Do you remember where you were when you first heard Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon"? Did you grow up listening to Michael Jackson's "Thriller"? Do you watch the Oprah Winfrey Show? If you answered yes to any of these questions, your life has been touched by Quincy (aka "Q") Jones.
This holiday season, you can sift through his scrapbook, The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey & Passions (Insight Editions, $45, 9781933784670/1933784679), published yesterday. A self-proclaimed pack rat, Mr. Jones allows readers to peek at his report card (nearly all A's) from the Schillinger House in Boston (later renamed the Berklee College of Music), which he attended on scholarship in the 1950s, to sample recording dates and accounting entries from his years as a producer (yes, amounts are included!), and to see the final vocal takes for "We Are the World," with a lyrics sheet marked for who would sing which phrases, as well as a facsimile of an invitation to the 1994 inauguration of Nelson Mandela, autographed by many of the attendees (including then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, Congressman John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Jackson and General Colin Powell). The memorabilia charts his rise from a gifted trumpet player getting his start in Seattle, Wash., to a global humanitarian.
Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., was born on the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933. His mother suffered from dementia and was institutionalized when Jones was seven years old. His father, Quincy D. Jones, was a skilled carpenter who was denied work because of racist practices. After turning to black gangsters for work, the carpenter found himself having to flee Chicago abruptly when his "employers" were run out of town by Al Capone. Jones's father plucked his boys from the barber shop chair and took them to the bus stop They were soon bound for Seattle, which at the time was a hotbed for jazz musicians. Jones formed what would turn out to be many lifetime friendships there, with the likes of Ray Charles, Clint Eastwood, and the great Lionel Hampton, as well as many of the musicians that would come through Hampton's band.
Extremely well read, Jones scatters potent quotations throughout his life's narrative. One of them is his advice to young people, words he took to heart from the book Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: "The statute of limitations has expired for all childhood traumas." Jones then adds, "Get over it and get on with your life . . . Some of our most successful people have had some terrible childhoods." Most of the developments in his career were direct results of serendipity. Breaking into a recreation center with a gang of teenage friends seeking some lemon meringue pie, he discovers a piano in the supervisor's office, which eventually leads him to the trumpet. Years later, stranded in Europe after taking his band there and trying to get all the musicians back home, Jones had to get an advance against his royalties and go to work for Mercury Records in 1961--which started him on his path to producer. And, after not one but two aneurysms in the brain in 1974, Jones was told never to play the trumpet again. "Although I miss playing, you have to keep going," he told Shelf Awareness. "I remember my doctors telling me after I had started to recover from the operations to get right back to work. And that's exactly what I did." He went on to produce Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Thriller, the film The Color Purple (for which he cast Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey); and has founded Quincy Jones Entertainment, Qwest Broadcasting, Vibe magazine and the Quincy Jones Foundation. He has won nearly as many humanitarian awards as he has prizes for his musical and production achievements.
France, which Jones said kept jazz alive when the U.S. was not yet ready for an African-American-led sound, awarded him its highest accolade, the Legion d'Honneur Commandeur, on March 26, 2001. Jones adopted France as his country for several years in the late 1950s, studying with renowned music teacher Nadia Boulanger, from whom he learned the importance of music's history. "There's twelve notes, that's all," Jones writes. "And Nadia Boulanger says, learn what everybody's done with those twelve notes, 'cause they're the same notes.' " The same could be said of human history writ large, as far as Jones is concerned. Jones includes a letter in his book written by Alex Haley, with whom Jones collaborated for Roots, describing what Haley felt the duo's role is in "Phase III of the Struggle (Phase I having been the survival through slavery and what followed; Phase II the 1960s.) Current Phase III's needs include that we as a people begin producing the kinds of things, of various natures, which--via media in your and my case--will influence the rest of the world's people toward improving their private views and imagings of Black people . . . which will start to open more of the doors that are yet subtly kept closed."
Today as the United States stands ready to inaugurate our country's first African-American president, the doors seem to be springing wide open. "There will never be enough words to explain the mountain of emotions that Barack Obama's election elicits," Jones told Shelf Awareness. "No one can really fathom how far we've come, how much blood has been spilled, how much mental and physical pain has been endured, unless you lived through it. There are so many people who I wish could've seen this day, especially my father. I think Whoopi Goldberg summed it up best when she said 'I've always felt like an American, but I finally feel like I can put my suitcase down now.' "--Jennifer M. Brown