The Quincy Jones Experience

As Ben Sisario writes in the New York Times, Jones was “a colossus of American music, leaving a profound influence on nearly every genre he touched, from the 1950s on—jazz, funk, soundtracks, syrupy R&B, and chart-topping pop. The scope of his career is so vast, it seems almost impossible that it’s the work of a single person.”

Guardian rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis observes that, over the course of seventy years, “nobody else in music was shifting with apparent ease between recording chart-topping teen pop singles, arranging and conducting the Count Basie Orchestra for a collaborative album with Frank Sinatra (1964’s It Might As Well Be Swing), releasing progressive jazz albums, and pursuing a parallel career as a film composer.”

In 2018, Jones’s daughter, actor and filmmaker Rashida Jones, and Alan Hicks directed Quincy for Netflix, and in his review for the NYT, Glenn Kenny called it “an affectionate and surprisingly comprehensive documentary,” adding that Jones’s “life and career are far-ranging enough to justify a mini-series . . . His hardscrabble early years on the South Side of Chicago are scary; his triumphs from the earliest points of his career onward are exhilarating; the racism he is obliged to endure throughout is infuriating.”

To promote Quincy, Jones made himself available for interviews, and the two most-cited—Chris Heath’s outstanding profile for GQ and David Marchese’s crackling conversation at Vulture—prompted Petridis to suggest that “Jones may be music’s greatest raconteur.” Jones takes us on all-night benders with Sinatra and Ray Charles and mornings after with Miles Davis; brags about the women waiting for him in just about every port in the world; disses the Beatles; buys dope from Malcolm X; claims Marlon Brando would “fuck anything. Anything!”; dates Ivanka Trump; and relishes the night Michael Jackson got Prince to make “a damn fool out of himself” in front of James Brown.

Dozens more names are dropped—presidents, a pope, Picasso—but the one with the deepest personal history is Ray Charles. Jones was fourteen when they met, and Charles was just a couple of years older. By this point, Jones had seen his mother taken away to a mental institution when he was seven, and when he was an eleven-year-old aspiring gangster, he wandered into the wrong neighborhood and got his hand pinned to a fence with a knife and a hole poked in his head with an ice pick.

Jones and Charles hung out in Seattle, where Jones’s father had moved the family, and it was there that Jones began playing the trumpet in local jazz bands. By 1953, twenty-year-old Jones was touring Europe with Lionel Hampton’s band, and in 1956, he played in the band backing Elvis Presley’s first television appearances. Then it was off to the Middle East and South America with Dizzy Gillespie’s band before settling in Paris for a while in 1957.

In France, Jones studied composition and theory with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. “It was Boulanger’s attitude toward counterpoint, inversion, and harmonic structure that Jones found so useful in his determination to pursue a career in film scoring,” writes Carol Cooper. Years later, Jones would say that “the psychology of scoring is totally subjective, reactive, and highly personal. The science is the technical process of synchronization. The soul is the process of painting the psyche with musical ‘emotion lotion,’ of finding the appropriate voice and tone for a film.”

Jones wrote his first score for Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964), and Petridis finds that “the main title theme is moody and surreal, with ominously swelling strings and minor-key woodwind melodies that float and quickly disappear.” Truman Capote was opposed to director Richard Brooks’s insistence on hiring Jones to score In Cold Blood (1967), and the studio wanted Leonard Bernstein, but as Cooper writes, “Jones responded to their objections by using his improvisational skills to incorporate the kind of artful dissonance and microtonal inflections pioneered by Stravinsky and Shostakovich into key scenes, proving that he was up to the task of giving Brooks’s film the innovative soundscape it deserved.”

In his beautiful tribute at RogerEbert.com, Odie Henderson points out that Jones “worked on material that was as lily-white as Lesley Gore’s classic ‘It’s My Party’ and as soulful and bluesy as Ray Charles’s theme song for 1967’s Oscar-winning Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night. Put that record on, and you’re suddenly in Sparta, Mississippi, sweltering in the heat with Sidney Poitier’s Mr. Virgil Tibbs.”

Susan King spoke with director Norman Jewison a few years ago about winning Charles over after the legendary—and of course, blind—blues singer insisted on seeing the movie first. “I called Quincy,” Jewison told King, “and he said, ‘You’re going to sit with Ray and you’re going to tell him what’s happening on the screen visually and he’s going to listen to it.’ When the scene came where Sidney Poitier confronts this white Southerner about the investigation, the guy slaps him, and without any hesitation, Sidney slapped him back. Ray Charles heard the slap and then he heard the second slap and he said, ‘Did he hit him?’ I said, yes. And he said, ‘Maximum green. Maximum green.’ I didn’t know what it meant,” but Charles “just threw himself into that song.”

Ten years ago, Jones told Eric Hynes in Rolling Stone that, when it came to writing music for movies, the composers he considered mentors were Armando Travioli, Henry Mancini, and Ennio Morricone. When David Marchese asked Jones whose work he was admiring in 2018, the answer came quickly: “Alexandre Desplat—he’s good. He’s my brother. He was influenced by my scores.”

Jones’s work in film scored him seven Oscar nominations, and three of those were for his work on Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985). When he produced a musical adaptation on Broadway, he won a Tony, making him one of twenty-seven EGOT winners on the planet. His Emmy was for his score for Roots, the miniseries that riveted the nation in 1977, and he won twenty-eight of the eighty Grammys he was nominated for.

Perhaps the most fateful movie gig was Lumet’s The Wiz (1978). Michael Jackson, who was starring as the Scarecrow, asked Jones to recommend a producer for a solo album, and Jones did give him a list, but of course, he wound up producing Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987) himself.

Writing about the making of Thriller, Time’s Andrew R. Chow emphasizes a vital point. Jackson and Jones were “hellbent” on breaking through MTV’s resistance to airing videos by Black artists and “allocated an enormous amount of money to create distinctive, movie-quality music videos.” Jackson “paid $150,000 for the ‘Beat It’ music video out of his own pocket. Eventually, and thanks in part to threats from Jackson’s studio executives to MTV, the channel put ‘Billie Jean’ into heavy rotation.” The fourteen-minute video for “Thriller” made MTV must-see TV, and the channel’s overall aesthetic had an immeasurable impact on cinema in the 1980s.

In 1985, Jones oversaw the production of “We Are the World,” a charity single written by Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and performed by just about everybody who was anybody in American music that year. Somehow, Jones found ways to interweave soloists as disparate as Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen and Diana Ross. In the NYT, Ben Ratliff proposes that Jones “may have made his most lasting mark by doing what some believe to be equally important in the ground-level history of an art form: the work of connecting.”

Wesley Morris writes that what we hear in Jones’s music is “a little bit of everything—African percussion and R&B rhythm ideas, percolating alongside fur-coat string arrangements and trans-Atlantic flights of falsetto. It sounds like whatever America is supposed to mean. Often, he was orchestrating the sound of America, complicating it while grasping what makes it pop. It’s worth considering how his music opens one of the most-watched television events ever broadcast (Roots) and his production is behind the best-selling album ever recorded (Thriller). Two titles that nail the depth and sensation of the Quincy Jones experience.”