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Quincy Jones

Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., known to his friends as "Q," was born on March 14, 1933 on Chicago's South Side.  Reflecting on his roots, Q has said,

"We were in the heart of the ghetto during the Depression, and our biggest struggle every day was either running from gangs or with gangs. Just getting to school and back home was a notorious trek, and I still have the medals to show from a switchblade through my hand, pinned to a tree. But, you know, when you're young, nothing harms you, nothing scares you or anything. You don't know any better.”

THE CHILDHOOD YEARS:

LEARNING TO SURVIVE

BY CREATING HIS own LITTLE WORLD

At about the age 6 (he now remembers all too much), Quincy’s long-time mentally ill, schizophrenic mother was placed strapped down on a stretcher and taken away to a mental hospital for a time, leaving Quincy and his brother to run the streets and figure things out on their own, while his father worked as a carpenter and he was watched over by a stepmother he didn’t like.

One way young Quincy found to help him survive was to go to a little closet and just sit there, turning the world off and taking all the negative and painful things and convert them into something beautiful and positive. As Q later put it,

"I transferred all of the need of what we didn't have, so I didn't need it anymore because I had something else that was beautiful. It was mine, I could always depend on. I could always go there no matter what happened, racial things or whatever. I could go there and it would be okay. It was my own little world and I could make it what I wanted it to be.”

THE TEEN YEARS:

MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC!!

When Quincy was ten, he moved with his father and stepmother to Bremerton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. He first fell in love with music when he was in elementary school, trying nearly all the instruments in his school band before settling on the trumpet. While barely in his teens, Quincy befriended Ray Charles, a local singer-pianist, only three years his senior. The two youths formed a combo, eventually landing small club and wedding gigs, and they remained life-time friends, (as shown together here in later years).

At 18, the young trumpeter won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, but dropped out abruptly when he received an offer to go on the road with bandleader Lionel Hampton. Reflecting on the Hampton years, Q once remarked, “The band was working 70 one-nighters in a row all through the south, doing 700 miles a night with these guys that had been out there 30 years. I used to watch the old guys. I really respected their wisdom.” (Q is shown here in the middle and Hampton is in the background.)

The stint with Hampton led to work as a freelance arranger, and Jones then settled in New York, where, throughout the 1950s, he wrote charts for Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Cannonball Adderley, and his old friend Ray Charles.

THE MIDDLE YEARS:

TOURING, FILM SCORES, SOCIAL ACTIVISM

... & A BRAIN ANEURYSM

At 23 in 1956, Quincy Jones was performing as a trumpeter and music director with the Dizzy Gillespie band on a State Department-sponsored tour of the Middle East and South America. Shortly after his return, he recorded his first albums as a bandleader in his own right for ABC Paramount Records.

In 1957, Quincy settled in Paris where he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen, and worked as a music director for Barclay Disques, Mercury Records' French distributor.

In 1964, Quincy Jones turned his attention to another musical area that had long been closed to blacks – the world of film scores. At the invitation of director Sidney Lumet, he composed the music for The Pawnbroker. It was the first of his 33 major motion picture scores. And, for television, Quincy has written the theme music for such shows as Ironside (the first synthesizer-based TV theme song), Sanford and Son, and The Bill Cosby Show.

The 1960s and '70s were also years of social activism for Quincy Jones. He was a major supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Operation Breadbasket, an effort to promote economic development in the inner cities. After Dr. King's death, Quincy Jones served on the board of Rev. Jesse Jackson's People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). An ongoing concern throughout Jones's career has been to foster appreciation of African-American music and culture. To this end, he helped form IBAM (the Institute for Black American Music). Proceeds from IBAM events were donated toward the establishment of a national library of African-American art and music. He is also one of the founders of the annual Black Arts Festival in Chicago.

In 1974, Jones suffered a cerebral aneurysm that almost claimed his life. He underwent two major brain surgeries and spent half a year convalescing. He was advised never to play trumpet again as it might disturb the settings left in his head by the procedure. After two delicate operations, Quincy Jones was back at work with renewed dedication.

MEGA-PRODUCTION SUCCESSES:

"THRILLER" & "WE ARE THE WORLD"

Jones went back into the studio, among other things, to produce Michael Jackson's first solo album, Off the Wall. Eight million copies were sold, making Jackson an international superstar and Quincy Jones the most sought-after record producer in Hollywood. The pair teamed again in 1982 to make Thriller that became the best selling album of all time, selling over 30 million copies around the globe and spawning an unprecedented six Top Ten singles, including "Billie Jean" and "Beat It".

After the 1985 American Music Awards ceremony, Jones used his influence to draw every major American recording artist of the day into a studio to lay down the legendary track We Are The World to raise money for the victims of Ethiopia’s famine. When people marveled at his ability to make the collaboration work, Jones explained that he'd taped a simple sign on the entrance: "Check Your Ego At The Door".

ADDING IT ALL UP:

THE QUINCY JONES LEGACY, so far

Quincy Jones is the all-time most nominated Grammy artist, with a total of 76 nominations and 26 awards. He has also received an Emmy Award, seven Oscar nominations, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. His life and career were chronicled in 1990 in the critically acclaimed Warner Bros. film Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones.

And, in 2001, he published Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. With some chapters written by Jones and others by friends like Ray Charles, Quincy describes how his joy of discovering music helped him when his problems caught up with him. He also tells how he suffered a mental breakdown in the 1980’s. "When I played music,” Jones writes, “my nightmares ended. My family problems disappeared."

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

ADVICE ESPECIALLY FOR YOUNG MUSICIANS

In a recent interview for the Academy Of Achievement, Quincy Jones shared some thoughts gained from his long, distinguished career.

On Today’s Young Musicians: “I see a lot of young musicians just want to be very famous and very rich, very quick. That was a goal that we didn't understand at all in those days, because our idols (like Charlie Parker) were not symbolic of that. They didn't think of opulence or that kind of living – jet planes, and limousines and all those things. Today, it’s a huge business where very young people make enormous amounts of money and have to be almost super-human trying to absorb that kind of adulation, recognition, fame, adoration and money. It's a very abnormal situation, so we have a lot of casualties. They come up, burn out, and have to live with some very unpleasant memories.

On the positive side, there are more opportunities now than ever. We're going through a technological revolution that will be changing civilization. It's going to be quite sensational. But, we still have to remember that everything starts with a song or a story. That drives everything, and that's where everything has to start.

On What It Takes To Do What Quincy Jones Has Done: "Obsession and humility – that’s what it takes. Everybody I know that really does their thing, they're junkies, they really are. I mean, their thing takes over them. It really does. There is some kind of subconscious attraction to everything, even things they’re not aware of that they’re interested in.

Even right now, it’s a big problem for me going into a bookstore because I’m interested in everything – every subject from psychology to history to cuisine. Everything in there I'm interested in. I love technology, biographies, history. Somehow all of those things reinforce each other.”

[To the entire Academy Of Achievement interview with Quincy Jones, click this link. ]