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The sheer scale of the legacy of Quincy Jones, who died last Sunday at the age of 91, in music, film, TV and theatre is extraordinary. The formula of his success as a musician, singer, producer, conductor and arranger over seven decades is found in his 2022 book 12 Notes on Life and Creativity.
The title is a lesson he picked up during his tutelage in Paris in the late 1950s under French music teacher Nadia Boulanger: “There are only 12 notes. Until God gives us 13, I want you to know what everybody did with those 12.”
Well into his 80s and having given up his love for vodka, enabled Quincy to look back at each stage of life and see the visible threads that held everything together even when “I could have sworn that everything was falling apart.”
Almost every night after his mother was committed to a mental facility suffering dementia, little Quincy would have nightmares in which he would be sitting at a piano playing classical music. As mother beseeched him, in multiple voices to stop playing, he would be shouting back, “Please, stop it! Somebody sing about love.
Somebody sing about loving me”. Even though he was just 10 years old and had not learned to play instruments yet, the piano foreshadowed his path in life.
Growing up in South Side Chicago in the 1930s when the mafia run the city, exposed Quincy and his little brother Lloyd to crime and violence and the young boys emulated the gangster life. Ironically, it was in the midst of breaking and entering a shop to steal pie and ice-cream that Quincy first saw a piano.
As he writes: “I slowly walked over and ran my fingers across the keys. I’m telling you; it was as if every cell in my body yelled, “This is what you are going to do for the rest of your life’.” Soon he was “messing around” with the violin and clarinet in school, and then on to percussion, sousaphone, horns, tuba and trombone. “If it made music, I wanted to play it,” recalled Quincy. He learned the trumpet a few years later in high school.
The first song he ever composed was From the Four Winds which he hailed as one of his most important works, because it gave him his first taste of confidence as a composer.
The song caught the attention of his idol, the jazz great Lionel Hampton who invited 18-year-old Quincy to join his band in 1951. He would play in the group for the next three years touring across the US and Europe.
Throughout his travels for the next 17-plus years, Quincy took the counsel of saxophonist Ben Webster, who in those early days advised him to learn a few words in the language of every country he visited, and that would then open doors to the food and the music “because the soul of a country is identified by its music, food and language”.
Quincy learned to always be ready for the big opportunities and one of those big calls came in 1958 when at the age of 25, he was asked to conduct an orchestra playing alongside Frank Sinatra in Monaco (Sinatra was first person to ever call him Q).
Six years later, Sinatra asked him to arrange and conduct the band for his album It Might as Well Be Swing including In Other Words (Fly Me to the Moon), the first song ever played on the moon.
Quincy and Sinatra worked together for nearly 40 years and as he reflected, “If I hadn’t sharpened my arranging chops, I would never have been ready to accept that opportunity of a lifetime when I got that call from Frank.”
Quincy was recruited as music producer and supervisor for the movie The Wiz in 1978 which starred Michael Jackson in his feature film debut.
In the course of filming, Michael asked Quincy to find him a producer for his first album on Epic Records. “I’d like to take a shot at producing your new record,” offered Quincy.
There are people who said he was a “jazz arranger and composer”, unsuited to the world of pop, but Michael stuck to his guns and thus began an association with Quincy that spanned three classic albums, Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), the best-selling album of all time, and Bad (1987).
“Focusing too much on what others have to say about you will lead you down a path to defeat before you have even had a chance to react,” Quincy reflected. He didn’t allow categorisations to limit the type of music he played or produced.
‘From rock, to R&B, to bebop, to pop, to hip-hop – we viewed labels as a way to classify the end product, not our creative process,” he wrote.
“If the music I am creating gives me goose-bumps, odds are it will do the same for at least one other person on this planet.”
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