Quincy Jones always met them when they were young. Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson – whom he later nicknamed “Smelly” – were all just 12 years old when he first shook their hands. One of his late-life protégés, whom he signed at 81, was Jacob Collier, the toilet-brush-haired boy genius who got many old jazzers worked up with his multi-harmonic YouTube covers a decade or so ago. Collier considered Jones a cosmic father figure, and the venerated producer told him this mind-bending riddle: “Jazz is the classical music of pop.”
This particular belief might be the gift that Jones, who has died at the age 91, gave to music. Epic records didn’t initially want him to produce the Michael Jackson album that would become Thriller, because they felt he was too “jazz” (he’d once been musical director for Dizzy Gillespie) and they wanted a mainstream pop hit. Yet there is none more pop than Thriller – a basic two-bar rhythm track stacked with layers of synths and sounds and vocals. To Jones, jazz meant versatile. Jazz was an attitude, and an ability. Jazz meant knowing how to do everything – and then executing perfect decisions about what not to do. Which is why the smartest musicians smuggle so much jazz into pop and the rest of us don’t even have to know it’s there.
Jones claimed to have 22 girlfriends around the world. They tolerated him and each other, he told GQ magazine a few years ago: “Don’t forget women are 13 years smarter than we are.” He traced his behaviour with women to the fact that he had no mother – she’d been taken to a mental home when he was seven years old. He came from an era where domestic disasters were converted into drive and ambition – and where music was the best way to get yourself out of the dirt, apart from crime.
He was born in gangster-controlled 1930s Chicago and recalled eating rats, caught by him and his brother, cooked by his mother and served up with greens. His father worked for criminals, and by the age of eight he’d seen bodies strung up on telephone poles with ice picks in their necks.
Seventy years later, Jones was living in Bel-Air (his TV company made The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), dining a few times a week with his neighbour Elon Musk and, he claimed, dating Ivanka Trump. He was one of the last living musicians to have spanned, in effect, all of popular music, working with Elvis (whom he said couldn’t sing) and Sinatra, and guesting on an album by the Weeknd. He’s possibly the only such figure to have remained actively engaged in new artists in his ninth decade, whenever an old-school talent, such as Bruno Mars, presented itself.
He believed that modern producers were lazy, and that modern musicians were limited in technique – that they should all be able to do the tango, and the cha-cha, as well as three-chord pop songs. Optimistically, Jones said that he would live to the age of 120, crediting the genome breakthrough at Cal State for his lengthy extended future. He had, he said, so much more to do.
[See also: Jacob Collier’s internal weather]