Consider This from NPR - A look at the life of the singular Quincy Jones

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Quincy Jones, the famed music producer who helped artists dominate popular music for half a century, has died. NPR's Walter Ray Watson described Jones' talent as one that produced music that hooked ears, warmed hearts and moved feet to dance.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, it's Mary Louise Kelly. Real quick before the show, it has been a wild election season, and in the homestretch as you continue to follow every development here on Consider This, we want you to know there are two other ways to make sure you do not miss any developments. Thank you. Up first in the morning, consider this in the evening. And the NPR Politics Podcast, anytime big stuff happens. An around-the-clock election news survival kit. Thank you for listening. Here's the show. Only one man has worked with Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra. Still it's a real good bet, the best is yet to come. And Ray Charles. It had to be you. It had to be you.

That man was Quincy Delight Jones, who died on Sunday at the age of 91. The legacy he left behind has few peers in the history of popular entertainment. Consider this, you can't tell the history of popular music without mentioning Quincy Jones. Coming up, we look back at his legendary career and hear from the band himself in a 2008 interview. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Listen to the N on about it.

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Quincy Jones, the famed music producer who helped artists dominate popular music for half a century, has died. His publicist says he passed away peacefully at his home in California. Jones' career spanned the second half of the 20th century and stretched into the 21st. He wrote and produced everything from pop singles to high-concept albums to TV, film scores, and more. NPR's Walter Ray Watson has this appreciation of a one-of-a-kind artist. Quincy Jones' music hooked ears, warmed hearts, and moved feet to dance. Along with Michael Jackson, he broke open the pop music world with songs like these. I'm a man, I'm mad. You feel the change, that fire.

The rock with you all night. All produced by Quincy Jones. More than a hundred million records sold, including... That's right, Thriller, the best-selling album of all time. Hard to imagine now, but record execs doubted whether Quincy Jones was the right fit to produce Michael Jackson's debut as a solo adult artist. Jones's career started back in the 1950s, arranging, performing, producing. He made so many records with so many bands, it's possible you've heard lots of his tunes, never knowing they were his.

Born Quincy Delight Jones Jr., he was the son of a Chicago carpenter and a housewife mother who sang church songs at home. Jones faced gang violence as a child of the Great Depression, and at age 10, his family moved to Seattle, where his dad joined the war effort, working in a shipyard. Most of the days, he was gone at 6.30 or 7 o'clock, and so we were left to our own devices. Jones on NPR in 2001. As a kid, he was a ringleader of mischief. And one day, with a bunch of boys, he targeted a room full of freshly baked pies at a rec center. They broke in, ate all the pies. Then Jones opened the door.

And I saw in the shadows, I saw a piano there, and I almost closed the door. And then something deep inside me said, open the door again. And then something deep inside me said, open the door again. And I went back into the room and slowly went over to that piano and I felt goosebumps and everything. That changed my life, he said.

By high school, Jones picked up the trumpet. Soon after, he gained a lifelong friend and a blind 16-year-old pianist. Ray was very generous with me in teaching me how to read music in Braille. Ray Charles also taught Jones the basics of arranging. From the very first moment, I understood the concept that four trombones or four trumpets,

separately or collectively, syncopations without the same notes, something about it just fascinated me, and I knew that's where I wanted to live the rest of my life. Quincy Jones was still a teenager when he was hired by legendary vibist and bandleader Lionel Hampton. His talents opened the door. His skills took him everywhere.

If they asked me, I could write a book About the way you walk and whisper and look. In the mid-1950s, singer Dinah Washington decided she needed a more mainstream, wider audience. She demanded Jones arrange her music. He made lush, prestige albums for her and singers like Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan. Mercury Records promoted Quincy Jones as an executive, a major first for a black man at a major record label. In 2001, on WHYY's Fresh Air, Jones said the label's president told him straight up, we need help with the bottom line. I was a little presumptuous and said,

well, I don't think it's such a big deal to make a pop hit. He says, well, why don't you start making something then? In 1963, Jones struck gold with an unknown 16-year-old singer, Leslie Gore. You would cry too if it happened to you. It's My Party was a smash hit, like many of the other 18 singles Jones produced with gore during the early to mid-1960s. That's when Frank Sinatra nicknamed him Q.

Fly me to the moon Let me swing up there with those stars Together, they recorded an album that revived Sinatra's songbook. Quincy Jones seemed to have musical superpowers. In 1967, he got two Oscar nominations for his soundtracks, becoming the first black composer ever nominated for In Cold Blood and And he wrote many memorable TV themes too, like for the police drama Ironside and the sitcom Sanford and Son.

He was just incredibly revolutionary. Dan Freeman is a bassist, sound designer, and college professor. Quincy Jones actually was really kind of blowing beyond, I guess, the frontiers of pop music and really kind of on the edge of things both, I think, musically and technologically during those years after 1975. A decade later, at the peak of the music video era, Jones produced We Are the World with USA for Africa. The groundbreaking charity album assembled some 50 pop stars

and raised millions of dollars to address famine in Ethiopia and elsewhere. Quincy Jones was a tastemaker of new and established artists. to address famine in Ethiopia and elsewhere. Quincy Jones was a tastemaker of new and established artists. He won more than two dozen Grammys, was the publisher of Vibe magazine, the executive producer of the hit sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and father of seven children. He was beloved for his vibrant personality and sometimes unfiltered opinions.

Dan Freeman remembers the advice Jones gave to his graduating class at Harvard University in 1997. He said something very simple, which was that every day you had to make a choice, and the choice was between love and fear. And he said, as much as you could, always choose love. Always choose love. Words and Music by Quincy Jones. That was NPR's Walter Ray Watson. In 2008, Jones published a book about his career, The Complete Quincy Jones. And he spoke about his life and career with then All Things Considered

host Michel Norris. They began with Jones reflecting on growing up in Chicago in what he called the heart of the ghetto. Gangsters. Nothing but gangsters. Back in the 30s, it was all I ever saw was machine guns and stogies and big piles of money on the lights. You saw all this? That's all, as a kid. That's all I saw. I wanted to be a gangster till I was 11. Are you kidding? In your book, you tell the story, you say that they pinned my hand to a wooden fence with a switchblade

when I was seven years old. Who was they? They is being on the wrong block. If you went on the wrong street and didn't have the right call, you'd get a switchblade through your hand. I was seven years old. And they literally pinned your hand to a fence? Yeah, with a switchblade. Now, also, ice pick in my temple. That's real fun. They held it to your temple, or did they actually?

No, they stuck it in my temple. Oh, my goodness. Oh, yeah. I got the scar right, but my mantle's to prove it. How did you get out of Chicago? Capone ran the Jones boys out because they didn't know they were making so much money. And they ran into Mexico. And my dad came and got my brother and I at the barbershop the next day and took us on a trailway bus.

No toys and went straight to the Northwest. He worked in Bremerton Navy Yard during the World War II. And then we went to Seattle two years later. Now, that's where you met up with Ray Charles. That's right. Exactly. Exactly. You got your homework. You know, I did my homework. You sure did. I knew who I was going to be talking

to. I met Ray Charles at 14. He was 16. But he was like 100 years older than me. Quincy, my buddy. My buddy, quite so true. How'd you meet? It wasn't like the film.

We met up at the Elks Club. The Elks Club is where we all went after all of the paying jobs, whatever they were, whenever they came. That's where we went to just play bebop for jam all night for free. Musically speaking, you've bridged so many genres and generations also. I understand that Lionel Hampton was the person who gave you your big break. I want you to tell me not just about Lionel Hampton, but also about Gladys Hampton, because I understand she stayed on top of you.

She was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I was very upset, though, when I got thrown off the bus. Because I really wanted to go on the road. That's all I cared about. Thrown off the bus? Honey, honey, what's that child doing on here, Lionel? Honey, get off of this bus and go back to school. We'll talk later. And I sat on the bus for four hours so they wouldn't change their mind.

And boy, it didn't happen. Tell me the story. At 15 years old he saw a piece of music I'd written called Sweet for the Four Winds. I didn't know what I was doing. He wanted to hire me as a trumpet playing arranger and I just jumped on the bus. I didn't want to tell my parents or anybody. I didn't want anybody to change their mind because it had been my dream to be a member of a big band and Lionel Hampton at that time was bigger than Duke Ellington, or Basie, and Louis Armstrong.

They all worked with Joe Clayson at Associated Booking, and he was their number one band. He wrote 300 days a year, you know. And it was the most exciting educational learning experience I've had in my life. So you went back to Berkeley to study music. It wasn't called Berkeley at the time. It was the Schillinger House of Music. That was a Russian mathematician. My teacher said,

because you're going to learn everything everybody ever did with the 12 notes, from Stravinsky to Elvin Berg to Duke Ellington, everybody. I spent 28 years to hone my craft so I could write any kind of music. And I learned so much by working as a conductor and arranger for, you know, Billy Eckstein and Ray Charles and Peggy Lee with no pressure on me. And in those days, we didn't care about money or fame. We couldn't care less. And love songs, never out of date. That was Quincy Jones speaking with Michelle Norris back in 2008. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers and Noah Caldwell. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Patrick Jaron-Wadanana.

Our executive producer is Sammy Yinnigan. And one more thing before we go, you can now enjoy the Consider This newsletter. We still help you break down a major story of the day, and you will also get to know our producers and hosts and some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org slash consider this newsletter. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. On NPR's Wildcard podcast, comedian Seth Meyers talks frankly about his early career. I was far more temperamental when I was younger. And things ran very hot at SNL.

And there were definitely times where my instincts were to say something that would have been relationship-ending to people. I'm Rachel Martin. Seth Meyers is on Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation. On the TED Radio Hour, on December 24th, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will touch the sun. The spacecraft will hit the closest approach ever to the sun. Astrophysicist Nora Wawafi leads the sun. The spacecraft will hit the closest approach ever to the sun. Astrophysicist Noura Wafi leads the mission. We will be making history. To this day, it's still like magic to me.

Ideas about the sun. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR.