The passing of jazzman, R&B producer, and film composer Quincy Jones on November 4th comes exactly fifty years after his being declared near death upon suffering a stroke in 1974. Instead, ten metal plates and clamps were embedded in his skull to permanently tie-off the leaking blood vessels and his life was spared. To his friends and colleagues, it seemed characteristic of Jones's lifelong spirit of optimism, enthusiasm, defiance, and self-determination, that instead of oblivion, Q's life and career would now resume at full force and, indeed, flourish.
He would have to give up his performing life as a hot trumpeter touring and recording with bands like Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie -- blowing those high notes would strain the brain, the whole cranial cavity, beyond endurance. But when one talent must retire, another can prosper: Jones the band arranger was born or, in this case, reborn as a new focus. Some of his smart and powerful big band arrangements for the Gillespie band would lead to offers of arranging for the Count Basie orchestra and when Basie started backing vocalists like Frank Sinatra, Jones as arranger would start hearing directly from the Chairman of the Board himself and then, before long, from top-billed artists of Q's own generation and background.
Word was out that here was a guy comfortable with the '40s big band tradition, experienced with the rebel jazz and bebop trends of the '50s and the growing R&B movement of the '60s – as happy to write a pop chart for Ella Fitzgerald as to play gospel/blues with Ray Charles. Ella liked his dependable technical knowledge about all kinds of music and Ray, well, they had been compatriots since teenage.
Quincy Delight Jones had been born in Chicago, raised in Seattle, and educated on scholarship at Boston's Berklee College of Music. There, while absorbing all the current fads of jazz, he was also being trained well beyond the genre of jazz, even taking a year in Paris for enhanced studies in composition and music theory, training with the controversial modernist Olivier Messiaen and the 20th century's greatest music coach, Nadia Boulanger. He returned to the US of the 1950s to join the bebop vanguard and develop something of a horn sound of his own. For a while, he played regionally around the Seattle area but it was his getting together with Ray Charles, who was just embarking on his own career rocking back and forth at the piano and creating an iconic vocal blend of blues, gospel, and funk, that lit the fire under Q "for real" to set his own course. That's when he started to move beyond just arranging for other bands and vocalists to performing his own stuff – record albums under his own name including one called "Quincy Jones Explores the Music of Henry Mancini" which would prove fortuitous. Mancini himself would later tell the story: how "someone" from Universal Studios called Mancini for advice: did he think a non-Hollywood novice like this guy Quincy Jones could handle a movie scoring job? Before long, during the call, Mancini says he intuited the real question being asked: did he think a Black man could handle a dramatic (i.e. non-ethnic) film score? As late as the mid-1960s, perhaps especially then, this same sort of prejudice was riding high and Mancini recognized it as such. He kept his head, though, and said that Jones was well-versed in all kinds of music, well-trained beyond what any Hollywood producer could want, and should be considered ready and able to work. Q got the job and a good many future scoring jobs after that, thanks to Mancini's early advocacy.
Over the subsequent years, he refined his approach to soundtrack music, adjusting to the needs of each film story and yet somehow always sounding personal and authoritative on his own behalf. Director Sidney Lumet's searing tale of a Holocaust survivor living in a dark corner of NYC, The Pawnbroker, got a true fusion score from Jones – part Harlem jazz but also partly a kind of tortured old world European sentimental rhapsody evocative of the pawnbroker's troubled memories, and partly a dissonant, progressive music to underline the moral dilemma at the heart of the film: comparing the war torn '40s with the urban war zone of the '60s which results in the murder of the pawnbroker's innocent and good-hearted apprentice and, of course, his own soul.
From there, the Quincy Jones history of movie scoring is represented by all kinds of music – everything he had studied and played and arranged and loved: orchestral suspense music for thriller films like A Deadly Affair, Mirage, The Slender Thread, light charming music for comic films like Walk Don't Run and caper films like Hot Rock. For The Getaway, he featured harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielmans in a lot of effective solo work; for Banning, he penned a pop song, "The Eyes of Love", while for In The Heat of the Night, he paired again with Ray Charles for a foray into southern blues music. Perhaps Jones's most challenging film assignment was for the bleak black-and-white semi docudrama about a hapless pair of drifters who, hoping to rob a typical household in the Kansas countryside, impulsively decide to kill them all instead, In Cold Blood. There, the Jones score mixed an avant garde orchestral style, a perverse nursery tune, and an unsettling array of percussive sounds including body slaps, tongue clicks, tapped soda bottles, etc. for a most disturbing effect.
Television was an additional outlet for Jones's new multi-media scoring career. One assignment sent him on a year-long detailed study of the history of African music to be used in a mini-series broadcast version of the Alex Haley novel, Roots. In the end, Jones's research was so meticulous and so voluminous that the broadcast deadlines for the TV series itself were passing and so someone else (Gerald Fried) was brought in to compose the bulk of the dramatic scores for that series while Jones's more academic music was used in the premiere episode only. Still, it kept his name before the industry even as it emphasized his reputation for absolute musical integrity.
Sidney Lumet's name comes up again here in the Quincy Jones story as director of another big screen product – this time a musical version of the classic film The Wizard of Oz to be called The Wiz and for which Quincy would produce the music tracks. This was not Q's music but he was obliged to supervise the soundtrack and, in the process, he would meet one of the co-stars, soon to be the most famous personality in all of show business, Michael Jackson. Despite the relative failure of the Oz project, Q and Jackson decided to join forces afterward and the result would be a string of the most successful pop albums of the era including the best-selling record album of all time, the 65 million-selling Jackson/Jones disc, "Thriller". For a short-lived skyrocketing couple of years, Michael Jackson was the "King of Pop" and Quincy Jones rode to the top of the music industry: producer, composer, corporate executive – all merit-based job titles that had nothing to do with having also been a barrier-breaking, prejudice-ignoring Black man.
In late years, he was the subject of a documentary film, "Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones" and an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar award-winner. He had won 28 Grammy awards out of 80 nominations. In 2022, he reached back to honor his old champion, the late Henry Mancini, joining John Williams, Herbie Hancock, and others to remember Mancini's innovative jazz scoring for the Peter Gunn TV series. It was an anniversary celebration, a chance to gather in a studio to reminisce and record some Gunn music among old friends. For Q, it was a piece of autobiography as well, remembering that one supportive phone call where Mancini had said, "Go ahead; hire him; you can't do better than Q". Up to his final still-productive days, that was still true.
Quincy Jones was 91.
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