Global News Podcast - Quincy Jones, giant of US music, dies age 91

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Musician Quincy Jones who worked with Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra and many others, has died at the age of 91. Also: we look at the final day of campaigning in the US election, and a new way to detect cancer.

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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritzen and at 14 Hours GMT on Monday the 4th of November these are our main stories. The death of a musical great, Quincy Jones who worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Frank Sinatra. Play everything, pop music, rhythm and blues, stripper music, Sousa, Bob Mitzvahs, Bob Mitzvahs, Bruce, everything. The final day of campaigning in what could be the tightest presidential election vote in US history. The trial in France of those accused

of radicalising a teenage Islamist who beheaded a teacher and a red alert danger warning for the Spanish city of Barcelona as authorities in Valencia struggle to cope with their flood devastation. Also in this podcast... We're trying to identify where exactly the tumour cells are in order to be removed. A new, super-pre super precise way to detect cancer

using a super strong form of carbon. One of the most significant figures in music over the last century, Quincy Jones, has died at the age of 91. Not only was he the producer of Michael Jackson's Thriller, Bad and Off the Wall albums, he also produced Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin, plus big band jazz, bebop, gospel, blues, soul, funk, quiet storm R&B, disco, rock and rap.

And he was in Austin Powers. He was also the force behind the charity single We Are the World, which raised money for the Ethiopian famine. Richard Foster has been looking back on his life. Quincy Jones found music through breaking and entering. As a child he got into a military store near Seattle. Quincy was looking for food. What he found instead shaped his future. I broke into one of the supervisor's rooms and saw a little spinet piano over in the

corner. The first time I ever touched it, every drop of blood, every cell in my body said this is what you're going to do the rest of your life. Quincy Jones loved jazz. He arranged songs for Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Ray Charles and wrote his own classic Soul Bossanova. He'd reworked Fly Me to the Moon, taking it from a waltz to a swing. That got the attention of Frank Sinatra, who gave him the nickname Q. He has to call you first. So say Q, Q, has somebody ever called me that before? And it was, it says, it's Frank. He said, I would love you to do an album with Basie and I,

are you interested? And I said, man, is the Pope a Catholic? Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars. Hollywood came calling in the 60s, and Quincy wrote scores for 33 films. Amongst them, In the Heat of the Night, The Colour Purple and The Italian Job. He also wrote for the small screen, including the themes for Ironside and The Cosby Show. While working on the film The Wiz, he met a young Michael Jackson. Woo!

Woo! Woo! Woo! Michael Jackson asked Quincy to produce his first solo album, Off the Wall. It sold 20 million copies, and the next one they made together was the biggest selling album ever, Thriller.

Thriller. It was made in just eight weeks. Michael Jackson said Quincy knew just what he wanted. Anybody who's worked with him notices this. The way he'll make you do a thing until it's perfect. He'll say, it's beautiful, we have a take. Then he'll say, well, can you give us one more? The pair also worked on Jackson's album Bad. In 1985, Quincy Jones gathered America's most popular singers of the time to record We Are the World, the USA's song for the victims of famine in Africa. Towards the end of his life, he stepped back from producing, concentrating

on philanthropy and organising concerts. Quincy Jones was married three times and had seven children. He won 27 Grammy Awards including one for lifetime achievement He won an Oscar for his humanitarian work and was nominated for seven others The music industry has lost one of its most important producers even people who didn't know Quincy Jones's name certainly knew his records Richard Foster and Quincy Jones's family have said in a statement, although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know that there will never be another like him. He is truly one of a kind and we will miss him dearly.

We take comfort and immense pride in knowing that the love and joy that were the essence of his being was shared with the world through all that he created. Quincy Jones, who's died at the age of 91. It's the final day of campaigning in the US presidential election with polls suggesting the race could be the most tightly contested in US history. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are campaigning in key swing states today and it's those states which will decide who the next president of the United States will be. Stephanie Prentiss has been following the race and told me more. This is it. It's the final sprint and what we'll see as today unfolds is a blitz of rallies and appearances by both candidates across those battleground

states in the US Rust Belt, those states once dominated by manufacturing. So, Kamala Harris should be focusing on different cities across Pennsylvania. That's a sign of how important that state is to a democratic victory. Donald Trump, he'll start his day in North Carolina before heading to Pennsylvania as well and Michigan. The big target for both at this stage is those crucial undecided voters and in fact we've been hearing some people say they only decide on Tuesday morning who they'll vote for. So that's where they are. What are they focusing on? Donald Trump, he's kept up with going hard on the economy, on immigration and on criticising

his rival, particularly about immigration. He's also inferred that voter fraud could be an issue if he doesn't win. On the road yesterday we heard him saying he should have never left the White House. Kamala Harris in her final rallies has been speaking about unity, about ending political divisions. Sunday night we saw her in Michigan and that's a state seen as a must-win for her. While we know there are those who seek to deepen divisions, sow hate, spread fear and cause chaos, this moment in our nation has to be about so much more than partisan politics. We've also seen her really focus on the younger generation in the past week, urging them to get out and vote. Now, we also know many traditionally democratic voters,

including Michigan's large Arab-American and Muslim-American population, they've expressed anger over military support for Israel in Gaza. Now, Kamala Harris in Michigan Sunday said she'd do everything in her power to end the war there. And there's a lot of concern about a rejection of the result by Republicans. Absolutely right. So, election day in the US, it could really be considered election week. We know each state follows its own rules for counting ballots and that can delay results. And in fact, some of the rules have changed since last time around. The tightness of the race issue makes it very hard to predict when a winner could be declared.

And there's concern about that result on two fronts that delays will not help. So number one, the Republicans putting in legal challenges. That could lead to an even more protracted process. But number two, and more serious, there's a chance of the sort of mob behavior or attempted coup, depending how you look at it, that we saw in the January 2021 attack on the Capitol if Donald Trump loses and indeed claims voter

fraud. And that is entirely possible. I mean, Donald Trump's repeatedly accused Pennsylvania of election fraud claims which the state refutes and that has extra resonance because he contested that back in 2020 as well. And we also know a CNN poll found the majority of Americans, 70% do expect the result to be contested by Donald Trump if he loses. In a few seconds, where are we with the polls? Poll suggests the election will be historically close. 244 million Americans can vote, more than a quarter already have. In simple terms, this race is neck and neck and at this stage,

every single vote will count. Stephanie Prentiss. Staying with elections and one that was seen as a crucial indicator of whether the country's long-term geopolitical alignment would be with Russia or the West. Now Moldova's pro-European President, Maia Sandu, has won a second term, defeating Alexander Stoianoglu. Thanking Moldovans who live abroad and who seem to have boosted her support, President Sandu said they'd saved Moldova from hostile foreign forces.

There have been many allegations of interference from Moscow, which it denies. Her chief of staff, Adrian Balutel, said the result was hugely significant. The victory of President Sandu means that Moldova is keeping on the track of democracy, rule of law and European integration. This election was more than just about a candidate. The elections were about a fundamental choice between the development, between a way forward to a world that promotes peace, that promotes democracy and the world that kept Moldova up until now, up until the independence in the bubble of corruption and of controlled state, basically.

Presidential Chief of Staff Adrian Balutel. So is he right? That's the question I put to Alexei Kalmakov from the BBC Russian service. He's right in his own way but what we've seen today and the last night was a country divided pretty much in the middle. For the incumbent Maria Sandu, it was important to get the referendum right. The referendum took part the same day of the first round of the elections two weeks ago and she couldn't win a decisive majority.

She still won it, but they won a very, very thin margin by a very thin margin of just over 50% of the Moldovans said that they want to put the European aspirations into the constitution. So for her, it it was one issue election. It was about Europe. As we saw for Moldovans who live in the country, it probably wasn't. They still have different problems with the cost of living, with the energy prices and

with the influx of Ukrainian refugees from neighboring Ukraine after Putin's invasion. Yes, because it was the Moldovans overseas that apparently won the vote for Maya Sandova. If it had been left just to the people still in Moldova, she might not have won. Yeah, and it's not the first time she had to rely on diaspora in the West. Four years ago, as we remember, she defeated the incumbent opponent, the then president, and became president herself. And now she's won an unprecedented for Moldova, unprecedented second term. And yet again, she had to rely on the diaspora, people who live in the West. And obviously, there were accusations after the referendum and after this election that

diaspora in the West had more of a say in this election and the referendum than those quite a lot of Moldovans live in Russia. But there were just a handful of polling stations in Russia this time around, and there were over hundreds in the West in the EU. And for them, obviously for the diaspora in the West, this was some do's one issue for the people who live in the country, probably the picture is different. As we know, when people are not happy with their lives, they tend to vote against the incumbents rather than for something that they promised. European leaders, including President Zelensky of Ukraine,

have welcomed Maya Sandus' win. But what reaction from the Kremlin after all the allegations of election meddling? Kremlin said that they were following these elections very closely. They obviously denied any allegations of interference, which were brought forward by the Moldovan authorities. And we still expect an official reaction, but as we know, the Kremlin's been very consistent with its foreign policy towards the neighbours. And we know they use any force at their disposal, including gas, for example, as we see with Ukraine, we've seen it with Belarus, and now with Moldova, to try to bring them back

into the orbit and not let them go especially towards the West. BBC Russians, Alexei Kalmykov. Eight people have gone on trial in Paris today on terrorism judges over the gruesome murder of a French teacher in October 2020, who had shown his pupils a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class on freedom of expression. Our correspondent in Paris, Hugh Schofield, told me more. No one has forgotten that evening and the news that came in of the beheading on the street of a secondary school teacher, this man Samuel Patti, who was killed by, it turned out, by a young Chechen refugee who had been angered and taken upon himself mission to avenge Patti's alleged crime, which was to have shown

before a class of 13 year olds the famous cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the context of a discussion on the ethics of freedom of speech and so on. And what's happened since is that there's been one trial already. The killer died at the scene, so there have been two trials. The first trial was of children, it was about a year ago, at the school who were accused of identifying the teacher to the killer when he came, Abdelakhan Zurov. They got short prison terms because they were minors at the time. But this much more important trial is of adults, of the people who it's alleged created the circumstances in which the killer could act. And above all, it's of two adults, the father of a girl at the school who was told a lie by his daughter about what Patti had done. She exaggerated

what he'd done in showing the cartoons. He believed his daughter and spread on the internet and started a campaign of hate on the internet with the help of another man who's on trial and an Islamist activist. And that, it's alleged, created the circumstances which ultimately led to Anzorov acting a few days later. France, who has long been sensitive to the potential for jihadist violence, how significant a place does this particular crime hold in the French psyche and why? Well, you're right, of course, there have been many Islamist killings over the years, especially in that period, 2015 to 2020. This was kind of towards the end of that period. It has special I think feeling for people here because

the man was a teacher and that the educational system is held up as a kind of true exemplar of what the Republic should be about about teaching children of all backgrounds religions types colors in the same way and it's spreading the same message of kind of secular republicanism to all of them and when that was sort of attacked in such a blatant horrific way in the name of a form of Islam that certainly horrified people and petrified them too. New Scofield in Paris. The footage is remarkable strolling casually

amidst the very conservatively dressed students at Hazard University in Tehran is a woman dressed only in her underwear. Bear in mind, Iran is a country where women can be arrested just for letting their hair show. A spokesman for the university suggested the woman had a mental disorder. She was quickly detained by its security guards. But that explanation is being dismissed by most activists and human rights groups,

as the Iran analyst Rana Rahimpour explains. The details of exactly what happened, it's still unclear, and a lot of rumours are going around on social media. But one thing that is clear is how this woman's protest has been received by large parts of the Iranian society. Many believe that this is a very brave act of protest against compulsory hijab. There are reports on social media that suggests that this woman was harassed by the so-called security officers or forces at the university or a member of Basij, the militia, and because she wasn't wearing a headscarf when she was

entering the university and as a result of that encounter that a member of the Basij tore that woman's clothes and in protest she has taken it off. And that doesn't come as a surprise because the Iranian regime for decades have been suppressing Iranian women, has imposed compulsory hijab on them. And in 2022, we saw a peak of it when a woman was killed while in the custody of the morality police and the suppression has continued. This is a show of frustration, a show that the Islamic Republic of Iran is refusing to accept. Iran analyst Rana Rahimpur. Still to come in this podcast.

To young black Paul, he was a god. He gave them the will to work hard, to get educated, and to meet the world as it stands, and to do what he can to change it for the better. The death in Britain of Paul Stevenson, a pioneering civil rights campaigner. My talent as an athlete is swimming long halls over the curvature of the earth. Lifeless Ordinary is the podcast with astonishing personal stories from across the globe. My past is very bad and I survived it. You have to tell the story. Expect the unexpected.

All of a sudden the car exploded. Lifeless Ordinary from the BBC World Service. Here's a thing that happened to me. Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts. The authorities in Spain have issued a red alert warning of extreme danger because of torrential rain in Barcelona. A rain and hail storm hit the area around the city less than a week after the country's worst flash floods killed more than 200 people in the Valencia region further south. Spain's airport operator says 50 flights due to take off from Barcelona's airport were cancelled or severely delayed.

Our correspondent in Spain, Guy Hedgeco, told me more. This is the kind of weather that we were seeing in the southeast of the country just a few days ago and it's moved up to the northeast. The hope is that it's not going to stay there as long as that weather we saw down in Valencia did a few days ago. But it seems to be about as extreme, which is why the the weather agency has issued this red alert for the region and also the local government has issued a red alert. It's warning people that they should try and stay at home if possible, certainly not go out in their cars. A lot of roads are seriously affected by this weather. You mentioned their public transport, flights being affected, trains

and so on. People have also been told in certain areas to not go and collect their children from school because the schools are a safer place to be in this kind of rain. And the cleanup continuing around Valencia? Yes, that's right. More members of the military have been deployed to the Valencia region today. A hundred members of the military arrived in a naval vessel. There are around seven and a half thousand in total on the grounds now and they're helping the emergency services. On the one hand they're looking for the many, the dozens of people who are still missing, many of them believed to be in cars that got caught in the floods, but they're also helping

with the cleanup, that enormous task across much of the region, so helping people clear out their houses, trying to enable people to get back into their homes and pumping water out of many buildings as well. So it's an enormous task and that's expected to last quite some time yet. Guy Hedgeco and the devastation in Valencia is another reminder that extreme weather events are becoming more and more common all over the world. We're putting together a global news podcast special on this and we'd like your thoughts. What can we do to protect ourselves and our families and what should our politicians be doing? We're looking for practical solutions that can protect homes, transport networks and the places where we work. Also, what experiences have you had? Record us a voice note and send

it to globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. Activists have reacted with horror after at least 29 children appeared in court on Friday in Nigeria on charges that could see them face the death penalty. The young people were arrested during cost of living crisis protests that racked the country in recent months and were among 76 defendants facing felony charges. Though Nigeria hasn't enforced the death penalty since 2016, there are severe concerns around the ages and treatment of those detained.

Victoria Uwankunda spoke to Aniet Uang in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who's been following the story. She began by asking her what were her main concerns about the protests and those arrests. The very first thing is the treatment of many of these children who have been in the custody of the authorities since August when the protests took place and when they were arrested in various cities across mostly the northern Nigeria. They've been in custody of the police and have not been properly treated in terms of the laid down procedure of dealing with minors before the criminal justice system. The second concern that we have is the fact

that these children were arrested during protests that really are around hunger and the economic hardship that Nigerians have suffered in the last year or so. We are seeing that this is a new trend that the authorities are taking on or they're ramping on attacks against people who are engaged in any form of dissent or criticism of their policies or the impact of their policies or their actions. There's a lay-down procedure of dealing with minors in the criminal justice system and what we saw on Friday is certainly not what has been prescribed by law. Have you been able to raise those concerns with the authorities and if so

what do they say? There's been an uproar since Friday when these children appeared before the court. Before then we had a sense that these children were in custody and we had been working with other lawyers to ensure that the cases are dealt with as appropriately as they should but we've seen lots of pushback from the authorities. The children have very little or no access to their families or to lawyers who have pretty much had to struggle to see them and to ensure that they're doing well in the custody of the authorities.

So the Office of the Nigerian Inspector General of Police have denied having subjected the detainees to some of the things you mentioned. They say there was no ill treatment and that medical aid had been provided. They went on to say that age does not exempt individuals from facing legal consequences. As a human rights activist, when you hear that and when you see what is happening, what do you make of those comments, especially that, you know, from anyone facing legal consequences, regardless of how old they are? The first thing I'd say in response to that is the fact that in Nigeria, detention conditions are often very gruesome.

Very little access to food, to water, and to just living conditions that are humane. And this is true for almost all of the facilities where people are detained across Nigeria. And so that is a concern that remains. If the authorities say that these children have been given better treatment than this, then they should allow for independent visitors or monitors to be the judge of that. And yet, Ewang in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

A British civil rights campaigner who helped set the stage for Britain's first laws against racism has died. In the early 1960s, Paul Stevenson led the fight against a ban on the employment of black or Asian bus drivers in the western English city of Bristol. He died over the weekend aged 87. Mark Duff reports. Unlike the icons of America's battle against racism or of South Africa's fight against apartheid, Paul Stevenson is no household name, no King, Mandela or Rosa Parks. What he did though, helped change Britain forever. In 1963 the country was casually, routinely racist. It seemed normal in those days that a bus company in Bristol should refuse to hire black or Asian

drivers. Paul Stevenson wasn't having it. He rallied thousands of people to boycott the company, forcing it to change its policy. Speaking late in life, plagued as he was by Parkinson's and dementia, he explained what had driven him. It was taken for granted. Racism was not considered to be a major issue for people issue for people who have migrated to Britain. I fought against racism because it needed fighting against. Paul Stevenson later moved to London. It was there, as he described to Sky News, that he achieved another coup, convincing arguably the world's greatest ever boxer, Muhammad Ali, to visit the school where he was a governor. To young black poor, he was a god, like a Roman god.

He gave them the will to work hard, to get educated and to meet the world as it stands and to do what he can to change it for the better. But Paul Stevenson was never complacent. As late as 2021, he was bemoaning the racism that still scarred his country, when three young black players were abused viciously online for missing the penalties that cost England victory in the European Championship final. For all that, in a world that too often seems to veer from bad to worse. Paul Stevenson's campaigning spirit and the change it forged is a small reminder that sometimes perhaps things can get better.

Mark Darf looking back at the life of anti-racism campaigner Paul Stevenson. The UN's annual Climate Change Conference starts on November 11th in Azerbaijan. Ahead of that we are recording a special edition of the Global News podcast and we have a request. Here's my colleague Nick Miles who's going to be quizzing two of the BBC's top climate change experts. Record-breaking hurricanes in America, droughts and floods in China and around the world the highest sea temperatures on record. Climate change has never been so clearly with us but sometimes it can be confusing to say the least about what the UN Climate Change Conference is trying to achieve and what it

delivers. Which nations are leading the way and which are dragging their heels? We need your questions to put to our experts. Just email us at globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk Thank you, Nick. Graphene is one of the most extraordinary substances known to humans. It's an atom thick and 200 times stronger than steel. It's also extremely flexible. And if that wasn't enough to impress, a new use has been found to help detect cancerous cells. Nick Robinson has

been talking to Costas Kostarelos, professor of nanomedicine at Manchester University in the north of England, where it was invented. We are interfacing what we call graphene-based neural devices with patients' brains. So we're trying to understand the signals that neural cells that act as the host cells for brain cancer and what kind of signals they are emitting and in the context of the particular intervention we're trying to identify where exactly the tumor cells are in order to be removed. So the novelty behind those properties

that this material is offering are to design and fabricate ultra flexible devices that offers very high precision, very high fidelity signals from those neurons that are hosting the brain cells, the brain cancer cells. The precision matters because you can then just remove those cancerous cells rather than removing large parts of the brain, is that right? That's precisely right, not even large parts, minute parts of the brain. You really do not have any room for error there. You really need to make sure you remove

all of the cancer cells and leave behind all of the neurons, particularly those that are participating and contributing to essential functions for our patients. When you talk of essential functions do you think this could have an application for other diseases that affect the brain, strokes, epilepsy, those sorts of things? Absolutely. That's the next phase in our clinical development. We are looking first of all to develop these devices for a high precision removal of brain

cancer but because of the quality of the signals from the neurons that we are receiving we believe we're going to be able to understand and maybe intervene in a much more precise way following stroke events and epileptic feats. Professor Costas Kostarelos. And that's all from us for now. But there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Jack Wolfen and the producer was Stephanie Prentiss. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritzen. Until next time, goodbye. I'm Azadah Mashuri from the Global Story Podcast. We're hearing from the election workers on the frontline of American democracy. Many report they've faced threats, harassment and intimidation. So what's fueling it and what does it tell us about trust in democracy right now as the

US prepares to vote? The Global Story brings you unique perspectives from journalists around the world. Find us wherever you get your BBC podcasts.