I don’t have a lot of memories, especially from when I was young, but most that I do have involved music. And many of them relate to Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91. His music was woven through my childhood.
Michael Jackson was ever-present, especially the music on his stratospheric three albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad, all produced by Jones. Jackson cut through racial divides, but there was also something very Black about the way he was celebrated in my household. In that simpler time, before the controversies that dogged his later life and legacy, “Michael Jackson is just incredible” was a constant refrain. At family parties in the 90s and 00s, aunts and uncles would claim that he “invented” the moonwalk and was the “highest-selling musician ever”. I never thought to factcheck any of this, because mixed with pride back then was an unmoving, objective certainty that held Jackson up as a reason why we were proud to be Black. He seemed not just African American, but a borderless kind of Black.
A decade later, I’d properly realise the extent of Jones’s contributions to these records. By then I was music-obsessed, living in the liner notes of these seminal albums, imagining myself in the studios with that list of names as they made magic. While Jackson was the face of the music, Jones was the architect. He was key in curating Jackson’s step from an earwormy, bubblegum pop artist who made inoffensive music to a progressive, sexy, disco visionary act. Even though their relationship was rocky, something that was public fodder in gossip magazines and industry circles, their professional creative relationship superseded all of this.
Jones’s influence stretched across many aspects of Black life – something masterfully depicted in Netflix’s 2018 documentary Quincy. It was not only his success that Black people resonated with: it was the fact that he was authentic and unashamed of his origins, which were marked by poverty and racism, and had a taste for hedonism (something noticeable in the early minutes of the documentary, as he promises his actor daughter Rashida Jones that he’s given up drink). As a young, rebellious and motherless Chicago kid, he had dreams of being a gangster and rubbed shoulders with a pre-militant Malcolm X. I marvelled that, against the odds, he became an international jazz-band leader travelling to exotic locations such as Turkey, Pakistan and Morocco, and rubbed shoulders with giants such as Frank Sinatra. There were oddities to discover, such as Quincy being the youthful producer of Lesley Gore’s It’s My Party.
As R&B, soul and disco became more popular than jazz, he found a way to be a production powerhouse for Jackson, but also for other artists who were popular with white audiences and simultaneously ubiquitous in Black cultural consciousness, such as George Benson and Patti Austin. The music was a soundtrack as we grew up: be it the Black reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, or the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning post-reconstruction saga The Color Purple. I was summoned by my parents to watch the groundbreaking music video for Thriller, but also the TV show Roots (1977), which my dad saw as a rite of passage. Jones provided a hugely affecting soundtrack to that hugely popular series, too.
There will be millions of words of tribute written this week. But what I’ll remember Jones for is his part in the chaos of my family parties, for those secret moments of joy and reflection, for the opportunity he gave my family to educate me about one of our own – his achievements and all the reasons to be proud.