The Impact of Quincy Jones

Growing up, Quincy Jones wanted to be a gangster. Not one of the wannabes that roam the streets today, but a bona fide, legit, Al Capone-type badass. Today, at 77 years old, there is no question that he is a badass. He’s a legend. He’s Quincy Jones, man, the man, the most successful music producer of all time, not to mention quite a musician himself, as well as a television and movie producer, record, television, and magazine executive, tech-savvy entrepreneur, and generous philanthropist to boot.

That’s pretty gangster. But certainly not the same type of gangster he wanted to be growing up in Chicago during the Al Capone era. When he explains his reasoning, it’s as hard to argue with his logic as it is not to get the chills. “For young kids in the place I was raised—the biggest black ghetto in America during the Depression—there was nothing but what we saw around us.” What the young Jones saw was a gang-orientated hierarchy, he saw tables full of money, back rooms with machine guns and bodies, and people hanging from telephone poles. It was a dangerous world that enthralled him. “Baby gangsta, 11 years old, big deal, right?” he says. “But it was just in our DNA, because that was all we ever saw. Running from gangs, getting hands nailed to the fence—it gets under your skin pretty quick.”

Even once his family moved to Washington state after his father’s employers were run out of town by Capone, Jones kept trudging down a dangerous path. “We really thought we were going to [continue to] be baby gangsters,” he laughs. “We broke in [to a rec center] and there was flavored ice cream and pie. So we ate the pie and had a pie fight. Then I broke into the supervisor’s room, and I saw, in the dark, over in the corner, a piano. I almost closed the door. But I walked over to the piano and touched it, because it never dawned on me that people actually played these instruments at all. But when I touched it, I knew that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”

The Journey

Jones elevated above his callous beginnings. He took that badass upbringing and parlayed it into creating badass new sounds, busting through glass ceilings and breaking the mold, forging his own path as one of the first powerful black men in a white man’s musical world. He did it on his own accord, encountering some pretty impressive mentors and contemporaries along the way. He created legends out of artists like Frank Sinatra, who he performed with, Michael Jackson, whose albums he produced, and Will Smith, who starred in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, executive produced by Jones. We have those gangster aspirations of his to thank for these staples that are now permanent pieces of our cultural history book.

His upbringing, vacant of any respectable role models, resulted in a man who seeks to learn from everyone he meets, who finds endless inspiration in learning about other cultures, in the sounds of the world. He revolutionized that music. Over his six-decade musical journey, he introduced the sounds of the Fender bass and the synthesizer into the popular spectrum, combined bebop with hip-hop, made jazz mainstream, and set the soundtrack for Hollywood.

His home in Bel Air is filled with artifacts from his journey, such as a trophy case displaying his 27 Grammys. The walls in his personal theater are lined with posters from movies he made along the way, from 1985’s 11-Oscar-nominated The Color Purple, which was the first film Jones co-produced, to 2005’s 50 Cent biopic Get Rich or Die Trying, for which Jones provided the 35th musical score of his career.

His epic journey was immortalized not only by the music he created but also by the Warner Bros. film Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones and by his book, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. During our conversation, he shared some of the invaluable lessons that he learned along that journey from his mentors and contemporaries.

When they were playing together in Vegas, Frank Sinatra told him, “Quincy, your team is only as strong as its weakest link.” When they were touring with Lionell Hampton, jazz saxophonist Ben Webster imparted the importance of appreciating other cultures, saying, “Listen to the real people, listen to the music, eat the food, learn 40 words in every language—Greek, French, Swedish, Russian.”

He took those lessons to heart. He says, “That gets my cookies crumbling—feeling at home in practically every country on the planet. Knowing the customs, the food, the language, and the music, the definitions of culture.” And throughout his rich and varying journey, he developed mantras of his own. Jones thinks of the world like he thinks of a symphony orchestra: “Everyone doing the same thing but on something different.” So, “Don’t drag your culture into every other person’s culture. You become a bigger person if you learn their culture. That’s what the world needs now: for us to accept each other as we are.” But most importantly, “When it rains, get wet. Be involved.”

Making Music to Make a Difference

So beyond the music, beyond the accolades, Quincy has shown that he is not afraid to put action behind the lessons, and he has opted to get wet when it has rained on parts of our world. He is involved and has been since the 60s, when he was a key supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Operation Breadbasket. In 1985, he combined his philanthropic efforts with his musical acumen, bringing artists together in a studio to record “We Are The World,” a song he produced that became the best selling single of all time and raised more than $63 million to combat famine in Ethiopia. In turn, the U.S. government donated more than $800 million to the cause. And in 2004, he once again harnessed the power of celebrity to launch the We Are The Future initiative with a concert featuring Carlos Santana, Alicia Keys, Oprah Winfrey, and others. In 2007, he joined forces with the Harvard School of Public Health to form Project Q, dedicated to the health and wellbeing of children.

And this year, almost 25 years to the day after the original song was recorded, Jones is proving that “We Are The World” is not just a song title  but a global philosophy that he subscribes to, a rallying cry for any person, any country, suffering on the planet who needs a helping hand from their global neighbors. He gathered more than 80 artists from a new generation in that same “We Are The World” studio to sing “We Are The World 25 For Haiti.” The proceeds from the song benefit the non-profit We Are The World Foundation, founded by Jones and Lionel Richie to aid the relief of the crisis in Haiti following the earthquake in January 2010. He explains, “Right after we finished the American version, I called Emilio Estefan, who is like family—I am the godfather of his little girl Emily. He and Gloria put together a Spanish version in four days. As we speak, all the forces are coming together in the Middle East. Two of my friends are Sheiks over there, and they are helping with the logistics. On a parallel path is We Are The World for Africa. [Nelson] Mandela is writing it down, and when the games [The World Cup] come, we will present the first African version. Then Chinese. Whatever we can do to get it done, it’s worth it.”

Jones’ efforts don’t stop there; his personal Quincy Jones Foundation raises awareness and resources to support global children’s initiatives. The foundation recently received a $1 million contribution from Swiss watch company Audemars Piguet in recognition of Jones’ partnership with the brand as an ambassador. The collaboration is commemorated by the Millenary Quincy Jones Limited Edition timepiece. “It doesn’t get better than Audemars,” Jones says. “I chose to [be a brand ambassador] because of their spirit and attitude about my foundation.” For three years, Audemars Piguet has been presenting the Q Prize, which recognizes advocacy on behalf of children. In 2008, the Q Prize was awarded to Maestro Gustavo Dudamel and Dr. José Antonio Abreu, a 28-year-old conductor from Venezuela and his mentor, who started El Sistema 33 years ago in Venezuela. El Sistema now teaches music to 300,000 of the country’s poorest children. Jones says, “They save kids who are in gangs. They get them playing musical instruments, which is in following with my background. Music is something that sustains your life.”

The Saving Grace of the Marching Band

After Jones discovered music that fateful night in Washington, he says he began playing the piano all day, all night. By the time he was 12, he was studying trumpet and singing in a gospel quartet. Then he learned the French harp and joined the marching band, opting to play the trombone “because that’s up front, where all the girls were. Trumpets were all the way in the back.” That band took him out of Seattle and introduced him to the world. “We played all the nightclubs. We played with Ray Charles and Billie Holiday when I was 14. Then Lionel Hampton came through and wanted me to join. I was too young, I had to get back to school.” His musical acumen earned him a scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, quite the prestigious institution, but Quincy was consumed by the desire to get back into the scene, back to bebop and big bands.

When the chance to join Lionel Hampton’s band arose again, Jones seized the opportunity and left Berklee. “In a way, they were the first rock band, even though it was a jazz band. His attitude was rock ‘n’ roll….We played warehouses, and we had to play the segregated South, man, it blew my mind. Juke joints, and white and colored drinking fountains—all the bus stations, all the dances, were segregated. Amazing. Two-fifty for general admissions, white spectators paid a dollar and a half and they would sit up on the balcony. And lots of black people dancing. It was a social trip, man. In some states, when we’d get off work, there’d be no place to eat because it was all white restaurants. It just slapped all of us in the face at the time.”

But Jones didn’t get mad. Instead, he just kept on doing what he did, learning everything he could and changing the rules of the game along the way. “You start watching and learning. I was just totally addicted to arranging and composing. You look and learn, man. I could hear harmony in my head. That’s all I wanted to do—find out how do you organize your mind to make all of these different instruments play at the same time, doing all these different things. My favorite thing is organization and composing. Try to imagine all the songs in your head. When you think you’ve got it all figured out, you put it down on paper, and then the next day, that is the most emotional moment you can ever live through, the moment when you hear that music played back to you. It’s either as good as you thought it was, or sometimes it’s better if you got better musicians. It’s a journey that to this day still fascinates me, my favorite part. It’s my philosophy about how I look at the whole world: everybody does something different, but they’re doing the same thing for different reasons.”

In 1961, he became the first black man to be a high-level executive at a major record label, when he was appointed vice-president of Mercury Records. A decade later, he was the first black person to conduct an orchestra for the Oscars. And a decade after that, he was the first black movie producer to be nominated for an Oscar. And a few years later, his Qwest Broadcasting became one of the largest minority-owned companies in the U.S. just four short years after it was launched. There are so many milestones, so many awards and honors, that he can’t even begin to name what was his most significant moment. “I produced the inauguration for President Clinton in 1992,” he offers. “Then in 1996, I produced the Oscars. All over the place—working with Sinatra, Ray Charles, working with every major artist for the last 60 years of American music. Billie Holiday, Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, LaVern Backer. Everybody. It doesn’t stop.”

And the awards and accolades don’t stop either. He’s been nominated for a Grammy a record 79 times and won his first in 1963 for “Best Instrumental Arrangement.” He’s racked up 26 additional Grammys since then, including “Album of the Year” for Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which Jones produced, in 1983. It holds the record as the best selling album of all time. He also was honored with the Grammy’s “Living Legend” award in 1990. It’s no wonder; that year, he took home six other Grammys for his Back on the Block album, including “Album of the Year” and “Producer of the Year.” Moreover, he’s got an Emmy, seven Oscar nominations, a slew of humanitarian awards, as well as top honors from countries around the world, including France’s prestigious Legion d’Honneur title and the Republic of Italy’s Rudolph Valentino award.

Music Education

Beyond his humanitarian efforts, Jones is also an advocate for the promotion of American music, which he feels is so entwined with the fabric of our nation, reflective of our history and our culture, and also reflective of a global culture. A lifelong student of music history, he says he is fascinated by the way influential sounds spread around the globe. “It’s painful to me realizing that America doesn’t have a Minister of Culture,” he says. “The country has the most widespread and imitated music on the planet.” Jones implored President Obama to introduce such a position, but his pleas were lost in the rumble of political strife. So Jones took matters into his own hands and formed The Quincy Jones Musiq Consortium, where leaders from all parts of the music industry combine forces with educators to ensure music is part of the lives of the children in the U.S. The Consortium also features an online social media network, a community where advocates for music education can share ideas and resources to help further the cause.

It’s only a mere drop in the overflowing bucket that holds the many ventures of Quincy Jones. His latest album, Q: Soul Bossa Nostra, is about to drop and already is causing a stir. While it’s not the first time he has brought together a slew of No. 1 artists for an album (his Back on the Block in 1989 combined the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Miles Davis with artists like Ice T, Big Daddy Kane, and Melle Mel), the new album is comprised of contemporary remakes of classic songs from Jones’ own catalog. “It is just astounding,” he says. “Timbaland brought out the idea of it years ago—of having hip-hoppers contribute to my songs, and I was very honored. Then it started to become a reality. And he was generous enough to open it up and have tons of guys get involved.” Artists like Usher, Ludacris, Jennifer Hudson, and Snoop Dogg joined forces with producers like Scott Storch, Jermaine Dupri, and Akon to put pop, R&B, and hip-hop twists on songs like “Strawberry Letter 23,” “Give me the Night,” and “Tomorrow.” Ludacris and Naturally 7 put a hip-hop stamp on the title track “Soul Bossa Nova,” which Jones says “is something I wrote in 20 minutes in 1962, and then it became the Austin Powers theme song.”

The first single, Akon’s version of the Brother Johnson classic 1977 “Strawberry Letter 23,” was released in March, with the entire album, which Jones executive produced, to be released in late August. It won’t be the last we hear from the living legend. Ask him if he is thinking about packing it in, and he says, “Not even close. I’ve got nine movies and three albums planned.” He’s got plans to head to China, then to Brazil. And he says, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”