No one kept up with the Jones
Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91, was a songwriter, compooser, and music and film producer.
He was killing it long before most of us here were born, and he continued to glide through nearly every genre imaginable in recent decades, before finally ing this week in Los Angeles, aged 91.
Like most ‘kids’ of my generation, my introduction to Jones was through Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which quickly became the bestselling album of all time. Their previous collaboration, Off the Wall, subsequently became my favourite dance album, even though I was too young for it when it came out.
It’s also probably my most played dance album, as both a DJ and listener. Off the Wall is the perfect marriage of Quincy Jones as a producer, Michael Jackson as a singer, and Rod Temperton as a writer.
There are other contributions, too — from Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney — but Off the Wall remains a high point for the Quincy Jones disco-era sound, and one that was also echoed in huge hits for George Benson, Brothers Johnson, and numerous other artists, featuring everyone from Chaka Khan and Gwen Guthrie to Luther Vandross and long-time collaborator Valarie Simpson.
Quincy brought his rich jazz heritage as an arranger and producer to Off the Wall and other disco hits, but it was his next move that changed pop music.
Thriller came after a backlash against disco, and Jones steered Jackson in a direction that crossed over to a white pop audience. A more rock-orientated sound broke down the walls in an era when the video and MTV reigned supreme, and the music and visuals forced the reluctant music execs to finally play black artists and cross racial barriers.
I still the hype of the Thriller video and its cultural impact was immense, decades before we knew what ‘going viral’ was.
This was hardly the first time Jones had changed music. He had produced iconic jazz, pop, and multiple other genres before that, and his heralded work with Frank Sinatra and Count Basie had come after many years of working with jazz greats, such as Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Basie himself, Clifford Brown, and Cannonball Adderley.
Taking a huge orchestra to Europe in the 1950s nearly broke Quincy emotionally and financially, and he vowed to distinguish between his love of music and the music industry itself, which he later navigated magnificently and until the very end.
He became a successful industry figure, and his masterful ability to bring people together was demonstrated on projects such as the charity song ‘We Are the World’, where the biggest music egos of the day all behaved relatively well under his tutelage. He started up the influential Vibe magazine, and produced television, such as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but his television and movie soundtracks of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are another element of his career that deserve respect and investigation.
The scope of his work is impossible to distil here, but at one time in the early 1960s he was helping Lesley Gore to a teen pop hit (‘Its My Party’), while simultaneously helping make some of the most progressive jazz on the planet.
He was also launching his career as a film and TV composer, while making some of the best bossa nova of the day, too.
Sampled a million times by hip-hop, these records, including the soundtracks, stand up tall in their own right, and show that he was one of the greatest arrangers of them all.
Vibe played an important role in expanding the growth of hip-hop and r&b in the 1990s, and Quincy Jones, despite early misgivings, advocated for hip-hop in an era where many of his peers were very dismissive of the genre.
Ice T and Big Daddy Kane appeared alongside jazz and soul greats on his Back on the Block album, which also helped the world discover a young Tevin Campbell, and after a rocky start he later became quite close to Tupac, who dated his daughter Kidada up until his death in 1996.
Quincy Jones did it all. His finger was always on the pulse, as he effortlessly glided the world making music that will last for ever.
