Today brings an end to the month of February, and an end to Black History Month 2021 here at Weekly Music Commentary. This has been a special month indeed. I really love it because it gives me a chance to write about music history. Also, it gives me a chance to return to a place where it all started for me, when my father introduced me to music. This week is very important to me because I got the chance to feature Quincy Jones. There are so many reasons why Quincy Jones is an appropriate subject for Black History Month. However, for me it goes back to a major place of personal music influence. Quincy Jones started me on an early path of a musical career. His artistic activities provided a map for what I wanted to do musically. Allow me to explain.
When I was quite young I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps and play the trumpet. As I’ve stated before he didn’t want me to start until I was committed to learning. That time came just before high school. However, along with my quest to learn to play the trumpet, was a zeal toward reading and writing music. My father was also a music arranger and upon watching him work, I wanted to do that as well. As time moved forward I started to learn about chord progressions and what other musical instruments could do. Because of musicians like Quincy Jones, showing the world what a good music producer could accomplish, I was arranging for my marching band well before my senior year. See, what I wanted was musical control over every sound coming from an artist and backing musicians, to large orchestras. Once I was in the real musical world, I got my chance to do many of those things. If Quincy Jones was influential to me, did other musicians also follow. Certainly! Every artist has to travel on his or her own road.Let’s look at Quincy Jones’ start in life, and see why he became a living legend.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, the son of Sarah Frances (née Wells), a bank officer and apartment complex manager, and Quincy Delight Jones Sr., a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Kentucky. Jones was introduced to music by his mother, who always sang religious songs, and by his next-door neighbor, Lucy Jackson. When Jones was five or six, Jackson played stride piano next door, and he would listen through the walls. Lucy recalled that after he heard her one day, she could not get him off her piano.
When Jones was young, his mother suffered from a schizophrenic breakdown and was admitted to a mental institution. His father divorced his mother and married Elvera Jones, who already had three children of her own named Waymond, Theresa, and Katherine. Elvera and Quincy Sr. later had three children together: Jeanette, Margie, and future U.S. District Judge Richard. In 1943, Jones and his family moved to Bremerton, Washington, where his father got a wartime job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. After the war, the family moved to Seattle, where Jones attended Garfield High School. In high school, he developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger. His classmates included Charles Taylor, who played saxophone and whose mother, Evelyn Bundy, was one of Seattle’s first society jazz bandleaders. Jones and Taylor began playing music together, and at the age of fourteen, they played with a National Reserve band.
At age 14, Jones introduced himself to 16-year-old Ray Charles after watching him play at the Black Elks Club. Jones cites Charles as an early inspiration for his own music career, noting that Charles overcame a disability (blindness) to achieve his musical goals. He has credited his father’s sturdy work ethic with giving him the means to proceed and his loving strength with holding the family together. Jones has said his father had a rhyming motto: “Once a task is just begun, never leave until it’s done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.”
In 1951, Quincy Jones earned a scholarship to Seattle University. After one semester, Jones transferred to what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston on another scholarship. While studying at Berklee, he played at Izzy Ort’s Bar & Grille with Bunny Campbell and Preston Sandiford, whom he cited as important musical influences. He left his studies after receiving an offer to tour as a trumpeter, arranger, and pianist with the bandleader Lionel Hampton and embarked on his professional career. On the road with Hampton, he displayed a gift for arranging songs. He moved to New York City, where he received freelance commissions writing arrangements for Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and Ray Charles, who was by then a close friend.
This is a part of Quincy Jones’ career that many don’t know about. Very few now know about his trumpet playing time. Of course I only knew because my father made sure I knew, and heard much of the music with him playing. I also listened to a lot of his big band arrangements.
n 1961, Jones was promoted to vice-president of Mercury, becoming the first African American to hold the position. During the same year, at the invitation of director Sidney Lumet, he composed music for The Pawnbroker (1964). It was the first of his nearly 40 major motion picture scores. Following the success of The Pawnbroker, Jones left Mercury and moved to Los Angeles. After composing film scores for Mirage and The Slender Thread in 1965, he was in constant demand as a composer. His film credits over the next seven years included Walk, Don’t Run, The Deadly Affair, In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, Mackenna’s Gold, The Italian Job, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Cactus Flower, The Out-Of-Towners, They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, The Anderson Tapes, $ (Dollars), and The Getaway. In addition, he composed “The Streetbeater”, which became the theme music for the television sitcom Sanford and Son, starring his close friend Redd Foxx, and the themes for other TV shows, including Ironside, Rebop, Banacek, The Bill Cosby Show, the opening episode of Roots, Mad TV and the game show Now You See It.
In 1974, Jones suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm, leading to a decision to reduce his workload to spend time with his friends and family. It certainly put an end to his trumpet playing. However, what came next would reintroduce him to another generation of music fans forever.
While working on the film The Wiz, Michael Jackson asked Jones to recommend some producers for his upcoming solo album. Jones offered some names but eventually offered to produce the record himself. Jackson accepted and the resulting record, Off the Wall, sold about 20 million copies. This made Jones the most powerful record producer in the industry at that time. Jones and Jackson’s next collaboration, Thriller, sold 65 million copies and became the highest-selling album of all time. The rise of MTV and the advent of music videos as promotional tools also contributed to Thriller’s sales. Jones worked on Jackson’s album Bad, which has sold 45 million copies.
He would go on to produce music for some of the top acts of R&B at the time. Tamia, Tevin Campbell, James Ingram, Patti Austin, The Brothers Johnson and more. This latter work is what makes him one of the most recognizable music producers of our time. In fact, I feel that his work actually went on to make music fans notice the music producer as well as the artist.
Quincy Jones has done as much for modern music as anyone. He is most definitely a living musical legend.