The real superstars get by with one name: Cher, Sting, Prince, Madonna, Bono, Beyoncé.
But to be known by a single letter?
Next level.
That was Q.
Born in Chicago in 1933, Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. was singular. A multi-generational talent. Musician. Bandleader. Producer. Composer. Publisher. Raconteur. Mentor.
The dashing grandson of former slaves had an outsized impact on popular culture across disciplines, and across decades. A 28-time Grammy winner, who also garnered an Oscar, Tony and an Emmy, Jones helped to break down racial and cultural barriers in the entertainment industry by bridging the staples of Black music – jazz, R&B, soul, funk – with classical, pop, and Latin influences.
He worked with all the elite artists – Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, etc. From his teenaged years, playing trumpet in bands with Ray Charles, Billie Holiday and Lionel Hampton, to producing Michael Jackson’s epic albums in the 1980s and founding Vibe, the leading hip-hop magazine in the 1990s, Jones was the orchestrator of America’s soundtrack – always remaining relevant in the evolving music landscape, right up until his death on Nov. 3 at age 91.
In a Hall of Fame career it’s hard to isolate specific defining moments, but here are four:
The Count Basie Orchestra
The 1950s and 1960s were fertile for Jones. His mastery of jazz harmony, rhythm and orchestration laid the foundation for later innovations. In his 20s, he toured the Middle East and South America as Dizzy Gillespie’s musical director and arranger and penned arrangements for Clifford Brown, Dinah Washington, Peggy Lee and Sarah Vaughan. By his early 30s, he was a sought after arranger and conductor, collaborating with finicky maestros Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.
Although he conceived the playfully swinging instrumental Soul Bossa Nova in 1962, and produced Lesley Gore’s 1963 upbeat lament It’s My Party, Jones’ defining work in this era was with Count Basie and his Orchestra. His ability to infuse the big band tradition with modern elements was exemplified on Frank Sinatra’s 1964 recording of Fly Me to the Moon. This swaggering, sophisticated version, featuring the Basie band conducted by Jones, became a keystone of the crooner’s repertoire and played during the 1969 Apollo 10 space mission that orbited the moon.
In the Heat of the Night
It wasn’t his first movie soundtrack, but this 1967 project cemented Jones as a force in film and TV scoring. His moody, genre-bending compositions for the award-winning Norman Jewison film, starring Sidney Poitier, included a gospel-inflected title track by Ray Charles and echoed the onscreen racial tensions about the Civil Rights movement and the Jim Crow south. He would go on to write the themes for popular TV shows like Sandford & Son, Ironside, and Roots, along with arrangements for classic films such The Getaway, The Italian Job and The Wiz.
Going Hollywood also increased Jones’ power and influence outside of the studio. He became the first Black musical director for the Academy Awards ceremony, in 1971. In addition to composing a standout score for Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning book The Color Purple, Jones also gets credit for casting media maven Oprah Winfrey in her first film. On a trip to Chicago where Winfrey was a local morning show host, Jones “flipped through the TV channels, spotted me, and believed I could play the character of Sofia in a movie he was coproducing – The Color Purple,” Winfrey recalled.
Rapper and Oscar-winner Will Smith has a similarly serendipitous tale of being invited to Jones’ birthday party and being cajoled by the tipsy host to do an impromptu living room audition for NBC execs. Jones, an executive producer on the resulting The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air sitcom, which launched in 1990, wrote the infectious melody for the theme song Smith rapped, and cameoed as a taxi driver in the show’s opening credits.
Though in his late-50s, Jones, always quick to embrace contemporary music trends, was no stranger to rap. His 1989 album Back on the Block brought together a generational array of artists including Ice-T, Ella Fitzgerald, Big Daddy Kane, Dionne Warwick, and 13-year-old Tevin Campbell, fusing jazz, R&B, and hip hop. And in 1992, citing poor coverage in mainstream publications like Rolling Stone, he founded Vibe magazine to cover Black music and culture.
Thriller
Jones’ vaunted partnership was with nonpareil entertainer Michael Jackson, with whom he made three seminal albums. While 1979’s Off the Wall is the favourite of the discerning, and 1987’s Bad is noted for Jackson’s socio-political commentary, maturity and expanded songwriting and production chops, it’s 1982’s Thriller that was the apex of their alliance.
With No. 1 hits Beat It and Billie Jean, and five other Top 10 singles, the album holds the record as the biggest-selling of all time with 66-plus million sold. It launched Jackson, a shy child star who broke away from his musical family to follow his own perfectly pitched voice, into the celebrity stratosphere, ultimately for better or worse.
And Jones’ sonic earworm of pop, rock, funk, and R&B forced gatekeepers at commercial radio and music video stations to dismantle segregated playlists, ushering in new era of musical diversity.
We Are the World
For all his versatility and technical, multi-instrument prowess, the thrice-married father of seven’s superpower was harnessing people – bringing them together and getting the best out of them. Nowhere was that more evident than Jones’ work on the 1985 charity single written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie to raise money to stop famine in Africa. He arranged and co-produced the saccharine singalong which featured a star-studded supergroup of 46 including Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross and Willie Nelson. And it was Jones who posted the “Check your egos at the door” sign to keep the A-listers in harmony for the goal of raising millions of dollars and effecting social change.
As he aged out of day-to-day studio work, the legendary producer remained on speed dial for mentorship and colourful anecdotes. There are a few artists with elements of his ability to push boundaries, cross genres and disciplines, and shape culture.
But none will ever do it as elegantly as Q.
