Trumpeter turned arranger Quincy Jones – best known to the general public as the producer of hit Michael Jackson albums after a career spent in jazz arrangement – passed away 3 November aged 91. Born in Chicago, 14 March 1933, in the 1950s he worked with such as Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie before moving in the 1960s towards record production, collaborating with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan and others.
His greatest impact came from his 1980s work with Michael Jackson, with whom he created such groundbreaking albums as Off The Wall and, especially, Thriller, both marked by Jones’ use of the latest innovative production techniques and cross-genre style.
He also wrote scores for films such as The Color Purple and In The Heat Of The Night and produced albums for Aretha Franklin, James Ingram and others and in later life became the figurehead of Qwest TV, the jazz-centred digital TV service.
He was known for his outspoken comments on musical standards and on the misguided elevation of much pop, dismissing an UsMagazine journalist’s naive comparison of him with rapper Kanye West with “Did he write for a symphony orchestra? Does he write for a jazz orchestra? Come on, man. He’s just a rapper. There’s no comparison.” Of rapper and producer Diddy, aka Puff Daddy, he said he “couldn’t recognize a B flat if it hit him”.
Talking to Jazz Journal in 1964 he set the record straight on various subjects, saying of jazz harmony “We haven’t caught up with the guys who were writing music a hundred years ago. Jazz has contributed nothing to music harmonically – the only thing it has of its own is spirit, and approach.” Of the 1960s blues boom he said that it was “a kind of return to the soil, a rejection of some of the avant-garde stuff, that out, progressive jazz, much of which is nothing more than musical masturbation”.
In 2018, at the age of 84 he was ready to open up even further in a spectacular interview with David Marchese of Vulture, a cultural offshoot of New York magazine, where he criticised Michael Jackson (“Greedy, man. Greedy”), the Beatles (“the worst musicians in the world”), and Donald Trump, whose daughter Ivanka he says he dated (“He’s a crazy motherfucker. Limited mentally – a megalomaniac, narcissistic”).
He holds out hope for pop if jazz – for him the highest musical form – is smuggled into it, saying of Michael Jackson’s Baby Be Mine “That’s Coltrane done in a pop song. Getting the young kids to hear bebop is what I’m talking about. Jazz is at the top of the hierarchy of music because the musicians learned everything they could about music.”
An appreciation by John White of Quincy Jones’ work in jazz will follow. The many Jones albums reviewed by JJ since 2019 are here.
13/11/24: John White’s obituary is here.
