Part 2- "Quincy Jones - A Morning Light" by Raymond Horricks

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

He was born Quincy Delight Jones on March 14, 1933, in Chicago.

"As one of a family of ten (seven sisters, two brothers) music didn't seem too important to most of them," he remembers. "My older brother played military drums, started in jazz the same time that I did, and then quit. My father wasn't a musician, but he was the greatest inspiration I've ever had. He encouraged me from the beginning, and I feel him behind me with every note I play."

When he was eleven the family moved north-west to Bremerton, Washington, near Seattle, and in 1948 they moved into Seattle itself.

"This was a hell of a change for me," he insists. "It's interesting because I went through exactly what all the fuss in the States right now is about — integration in schools. I've seen both sides.

"I experienced it first as a child in Chicago, where I was exposed to all kinds of gangs. 'The Vagabonds', 'The Giles A.C. Gang', 'The Dukes and Duchesses', and so on. Colour meant a lot in their constant rebellion against society, and believe me Chicago gangs were rough. I'll never forget when I was seven years old and saw 'Two-Gun Pete', a famous tough Chicago cop, shoot down a cat [bop lingo for a person] from one of the gangs and he crumpled up in front of Walgreen's Drug Store. My mind was not mature enough really to feel sympathy. I'd seen too many movies and I just accepted it as a part of Chicago life. And I accepted colour hatred as a part of it.

"Then, presto! A change. Out to near Seattle. I entered school — the only coloured kid in the class — and the other kids were wonderful to me. Positively no problems. Completely integrated. A hell of a contrast from Chicago where in the gangs they dared white kids in the coloured districts and vice versa. It was all a lack of understanding there. Just put a white kid in a coloured school and he acts like the majority of coloured kids act. The same with a coloured kid in a white school. There are some traits that are more heavily instilled from childhood, but basically kids all act alike. In Seattle we used to fight together, play together, everything — and it made me realize how each side was afraid of a non-existing element. Fear of the unknown.

"Now this isn't true everywhere in the States. In the South there is a different scene. There it's pure, unadulterated ignorance. Seattle though is like a model city and the only time the colour pattern gets distorted is when an outside influence starts interfering with it. These influences can set back progress twenty years with just one scene.

"I feel I've experienced the integration problem. And I'm sure things would be cooler if more people had. I'll even go further and say that if people would make an effort to meet more people, inside and outside their own country, then things would be cooler. The enemy always looks stronger when he's far away from you. People need to get closer.

"Even in Seattle, though, I used to shine shoes, paper routes, run errands for bootleggers, pimps, prostitutes and so on. You get this everywhere. It opens your eyes to life."

It was in Seattle that he began to show a real interest in music. "The only music I was ever exposed to in Chicago was from the house-rent piano players — long-fingered, elderly cats who just played and got juiced and ate neck-bones and red beans and rice. They all had fantastic left-hands when they played. I was very aware of this even though I was only ten."

His interest started with his helping to organize a small choir at the local church. His family was Catholic but as he puts it: "I got more of a message from the Baptist and Sanctified churches, because they used to project their feelings more. Also, I started singing spirituals under Joseph Powe, who at one time had been with 'Wings Over Jordan'. He was at the same time leader of a Navy dance band, and he taught me a lot about pulsation and phrasing.

After singing with him I started on piano. Then I was student manager for the Robert E. Coontz High School band and in that I experimented with clarinet, trombone, tuba, French horn, baritone, E-flat  alto horn, percussion, and then I bought a second-hand trumpet. From then on I was in every musical organization in school until I had graduated: chorus, orchestra, dance band, etc,

"I wrote a suite called From The Four Winds when I was sixteen, I still don't know how I knew how to do it. I'd never studied writing music. Yet I think the form, orchestration and imagination were even more mature than in some of my later works. I still can't figure it out. Hampton played it later. It was long — nearly twenty minutes. Anyway, I got a scholarship because of it to Seattle University."

Quincy remembers becoming increasingly interested in jazz from the age of fourteen onwards.

"It began when Cab Calloway came to play in Seattle and I was part of a band that played opposite him. Jonah Jones was on trumpet with Cab then, and Milt Hinton on bass.

"After Cab left, Billie Holiday came and the band I was with had to accompany her. Bobby Tucker was Lady's pianist then. I've loved him ever since. He was so patient when he rehearsed with us. We didn't read music too fast at the time.

"And then Count Basie came with his Sextet. Buddy De Franco on clarinet. Charlie Rouse on tenor. Gus Johnson on drums. And the great Clark Terry on trumpet. Clark told me how wrong I was playing and that I had a very bad lip position (I played under the lip). And he showed me how to get past these problems. He inspired me. His trumpet playing was so different — it had skill and soul."

Another who inspired him was the blues singer, Ray Charles.

"Ray Charles was seventeen when I was fifteen. In Seattle he had a trio he called The Maxim Trio. It was a gas! Very modern. Played all the hip things then. And Ray used to write for a vocal group (five voices) I was with. Ernestine Anderson was our lead singer. She was very modern too and had plenty, plenty of soul. One of my very first arrangements was the result of Ray showing me how to voice brass, using Billy Eckstine's Blowin’ The Blues Away as an example. And at every jam session in Seattle there was Ray's influence as strong as a radio-active wave—it always came into them. He played alto, clarinet, piano and he sang the end. Afterwards he went to California and recorded Confessin’ The Blues. To me, though his blues singing has always told the truth. My idea of a perfect marriage in jazz would be his feeling with a very full technique to project and develop it.

"Later, I was influenced by Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, and of course, by Parker. Remember, though, this was not particularly new music to me, because in 1948 the new jazz had been in for some time and was the only jazz music I'd grown used to hearing on records. Consequently, I had to go back and find out what had happened before in jazz. This same situation applied to Clifford Brown, Gigi and many other young musicians who were not raised in the swing era. It would account for the unbiased outlook this generation should have, being at an age where progress is yet to be seen."

Actually, after graduating, Quincy had received two scholarships. The first was to Seattle University, where he found the modern music department disappointing; the second was to the Schillinger House in Boston, which in his own words 'was a gas' and where he studied for nearly a year. In Boston he met Gigi Gryce for the first time. Also, the local school of jazz musicians: Herb Pomeroy, Charlie Mariano, Nat Pierce and so on. Then, when he'd turned fifteen, he went on tour for several weeks with the Jay McShann band.

"It was a very uncertain band with Jay never showing up at the rehearsals," he remembers. "The drummer was Brady from California (he's been with Oscar Moore since then). The trumpet player was Eric Von Slitz from Texas and he reminded me personality-wise of Benny Bailey. The tenor player was Carruthers and he's in Los Angeles now. I don't remember the other guys. While with McShann I gained valuable experience in writing and playing, but most of all I discovered the financial insecurity in the music business.

"After finishing school I ventured out with Lionel Hampton," he recalls. Gladys, Hampton's wife, was doing most of the hiring and firing for the band at this time, and a lot of younger modernists had sneaked into what was essentially a relic of the swing era (although an indestructible relic, still emotionally stimulating). In the trumpet section, apart from the veteran lead Walter Williams, Quincy found Benny Bailey and the still-developing Art Farmer. And then, a few months before the band's European tour in 1953, Clifford Brown joined the section, Clifford was already a solo voice to be reckoned with, and his attitude in playing jazz entirely agreed with Quincy's attitude in writing it. Quincy decided that the trumpeter was the one man he most wanted to write for. And he continued to do so until the time of Brownie's death in the car crash in 1956.

In a letter to me just before this tragic event, Quincy wrote: "About Clifford Brown, I'll put it like this. If any musician of the present day can be compared with Parker, it's Clifford. I can honestly say that he is the most unblossomed talent of this generation. He should not only be judged by his present talent (which is still of superior quality) but by his potentialities. Charlie Parker and Dizzy and all the other influences were not judged until they reached maturity. It takes a young musician many years to rid the mind of cliches, and to unscramble the millions of young ideas into what it takes to make a mature and original musical influence. By knowing Clifford very well, I'm very aware of his sensitivity and superior taste; he will never lower his standards and play without sincerely feeling, whatever the mood. He is a young musician in age but comparatively mature in ideas. When he matures in his own standards I do believe he will be a major jazz influence. He is the kind of person that would excel at anything attempted. (He plays as much piano as he does trumpet.) You can rest assured that all the Dizzy and Navarro influences will not be present in the mature Brownie. Remember, Dizzy began by imitating Roy Eldridge."

About Lionel Hampton he is still undecided. "The guy's a natural, and is a very unpredictable man and musician." When I met Quincy in London I suggested he write a short memoir of the time he was with the band, including a section about the leader. He shook his head, "I'm sorry. It would take three or four chapters of a book even to start recording all the weird things Hamp used to do. And I couldn't give you reasons for them. He is definitely more than a character."

With Hampton's band Quincy had moved to the front of the music scene and he discovered that he had to look after his music. Today, he has a share in a large music publishing house, and his compositions are well protected. (Incidentally, Kingfish, the first composition of his which Hampton recorded, contains a rare instance of Quincy playing a trumpet solo.)

On September 2, 1953, the Hampton band left New York for Oslo and the beginning of a long European tour. Only a week before Clifford Brown had recorded an LP for Blue Note under his own name; included in it were Quincy's Wailbait and a new ballad he'd written and called Brownie Eyes. However, it was after the band reached Europe that the arranger kept the recording companies as busy as a disturbed ants' nest. He was playing a concert each day with Hampton, sometimes two; and often travelling a considerable distance between concerts. Even so, Gigi Gryce and he wrote and recorded prolifically — in Paris and in Stockholm.

When I visited Paris some nine months later with Alun Morgan the French Vogue office had still not recovered from the impact of Quincy. Al Ferrerri of Vogue, a former saxophone player, said, "Last year we had a remarkable young man here, by the name of Quincy Jones. He wrote all the time." Apparently, after the concert with Hampton was over, he would regularly stay up the whole night writing. And nothing perturbed him. If he arrived in the recording studios to find more musicians there than his score had anticipated he simply sat down and wrote out the additional parts on the spot. He would write any time, anywhere. He went with Gigi Gryce to one of the Swedish sessions, and their scores were still unfinished. The studio contained only one piano. Gigi immediately sat down at this to finish his score. Quincy sat down in the far corner of the studio, and despite the crash of experimental piano chords going on, and the talking and the tuning up of the other musicians, he finished his off on a few scraps of manuscript.

"And he writes the kind of arrangements that musicians like to play," Borje Ekberg, the chief of Swedish Metronome, told Alun Morgan. "Most of our sessions with the Hampton boys had to be held very late at night or early in the morning after the public concerts and naturally the musicians were tired. But when they saw Quincy's scores they all said, 'Hell! This is great. Come on, let's make it!' "

In Paris, Quincy composed for octets, septets and sextets, and for a seventeen-piece band with Americans and Frenchmen mixed. In Stockholm, he composed for the brass soloists of the Hampton band, Clifford Brown especially, and for a band built around pianist George Wallington. But these recording sessions took place in an atmosphere of intrigue, for Lionel Hampton had ruled that no member of the band could record in Europe. Anyone caught recording, he announced, would be immediately fired and would lose his passage money back to the States. It was necessary, therefore, that the musicians make their way to the recording sessions without his knowing.

At the outset this was easy. When the band arrived in Stockholm from Oslo the first session was set for the morning of September 14. The several Hampton men called for left their hotel singly and at irregular intervals, and later reassembled in the Metronome studios. At this session Quincy played piano on the background parts to the Annie Ross vocalese version of Jackie, originally a tenor-saxophone solo by Wardell Gray, and also on Gigi's score of the Jerome Kern ballad, The Song Is You, for Miss Ross. Then he worked on two longer scores featuring George Wallington with a Swedish band. 'Round About Midnight, the Thelonious Monk classic, was first — and Quincy's dangerously brooding orchestration here is a model of mood evocation with a small jazz group. A Wallington original, Blue Bird, came after it, and into this Quincy introduced a more conventional swing. Outstanding in the band with Wallington was trombonist Ake Persson.

It was then time for the Hampton men to leave for a rehearsal and the band's evening concert. Quincy promised though that he'd be back at midnight with three scores to feature Clifford Brown and Art Farmer with the Swedish band.

This time it wasn't so easy. Hampton by now suspected that someone was recording. He wasn't staying with the musicians, but when the men went back to their hotel after the concert he posted George Hart, the band manager, in the foyer there, with orders to stop anyone leaving with their instruments. Quincy and Clifford and Art complained of tiredness and went to their rooms. There they sat and fumed until nearly midnight, and still the band manager hadn't moved. The let-out came though when someone discovered the fire-escape ran by a window at the end of the corridor. Delighted, the three felt their way down it and were off into the night.

At this session Quincy introduced his melodic and intriguing Stockholm Sweetnin', a jazz classic. Both trumpeters made outstanding use of it, Farmer playing in the near-Miles Davis style which he has since left behind, and Brownie already himself. Quincy later commented, "I consider this one of Brownie's most well constructed solos on record, and in itself serves as a stimulating, inspired composition." Also, Quincy introduced 'Scuse These Blues, revealing his clear understanding of the old and the new in jazz, and a score of the standard Falling In Love With Love. The session ended with the trumpeters jamming on Lover Come Back To Me.

After Stockholm the band went to Brussels, and then on to Paris, It was here that Annie Ross was reportedly told to leave the band by Hampton. Stories converge to the effect that the agents for the tour and a certain critic had been advising the leader that a white singer with a coloured band wouldn't please the French audiences. So Annie went, and out of sympathy George Wellington walked off the stand with her. At subsequent concerts Quincy and Lionel Hampton shared the piano parts.

Of course, the recording began again, and with it the subterfuge, Hamp's manager was still shadowing several suspected musicians, and particularly Clifford Brown. The musicians in turn enlisted the aid of the French recording staff, in whom the efficiency of a wartime underground movement still lingered. These men, by an elaborate system of decoys, ensured that the musicians made the sessions.

At the first session on September 26, two Jones' scores were recorded. Purple Shades featured Anthony Ortega, the Hampton lead alto. La Rose Noire, based on the harmonies of George Gershwin's Summertime, featured trumpet, trombone, alto, tenor, baritone, flute, rhythm and the composer on piano; it is an instance of the way Quincy can write a gentle and beautiful score and still cause it to swing.

Two days later Lionel Hampton was invited by the Hot Club de France to a party at L'Ecole Normale de la Musique Superior. It was a unique affair at which the champagne never ceased to flow. Before a selected audience of friends and musicians Lionel organized a jam session which included such different musicians as Mezz Mezzrow, Alix Combelle and Billy Mackell. And as the party progressed Lionel himself improvised brilliantly at the vibraphone. Previously, French Vogue had asked if they might record the proceedings and had been told "Go ahead." This was pure strategy on their part. For it meant that at the same time the coast would be clear for Gigi Gryce and Quincy to organize their big band session (and including ten Hampton men) in a studio the other side of Paris.

Even then the session almost fell apart. Hampton, quite innocently, invited lead trumpet Walter Williams and trombonist Jimmy Cleveland along to the Hot Club party; two men who were essential to the big band. To refuse the invitation would have aroused his suspicions, so they told Gryce to rehearse the band and wait for them. They went to the party, jammed a little with Lionel, and waited for the champagne to take over. Then, in the mounting excitement, they slipped away, jumped into a taxi, and raced to join the big band.

Quincy's Keepin' Up With Jonesy, recorded that day, is perhaps the most outstanding performance by a Franco-American band in existence. The composition has a double theme. The first theme, of 32 bars, is played by pianist Henri Renaud and the rhythm section. The second, a supple variation on the first, is then taken up by the whole band. A muted trumpet chase follows between Brownie and Farmer, and then solos by Gryce, Cleveland and tenorman Clifford Solomon before Quincy draws out a magnificent climax in brass. The whole, lasting some seven minutes, is characterized by a very Basie-like swing.

Hampton took the band on tour through France after this and it wasn't until October 9 that the big band reassembled to record Quincy's Bums Rush and another Gryce score. On the following day Gryce with a small group recorded Quincy's lovely Evening In Paris.

The last European session he had to write for was on November 10, after the band had returned to Stockholm. He asked four Hampton men to these sessions: Clifford Brown, Art Farmer, Jimmy Cleveland and drummer Alan Dawson. These, with five Swedish musicians, again including Ake Persson. Then Clifford Brown received a telegram from the American Federation of Musicians expressly forbidding him to record in Sweden without Hampton's permission. Quincy had written a feature for him, Pogo Stick, but decided it was wiser to let him stand down. As he says, "You can't go against the Union. They fight for you, so you have to respect and obey them." The others made the session, Art Farmer pretending to the band manager he was ill and confined to his room. They recorded Pogo Stick, Jones Bones, Liza and jammed Sometimes I'm Happy, Farmer in particular contributing a series of finely conceived solos.

The tour ended and the rest of the band flew back to the States in advance of Hampton. Eleven members of the band resigned immediately, leaving Hampton, for the first time in his career as a leader, completely without a band. "I wanted to settle down in New York and arrange," Quincy explains. "My little girl was born at this time. I was so broke, mind you, that if a trip around the world cost a nickel, I couldn't have paid the fare to get across the street."

He did settle down to arrange. In the next couple of years the only trumpet he played was on a couple of recording sessions with Dizzy Gillespie; also, on a CBS-TV series with Ray Anthony through the summer of 1954.

He arranged for everyone that mattered, it seemed. A letter he sent me in 1955 read: "New York has about as much work as an arranger could ask for, believe it or not. I'm freelancing a lot, doing jazz and commercial recordings. Fortunately, the A & R man, Marv Holtzman, that I work for at Columbia is very jazz conscious and is more than considerate in letting me have as much freedom in jazz as possible, so I have to cooperate with a smile when he does a commercial date. He's letting me do a big band record under my own name, the first.

"And yet ... in a year's time maybe nobody will be working. I guess by now you've heard about Parker. [He had died the month before.—R. H.] What are all the cats going to play now since he can't make any more records ? There was a big benefit for his kids at Carnegie Hall last week. It raised $13,000. It's too bad they didn't give that kind of money to him when he was alive. Financial insecurity was one of the causes of his death."

Quincy arranged albums for a series of musicians he completely admired: Clark Terry, Sonny Stitt, George Wallington, Oscar Pettiford, Cannonball Adderley. Then he had a disappointment. The big band album of his own he'd been promised by Columbia fell apart. He made the first session, with nineteen men, and then the interested A & R man left the company. No one offered to carry it on. To my knowledge the tapes of the first session are still gathering dust in the Columbia vaults.

And then one day he walked home from a recording session and his wife said: "Dizzy Gillespie's been on the 'phone. He kept talking about the desert.”