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Q: The Music
What if music as we know it was to cease to exist? Composition, arrangement, the harmonies, the melodies, the phrasing, the timing… all gone. What if it all vanished and, from nothing, we had to start again? How could we possibly rebuild music? Where could we start and who would we start with?
We could start with Quincy Jones. And from his lifetime of work, his collaborations, his compositions, his arrangements and productions, you could make it all again.
It may not be the complete world of music that we know today but from the heart and soul of Quincy Jones we could make a world of music rich beyond most of our wildest dreams.
In other words... If music was to cease to exist, from Quincy Jones we could make it all again and the world would be none the poorer.
It’s almost impossible to overstate Quincy Jones’s contribution to popular music over the past five decades. He’s rubbed shoulders with Dukes and Counts, Princesses and Presidents, Kings and Queens and the Chairman of the Board. And the magic that rubbed off his shoulder was often greater than that which rubbed of theirs.
At the age of sixty-eight, Quincy penned his autobiography in a straight up style one might expect from somebody with a story to tell and no time to waste telling it. The book’s acknowledgement page wasn’t polluted with adjectives and anecdotes he basically listed those who’d touched his life, one name after another. It ran 14 pages — within those pages he begged the pardon of so many others he omitted.
If you were to list the names of those lives touched by Quincy you’d need 14 books. Quincy’s story began with eating the rats his grandmother fried up in her kitchen in Kentucky, when he was just a small boy. “We ate them because my grandmother could cook them well,” he wrote. “But most of all, we ate them because that’s all there was to eat.” He called that chapter of his life ‘The Promise’.
It was perhaps the promise that things were so bad that they couldn’t possibly get much worse. It was every bit as much the promise that a seven year child could make to himself that within his tiny frame there was all the drive he needed to get out. Soon enough he found himself in Seattle Washington, where he discovered music was the vehicle that would get him out.
In Seattle, he found the trumpet and he found ‘his brother’ Ray Charles. Quincy was fourteen years old and Ray just sixteen or seventeen. Who’d have known at the time that those two boys carrying within them the greatest treasure of heart and soul music the world would ever know?
Though Ray was still a boy himself, he was a ‘working’ musician. He’d taken the bus to Seattle from Florida — there were a few reasons he’d picked Seattle, mainly because it was the furthest place from Florida. His mother Retha was dead at 31. Ray was 14. Despite Retha’s frail frame and tender years she was a strong woman and though Ray got his music from obscure places (like Wiley Pittman’s Honky Tonk piano in Greenville, Florida) he got his strength from his mother. And without her strength Ray would have died a blind man on a street corner in Georgia. Nobody ever wrote a book about Retha Robinson; but I’ll bet she was a saint.
Despite the two years that separated them, Ray was very much the big brother and his genius was that he could find the soul in any piece of music. Quincy later said it was one of his first great lessons in music.
Music, he also said, gave him control, as he once wrote, “I had no control over where I lived, no control over my sick mother, no control over my hard-hearted stepmother and my overwrought father. I couldn’t change the attic where I slept, or stop the anguished tears of my little brother Lloyd who sometimes cried himself to sleep at night; I couldn’t control the angry whites who still called me nigger when they caught me alone on the street, or the bourgeois, high yella blacks who considered me too poor, too dark and too uneducated to be a part of their lives… Music was the one thing I could control. It was the one world that offered me freedom.”
Quincy was playing trumpet and was a sponge soaking up all of the jazz licks from all the ‘jook joints’ in Seattle he could get into. Ray had been arranging music since he was twelve years old and taught Quincy about arrangement, and that you can find soul in every piece of good music — be it jazz, blues, classical, popular, show tunes or even the occasional polka! Quincy Jones went on to become one of the greatest (if not the greatest) conductors and arrangers of music in the 20th century. Ray didn’t do too bad either.
After touring all round Europe with Lionel Hampton, he was invited to conduct and arrange a Sinatra benefit show in Monaco. That led to a long collaboration, and great friendship, with Frank Sinatra. It was Frank who called Quincy “Q” and that name just stuck.
Sinatra, Count Basie and Q first worked on an album together in 1964. The first track off the It Might As Well Be Swing album was Bart Howard’s great tune Fly Me To The Moon. That tune is a jazz standard that has been recorded dozens and dozens of times, Frank Sinatra’s version with Count Basie’s orchestra pumping out Q’s arrangement is probably the greatest.
Q conducted Sinatra live shows numerous times and that was just one of many collaborations that makes his one of the most incredible careers in the music business. Aside from Ray and Frank, he worked with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughn, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, Betty Carter, Tony Bennett, George Benson, Sammy Davis Jr., Billy Eckstein, Lesley Gore, Aretha Franklin, Louis Jordan, Ringo Starr, Paul Simon and Michael Jackson… and that’s only naming about a quarter of the acts he produced.
As a composer he’s scored numerous films and TV shows, from They Call Me Mr. Tibbs, In The Heat of Night, The Italian Job and Getaway in film, to the themes to television’s Cosby Show, Ironside and Sanford and Son.
On top of that he produced what went on to become the best selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Depending on who you believe, The Eagles Greatest Hits might have overtaken Thriller at number one; but only Quincy Jones has produced and arranged landmark recordings across jazz, popular music, rock and rap.
History will say he’s the most Grammy nominated artist ever and is a seven-time Oscar nominee but surely his gifts to the world of music — and the world in general — far outweigh any awards that may be conferred upon him.
His 2001 autobiography “Q”, apart from being a NY Times bestseller, remains one of my favorite books. It’s a remarkable chronicle of a life in music; but more importantly it is full of Q’s love for the world and the people in it.
Defining Quincy Jones is kind of like defining love — sometimes the only way you know you got it is when you got.
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