Quincy Jones: 14/03/33 – 03/11/24

Born in Chicago, with the full name of Quincy Delight Jones Jr., Jones was to become one of the most versatile and prolific arrangers, composers and bandleaders in both jazz and the wider field of popular music, as well as playing trumpet at the highest professional level. His first musical memories date from his Chicago childhood. Talking to me for the BBC World Service, he said: “Around the corner from our house was an armory where all the bands played, Earl Hines, Lunceford, and everyone. There was nobody in my family who was into music, although I used to go down to my grandmother’s house and, on her scratchy Victrola, I used to hear Duke Ellington and Earl Hines.”

When he was 11, Q’s family moved to Bremerton, in Washington State, where he took up trumpet, shortly before the family moved again, to Seattle. Once they did, he made rapid progress: “I started playing professional jobs about 14. What’s great about coming from a little town is that you're a big fish in a little pond and it gives you the confidence when you get to New York to be able to really compete.” He was helped by a lifelong friendship: “Ray Charles taught me a lot. I go back to 14 years old with him. You got two kids – I was 14, he was 16, and we talked about the things we dreamed about. And we probably transcended our dreams.” And as a young music fan in the late 1940s, he also caught every band coming through Seattle: “I remember standing in front of Woody Herman’s Band with Stan Getz and the Four Brothers, all wearing suede shoes, and playing ‘Early Autumn’.”

After studying music at Seattle University, he continued studying in Boston, when his big break came: ‘‘Lionel Hampton called, saying come on down to New York. That was one of the happiest moments of my life. I played trumpet and keyboards and arranged. The first chart, one of the only ones I have a solo on, is a song called ‘Kingfish’. The voicing was pretty progressive, and even though it was a swing dance band it sounded pretty modern.” After arranging for Hampton, he worked for a many other leaders. Most prominent was Count Basie, though Quincy there were drawbacks: “It took me about eight months to collect the money, which I really needed, because I had a wife and a daughter, and there were nights when we didn’t have money to eat.”

After playing (and musical directing) Dizzy Gillespie’s State Department band, he moved to Paris, as a producer for Barclay Records. There the great classical teacher Nadia Boulanger gave him some positive help: “She said until you totally restrict your direction and your boundaries you have no freedom – you say you can do anything, but you can do nothing.  Once you decide a piece will be five minutes long and one minute will be with five instruments, then 15 instruments and a little bit faster, the texture thicker and so forth – that’s when you start to give yourself real freedom.”

In late 1960 Quincy assembled an all-star American big band to tour Europe with the Harold Arlen musical Free and Easy. The show went bust, so their contract was not honoured. He somehow kept the musicians on the road, playing high profile concerts, on the back of the album The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones (recorded in the US before they left). A studio session in Paris produced the LP I Dig Dancers and helped to pay the bills, as well as inspiring some new charts. But, after three months, he admitted defeat and returned his A-list musicians to the States.

In 1961 he became head of A&R at Mercury, promoted to Vice President in 1964, a landmark role for an African-American. Meanwhile he continued to arrange, notably for Ray Charles, for Frank Sinatra and again for Basie. While continuing his work in the record industry, with A&M throughout the 1970s, and then his own Qwest label, he also scored 40 movies including The Pawnbroker and In the Heat of the Night, and many TV shows including the long-running Ironside. I have focused on his jazz career, (and he always kept close connections with the music), but going on to write for Aretha Franklin, George Benson and Michael Jackson, among others, his work reached millions, notably in Benson’s Give Me The Night and Jackson’s Thriller.

In more recent times, his philanthropic work has come to the fore, first acknowledged with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 1995 Oscars. Here in Britain his efforts were recognised by an honorary doctorate at the Royal Academy of Music in 2015, and he went on to work with and encourage many RAM students, notably Jacob Collier, who, at the time of Quincy’s 90th birthday described him as “the greatest living musical superhero”.