91 years on the planet, he nurtured its gifts and provided us a joyous soundtrack.
