Jones, Quincy

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Quincy Jones

Producer, composer, arranger, trumpeter, and bandleader

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.”