Economist Obituary | "Quincy Jones - The Prince of Bel-Air"

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The following appeared in the November 9, 2024 edition of The Economist.

“Quincy Jones ruled popular music for half a century.  The producer, arranger and film-score writer died on November 3rd, aged 91

Among the other thousand things that kept him busy and curious without end, Quincy Jones loved to cook. His gumbo was so good, it would make you slap your grandmother. He made the world’s best lemon meringue pie by putting lime in the meringue. And lemons themselves were his favourite ingredient, time after time. Forget onions, hot sauce, and garlic. A squeeze of lemon knocked out everything else, like a piccolo in a symphony orchestra. In fact, he didn’t cook so much as orchestrate.

And perhaps he didn’t orchestrate so much as cook. He would try any musical style, jazz or bebop, soul or R&B, rock or funk, and mix them up without fear. Anything he could feel, he could notate. He would get his basic ingredient, a great song, and spike it with something, like the Hammond organ he worked into his version of “Summer in the City”, the menacing drum intro to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, or the anguished major-minor chord shifts in Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party”. That was his first recording to top the American charts, in 1963. After that he was the go-to arranger and producer for some of the baddest cats in the world.

He won 28 Grammys, the third-best total. His biggest achievement was to produce the “Off the Wall”, “Thriller” and “Bad” albums for Michael Jackson; “Thriller” became and remains the biggest-selling album of all time. His own favourite high-point came when, in 1985, he herded 46 of America’s biggest voices into one studio and, in one night, recorded “We Are the World” to raise money for famine relief. There they all sang, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, etc, etc. Michael spiked the mix with his falsetto, and he conducted. He had told them to check their egos at the door, and most had.

That was another thing he was great at mixing: people. He got on with almost everyone he met, giving the regulars nicknames (his was “Q”). Both the Clintons and the Obamas were friends, as was Oprah. So were Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. So was Buzz Aldrin, who carried Q’s recording of Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” to the real Moon. Bono took him to see Pope John Paul II, and in Paris he met Picasso. But his real greats were the musicians he worked with. Lionel Hampton (“Hamp”), who recruited him at 19 for his big band; Count Basie (“Splank”), who hired him to compose and arrange for his band; and Michael Jackson (“Smelly”, his weird baby-word for funk). For Michael he would drop keys a minor third to extend his range. He would also put up with his boa constrictor (“Muscles”) wrapping around his leg. Closest of all was Sinatra (“Frank”). That dear motherf***er who either loved you with his whole heart or else rolled you over like a Mack truck in reverse. With Frank and Ray Charles (“69”) he partied his ass off, seven double Jack Daniel’s an hour. On one pinkie he wore Frank’s ring, with his family crest from Sicily.

He and Frank shared more than cutting hit albums together. Namely, rackets and gangs. On Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s young Quincy saw storerooms full of liquor and dead bodies every day. No joke. He went once to the wrong neighbourhood and got his hand nailed to a fence until his Daddy rescued him. 

When he was seven his mother was confined to a mental institution. His only future seemed to be as a gangster, until fate intervened. At 11, now in Bremerton in Washington state, he was doing a little breaking-and-entering when he found an upright piano. One touch of the keys and he was hooked. He made music his mother, in a way. Every instrument he met he tried to learn, but trumpet was best. He played until an aneurysm in 1974 forced him to stop, but whenever he heard a good tune he still found himself fingering, adding the brass.

Jazz was his career for some time: playing in big bands, or from 1959 building his own. That was the music the brothers made. Audiences loved them, but once they left the stage they had to eat in the kitchen. His antennae were out for racism ever after. Because his dreams were huge, he notched up a string of firsts: first black vice-president of a major record label, Mercury; first black nominee for Best Original Song at the Academy Awards; first black conductor and music director at the awards ceremony itself. “First” usually meaning “only”. From the age of 15 he had wanted to write film scores, but they didn’t use brothers. When he was hired to write the score for “In Cold Blood”, Truman Capote called up the director to moan about it. The motherf***er then apologised in tears when it was nominated for an Academy Award.

In all he had seven Oscar nominations. He wrote scores for “The Pawnbroker”, “The Italian Job”, “In the Heat of the Night” and “The Colour Purple”. Plenty of others, too. And TV added to his versatility. He became a composer for “The Cosby Show” and producer of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, which earned him millions and made Will Smith a star. But he had never in his life made music for money. Once you went after that shit, God walked out of the room. The music was all he cared about. He liked to write it from midnight to 10 AM, lying on the floor in his own mansion in Bel-Air, legs up on the bed. Relaxing into an alpha state. Being alone was fine. He’d had three marriages, seven children and girl-friends all over the world. He was a bit of a dog with women.

The state of popular music in the 21st century gave him a headache or two. Rap and hip-hop were often too violent. Taylor Swift he dismissed. But then he hadn’t rated Elvis or The Beatles either: no-playing motherf***ers who couldn’t sing. He was irked that too many producers were lazy and greedy, and too many raggedy-ass “stars” knew nothing about music. For all his oddness, Michael had been obsessive about every detail of his songs. And after “Thriller” there was no “white music” and “black music”; all cats sang all sorts. The world had come together. Into his 90s, the mostly contented Prince of Bel-Air saw no reason not to go on enriching the ever-evolving brew.” ■