All the ways Quincy Jones transformed popular music
We have all been touched by the music of Quincy Jones. The late, great American producer’s invention and imagination weaves through the sound of our times, from the 20th century to the 21st, an invisible thread binding together jazz, swing, soul, RnB, funk, pop, hip hop and everything in between.
His records have been on the sound systems in my house since I was born, though they rarely had his name on the front cover. Jones was a legend in the credits. He formed a teenage band with Ray Charles in the Forties, played trumpet backing Elvis Presley’s first TV appearance in 1956, swung with Frank Sinatra in the Sixties, became emblematic of a funky sophistication in African-American culture in the 1970s and, in the 1980s, his absorption of all the musical strands of his time bloomed into the most dazzling pop ever heard. They are records that will never be surpassed. Jones was the man.
I had the privilege of meeting him and telling him what he meant to me. Quincy Jones is a very big part of why I became a musician, and then a music writer. Already in his late sixties and discussing the working life of a musician, he blithely announced: “The first 30 years are the hardest.” I snorted with laughter. I’d been involved in music my whole adult life and he made me feel like a beginner.
By the time I met him, Jones was a sophisticated elder of the music business, with a patrician air but a warmth allied to a keen intelligence that helped you understand how he had been able to get the best out of so many great musicians over so many decades. He was enthused by music all his life, and I saw him playing into his eighties with British jazz fusion prodigy Jacob Collier.
When I interviewed Jones for the Telegraph in 2006, he was beginning to look physically frail but waxed passionately about educating young musicians. “Music has been dumbed down,” he insisted. “I don’t think it, I know it. It’s about the roots. We got to get the education system in place to help kids understand what the culture’s about.”
He had enthusiasm, and he had plans, and he left me with this gem, passed from one all-time great musician to another: “Sinatra said, ‘Live every day like it’s your last. One day you be right!”
1. He invented Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was a phenomenal singer, an incendiary talent too ambitious to be stuck as a boy band pinup with his siblings. But it was Jones who gave him the musical ammunition to transform into surely the greatest pop superstar of his times (regardless of how you feel about his tarnished personal reputation). The world-beating partnership began on the set of 1978’s The Wiz, director Sidney Lumet’s flop musical version of The Wizard of Oz. “I saw something in him, how curious he was, and how talented,” Jones told me. When Jackson asked Jones to recommend a producer for his first solo album, Jones told him: “I’d like to take a shot at that”.
Jackson’s record company Epic was not enthused by their prodigy linking up with a veteran of big bands and soundtracks (“They said I was too jazzy”), but the duo kicked off with a funk masterpiece, Off The Wall, in 1979. Jones wove together all his rich melodicism and musicality into dance music where every part of the band was syncopating around underlying grooves, giving a platform for Jackson to take off into the ether. It made Jackson a solo star, but Thriller (1982) made them both legends. Track for track, it is probably the greatest pop album ever made, blending Jones’s rich musicality with the latest innovations in modern studio technology.
“Michael’s one of the most disciplined people I’ve ever worked with,” Jones told me. “We did Thriller in two months.” The work rate was structured to avoid what Jones called “paralysis of analysis.” “We had an amazing team. We’d be piled up in the studio for five days and nights with no sleep. There was no production philosophy. No grand plan. You live life forward and go step by step and do something that gives you goosebumps, man. You don’t sit there and try to figure out what the market is and all that bullshit.”
He called it listening to “God’s whispers.” “You go with the passion and hope other people feel as passionate as you do.” It turned out that more than fifty million record buyers did. Still the best-selling album of all time (with claimed all time sales of 70 million), Thriller conjured a perfect confluence of white pop and black dance music. But Jones insisted it was all jazz at heart. “If you really listen to Baby Be Mine without the lyrics – that’s Coltrane, you know.”
The team worked together again on the fantastic 1987 follow up, Bad (35 million copies, making it the 12th best-selling album of all time) before going their separate ways. There was no fall out. Asked in 2007 why they had never collaborated since, Jones shrugged it off. “Man, please! We already did that! I got too much to do.”
2. He gave Frank Sinatra his groove back
Although primarily associated with black music throughout his life, Jones had a long partnership with the 20th century’s most enduring white singer, Frank Sinatra. They made a series of albums in the mid Sixties, helping the ageing star reconnect with a vast mainstream audience by adding a touch of groove and urgency to fresh swing arrangements that tied in with Sinatra’s hip playboy image.
Their first recording together was Fly Me to the Moon in 1964, a propulsive, joyous song with jazz legend Count Basie on piano that positioned Sinatra at the centre of the space race through its association with Apollo missions to the moon.
“Mr First Take,” was Jones’ name for Sinatra. “If you love an artist you take the time to understand what his boundaries are in terms of patience. It takes a lot of guts to tell Sinatra what to do, man. You better have your stuff together cos the man takes no prisoners,” Jones once said.
When he died in 1998, Sinatra left Jones his ring. “I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don’t need a passport. I just flash my ring.”
3. He blew Hollywood’s bloody doors off
Jones stormed the white bastions of Hollywood to become one of the greatest film composers of them all. Following in the footsteps of Duke Ellington (already by that time a legendary pianist when he scored 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder), Jones was only the second African-American to score a major motion picture, Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964).
It is probably significant that most of Jones’s early cinematic work was for film projects with a black or social realism angle. “They didn’t use brothers,” was how Jones later put it, recalling a Hollywood meeting when writer Truman Capote stormed out, disgusted that Jones was being hired to create the soundtrack for a film version of his true crime book, In Cold Blood, frothing “I didn’t know Quincy Jones was a n*****.”
Capote later tearfully apologised, and the soundtrack went on to receive an Academy Award nomination in 1967. The same year, Jones became the first African-American to be nominated for Original Song for The Eyes of Love (from Robert Wagner’s romantic drama Banning).
Jones was also the first African-American to be named as musical director of the Oscars, in 1971. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including for Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple in 1985, but won only one honorary award: the AMPAS Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995. He was (it may come as no surprise) the first African-American to do so. As Barack Obama said of Jones in 2018, “At each stage in his remarkable career, he’s been the first. That’s given people behind him enormous confidence. And he’s done it with grace.”
Jones composed over 40 film soundtracks. Perhaps the most emblematic was his jazzy, racy score for 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, in which Sidney Poitier plays a black detective facing racism in the American South during a murder investigation.
But in the perhaps less racially conflicted arena of the UK film business, Jones is celebrated for his contribution to that most British of film capers, The Italian Job, in 1969. With its cockney slang lyrics by Don Black, Get a Bloomin’ Move On! (better known as The Self Preservation Society) is perhaps one of the unlikeliest entries in Jones’ funky, groovy, jazzy, pop canon. But in his own way, much like Michael Caine’s famous gang of villains, Jones can really be said to have blown the bloody doors off.
4. He spent his life lifting others
The first time I met Jones was in Rome in the 1990s with Bono and Bob Geldof, visiting the Pope to persuade him to back a plan for Third World debt relief. The two Irish rock stars were a notoriously pugnacious force for charity, but Jones’s quieter urbane gravitas made him a vital ally: when he spoke, even the Pope paid attention.
The grandson of a slave, Jones rose from humble beginnings to become the most powerful, garlanded and influential African-American in 20th century entertainment. He was born in a poor district of Chicago in 1933, “the biggest black ghetto in the worst depression.” His mother was interned in a mental hospital and he was raised by his carpenter father, who worked for “black gangsters” who got “run out of town” in a dispute with Al Capone.
At 10, Jones and his brothers were sent to Seattle for their own protection. Jones was on course for a life of crime. “We broke into an armoury to eat some pie. After we got full, we started searching the rooms. I saw this piano in the dark. I almost closed the door but, thank God, I walked back in that room and touched the keys and every cell of my body said this is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. I didn’t know people played instruments back then. After that, there was no turning around.”
Instead, Jones taught himself multiple instruments. In his first band with neighbourhood friend Ray Charles, he indulged an eclecticism that helped shape a boundary-less approach to music. “We played everything, man. Debussy, Be Bop, Rhythm and Blues, Polkas, Salsas, strip music, pop music. We were playing every night till 6 o’clock in the morning, three different clubs, we were total music junkies, man. We didn’t think about money or fame. It was not on our minds. We just wanted the music. That’s all we cared about.”
But to make that music and fulfil his expanding ambitions, Jones had to break down barriers. He got a scholarship to Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music. He moonlighted in jazz clubs, befriending such luminaries as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He started making popular records with such stars of the scene as Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. In 1961, at the age of 28, he was made Vice President of Mercury Records, the first African-American to hold such an exalted music business position.
He expanded as an increasingly exalted producer over the next two decades but never forgot the struggle it had taken to get there. He focused on African-American issues and talent, helping nurture the careers of Will Smith and LL Cool J in his role as executive producer of the TV series’ The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and In the House.
In 1985, he responded to a challenge from Geldof to create an American counterpart to Band Aid, in support of efforts to relieve humanitarian disaster in Ethiopia. Jones wrote We Are the World with Jackson, producing a superstar-studded charity recording (Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers, Tina Turner, Diana Ross and Bruce Springsteen all feature, among others) that went on to sell more than 20 million physical copies, making it the eighth-best-selling single of all time.
5. He made the greatest record in pop history
And no, we are not talking about We Are the World. If you want to appreciate the real genius behind Thriller, take a listen to Donna Summer’s extraordinary State of Independence, which Jones produced in the same year. The first time I heard that record, it blew my mind. It didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before, yet it was pop music rather than radical experimentalism.
The song was originally by Jon and Vangelis (a duo made of Yes singer Jon Anderson and synthesiser wizard Vangelis). Jones’ production lifts it into another dimension, taking off from a squelchy synth bassline to spiral up into a cosmic anthem of personal and universal redemption. Instruments melt together in swirling psychedelic fusion.
For the utterly glorious backing vocals, Jones assembled what may well be the greatest choir ever to sing together in one time and place: Lionel Richie, Dionne Warwick, Michael Jackson, Brenda Russell, Christopher Cross, James Ingram, Kenny Loggins, Peggy Lipton, Patti Austin, Michael McDonald and Stevie Wonder. It still sounds like the future, over forty years later. It is pop. It is jazz. It is pure genius, a perfect example of the musical melting pot that was Jones.
“What sets a great jazz player apart is amazing ears and an open mind,” he said to me in a conversation where I came to grasp that, to Jones, it was all jazz in essence, and it was all music. “It’s individuality. It’s blink and you’ll miss it. It’s whatever you feel at the time. You have to be ready to go with the flow.”
Quincy Jones has joined the cosmic flow now. The music, well, it goes on and on.