Quincy Jones, Who Has Died at 91, Fashioned a Legendary Career by Making Others Better

In 1959, Phoebe Jacobs was working for an upscale jazz club, Basin Street East, owned by her uncle, Ralph Watkins. As part of her job, Jacobs served as a general assistant and “go-fer” for the headliners who played there, and she developed close relationships with Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, and others including Louis Armstrong, whose foundation she later ran. As Jacobs told the story, Peggy Lee was working at the club when a classic album, “The Genius of Ray Charles,” was released, and she was blown away by the opening track, “Let The Good Times Roll.” Lee immediately had a task for Jacobs: “Find me the guy who does those arrangements for Ray Charles.”That was typical of the way Quincy Jones, who died over the weekend at the age of 91, built his career: He would make a great track with one major musical legend, and then another would hear something he had done — and pretty soon everybody wanted to work with him. By 1960, Jones was writing many arrangements for Lee’s nightclub act, and in 1961, they collaborated on two classic albums, “Blues Cross Country” and “If You Go.” According to Jacobs, Jones and Lee within a short time were enjoying an intimate personal relationship as well as a professional one, and, from what we know about “Q,” that too, was on-brand for him.Quincy Jones was a great rarity: a major musician, and a jazz man no less, who became one of the biggest power brokers in the entire history of the music business — and beyond that the larger world of films, TV, and mass-market entertainment. Jones, though, never forgot the music he loved, and continued to serve the cause of jazz, as well as its fans and its players.Quincy Jones with his many Grammy awards at his Los Angeles home, April 9, 2004. AP/Chris Pizzello, fileMake no mistake: Jones was never, as he was sometimes described, a big-band guy who abandoned jazz for the greener fields of pop, rock, and soul. Rather, his unique genius was the ability to straddle multiple worlds at once. There’s no doubt Jones could create pure jazz — his albums with his orchestra are some of the best large-ensemble recordings of the 1950s and ’60s. They are captured in a 2007 Mosaic Records collection, “The Quincy Jones ABC/Mercury Big Band Jazz Sessions.” Yet his greater strength was creating a kind of modern jazz that was easily accessible to listeners beyond the hardcore jazz audience, and, at the same time, creating a kind of pop that was more harmonically and musically sophisticated than the standard fare. The long-term popularity of “Soul Bossa Nova” illustrates Jones’s success. He originally composed the piece in 1962 for his album “Big Band Bossa Nova,” and famously revived it in Mike Myers’s “Austin Powers” series of spoofs of ’60s spy movies. It opens with the low-register grunting of a cuica — a deep-voiced Brazilian drum — combined with several flutes, among them Jerome Richardson and Roland Kirk. In recent years, “Soul Bossa Nova” has been heavily featured by two young musicians, Bria Skonberg and Grace Kelly, and Jones’s commitment to jazz is further borne out by the tune that follows, a very accessible arrangement of “Boogie Stop Shuffle” by a genre-busting bassist, Charles Mingus. Jones was always working in multiple idioms, and seeing what he could do to bring them together. Some of his earliest sessions as an arranger-conductor were with the R&B singer LaVern Baker, and they are pure period doo-wop, albeit with exceptional jazz soloing — from Sam “the Man” Taylor, Budd Johnson, Dick Hyman, and others. Then there are Dinah Washington’s “For Those In Love” (1955) and “The Swingin’ Miss D” (1957), probably the first great full-length albums he conceived with a major vocalist. Even this early, Jones was already becoming the guy that the headliners wanted to see on the podium; in 1958, he conducted for Frank Sinatra for the first time, at a now-legendary Monte Carlo charity concert. John told me that it was Sinatra’s ex-wife, Ava Gardner, who had recommended him for the gig, and this too was on brand. In 1964, Sinatra and Jones would make another classic album together, “It Might as Well Be Swing,” with the Count Basie Orchestra, and they — Sinatra, Jones, Basie — would spend much of 1965 touring together, resulting in the even more classic “Sinatra at the Sands” recorded live at Las Vegas at the end of that year.In 1973, Jones convinced CBS that it was incumbent upon the network to produce a prime-time TV special in tribute to Duke Ellington; this was long after the band’s hey-day, in the era of progressive rock and disco, and yet Q was able to complete his mission. The resultant show, “Duke Ellington – We Love You Madly,” interwove the maestro and his current orchestra along with a lineup of iconic jazz singers, including Sarah Vaughan, Joe Williams, Billy Eckstine, and Peggy Lee, along with contemporary soul stars such as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Roberta Flack — and even the rock band Chicago, who played “Jump for Joy.” Ellington died roughly a year after the show was aired, and thus he owed his last hurrah to Quincy Jones.Like Ellington, Jones employed a regular cast of great jazz instrumentalists — even as he evolved to bandleader from arranger on the road to becoming producer and bandleader in the studio — who had a distinctive, easily identifiable sound, such as trumpeter Clark Terry and multi-reed virtuoso Rahsaan Roland Kirk; they’re all over his albums and soundtracks. In 1978, Jones produced the music for the Hollywood adaptation of a Broadway smash, “The Wiz,” and though the film lost money on its initial release — similar to the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” — it has gone on to become a latter day favorite. This was the first time Jones worked with Michael Jackson, the nascent superstar with whom he would collaborate on three blockbuster albums, of which “Thriller” (1982) is still listed as the best-selling ever. Yet my favorite Jackson performance occurs in “The Wiz,” wherein the 20-year-old entertainer sings a very Ray Charles-like lament, “You Can’t Win.” It’s a fairly seamless mash-up of soul, jazz, and musical theater; Jones’s orchestration contains the expected funky fender bass, and yet throughout there’s a perfectly audible bassoon pumping away, and harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans is also heard from. With typical artistic generosity, this arrangement for “You Can’t Win” is much better than it needs to be.Jones quickly graduated to producer from arranger/conductor, in which capacity he supervised the work of other orchestrators rather than writing all of the charts himself. It’s been charged that he didn’t always give credit to the arrangers who worked for him, but the guys themselves didn’t feel that way. Billy Byers told me that Jones consistently treated him — and everybody he worked with and for — very well, adding “I owe my whole career to Quincy.” He was also extraordinarily generous with his family, including his four wives and major life partners, as well as with his seven children, including actress Rashida Jones.He became such an icon that Dave Frishberg, who played piano for Jones on numerous projects, mentions him at the end of “I’m Hip,” his classic satirical song parodying a name-dropping hipster wannabe, saying, “Better get this to Quincy!” Q may be gone, but he left an indelible mark on the entire landscape of American music.

Quincy Jones, Who Has Died at 91, Fashioned a Legendary Career by Making Others Better

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