Mention Quincy Jones to a bunch of people, and I’m sure each person will highlight a different achievement. There are so many milestones that naming them all would take far more space than I am afforded here. Jones was an Oscar-winning score composer, the arranger of great jazz albums by legends like Frank Sinatra, a band leader and musician in his own right, and the producer of the biggest-selling album of its era, Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
And that’s just scratching the surface of this artist’s legendary career, one that spanned 70 years and broke several barriers before coming to an end on November 3, 2024. With nothing else to prove, Quincy Jones left the land of the living to reunite with the numerous legends he knew on this earthly plane of existence. He was 91.
Jones was a guy whose many, many works lived up to his middle name: Delight. Q, as his friends called him, had so many different types of success that they defied the imagination. He worked on material as lily-white as Lesley Gore’s classic “It’s My Party” and as soulful and bluesy as Ray Charles’ theme song for 1967’s Oscar-winning Best Picture, “In the Heat of the Night.” Put that record on, and you’re suddenly in Sparta, Mississippi, sweltering in the heat with Sidney Poitier’s Mr. Virgil Tibbs.
Born on the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, Jones met Charles when they were both teenagers in Seattle, Washington. He was an up-and-coming trumpeter and arranger; the slightly older Charles was, well, Ray Charles. The creator of hits like “What’d I Say” became an inspiration to Jones early on, and the two worked together several times.
I’d be name-dropping for days if I listed everyone Q worked with: Elvis, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Lionel Richie, Sarah Vaughn, Sinatra, Peggy Lee, everybody on the “We Are the World” record and, indirectly, Austin Powers. Yes, “Soul Bossa Nova,” the unofficial theme song of Mike Myers’ parodic 60’s spy series, was a Quincy Jones composition. He also wrote the theme for TV’s “Ironside,” which Quentin Tarantino used to great effect in his “Kill Bill” movies.
Additionally, Jones composed scores for 40 films as varied as “The Pawnbroker” (his debut), “The Italian Job,” “Cactus Flower,” “The Color Purple” and the score that garnered the first of his seven Oscar nominations, 1967’s “In Cold Blood.” He was not the first Black person to receive a Best Score nomination (that would be Duke Ellington for “Paris Blues” six years prior), but he was the first to receive a Best Song nod (for “The Eyes of Love” from 1968’s “Banning”).
The Dude (his other nickname) had so many fantastic achievements! The best I can do is boil down this tribute to the question I always ask myself when someone I admire has left us: What did this person’s art mean to me?
To answer that question, I’ll start with the first time I heard of Quincy Jones: the 1978 movie adaptation of the Broadway hit, “The Wiz.” That musical was the first thing I ever saw on Broadway—and it scared the hell out of me. Jones not only beefed up the score to fit in movie theater speakers (and earned an Oscar nod for his troubles), he added more gospel flavor to “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” That number was sung by the person who scared the hell out of me on Broadway, Mabel King’s Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West. Though I watched from the safe confines of the Pix cinema, I was still terrified.
Jones also adapted that musical’s “Believe in Yourself,” performed by yet another legend he’d work with, Lena Horne. He and Horne won the 1982 Grammy for the soundtrack to her 1981 Broadway show, The Lady and her Music, one of Q’s 80 Grammy nominations. Coincidentally, I also saw that show on Broadway.
My Pops had Jones’ 1981 album The Dude in his album crate. The James Ingram song “Just Once” was a big hit from that record. As a kid, I couldn’t figure out what Jones did on albums like this one and “You’ve Got it Bad, Girl”—everyone else seemed to be singing but him—but now I know.
As for Michael Jackson’s Thriller, I had the album with Jackson’s picture on the vinyl record. Though I worshipped songs like “Billie Jean,” “Human Nature,” and “Beat It,” I’ll die on the hill that says the prior Jones-Jackson collaboration, “Off the Wall,” is a better album.
Time moved on, and I went from “The Wiz” to “The Dude” to “The Color Purple.” The movie that gave the world Oprah Winfrey’s Miss Sofia and Whoopi Goldberg’s Miss Celie was one of the few Steven Spielberg movies not scored by John Williams. My fawning ode of love to this movie will have to wait for its 40th anniversary next year. For now, I’ll just point out that on this film, Jones became the first Black person to earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination.
Being notoriously resistant to change as a young adult, it took my mom’s gift of a CD player to get me to start buying compact discs. The first one I bought was the Back on the Block album. I consider that to be Jones’ masterpiece. This work of art encapsulates every facet of Black music; jazz, soul, R&B, funk, and rap peacefully co-exist on an album with not one bad cut on it. Imagine Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Kool Moe Dee on a song, then press play.
Back on the Block begins with a rap song featuring Ice-T, Kool Moe Dee, Mellie Mel, Big Daddy Kane, and Jones (“Finally, he does something on a record!” I could hear my clueless younger self exclaim) and ends with one of the sexiest R&B collaborations ever recorded, “The Secret Garden.” Tell me you didn’t hear Barry White enticing you to “tell me a secret” when I mentioned that song.
Of course, Jones has done plenty more, from working on the TV miniseries “Roots” to spilling the tea in several awesomely profane interviews where he put everybody’s business in the street. Speaking of the street, I saved for last what is possibly Jones’s most well-known and beloved composition, “The Streetbeater.”
You know it as the theme to “Sanford and Son.” In an interview with the Television Academy, Jones expressed shock that NBC was going to put his comedian pal, Redd Foxx, on TV. Foxx’s routines were so dirty, even his name was two four-letter words! And yet, producer Bud Yorkin commissioned Jones to watch the pilot and compose its theme.
“I definitely didn’t need to see a pilot,” Jones told the interviewer. “I wrote it in like 20 minutes.” He’d known Foxx for decades—they worked the chitlin’ circuit back in the 1950’s. “I just wrote what he looked like,” he explained. “It’s raggedy, just like Foxx.”
That’s the mark of a true genius composer—someone who can capture the essence of an individual so well that you don’t need a visual to evoke them. Quincy Jones was a musical genius—and a helluva lot more. Rest in Peace, Dude.