Tribute to Quincy Jones, great architect of all American music

What you makes you feel like doing stuff like thatmore or less: what makes you want to do all these things? Well, perhaps, showing up dazzled for the first time at a nightclub.

Yes, there is a flute tune that bewitches you, well, it was 1978, there are the lights, the atmosphere, all that, that’s what can give you, when you are young and innocent, young and innocent , desire, as the song we just heard says, « Stuff Like That »to taste, I quote, the forbidden fruit? Drugs, sex, who knows, they were circulating well in the big cities of the Western world in 1978. « Stuff Like That » is a song that could be heard there that year. She was even number 1 in the, quote, soul charts of the American magazine Billboard.

A classification that has changed its name about twenty years ago, it is called hip-hop/R&B today. However, it still brings together songs aimed at black American audiences today, according to a form of segregation which has never completely disappeared in the United States.

A segregation to which Quincy Jones, the co-composer, arranger and signatory of the title we have just heard, has never ceased, throughout his long career, his long life, to oppose. And that he never even stopped challenging.

I dedicated in the Very Good Trip, always available, of course, on the France Inter application, a first episode of the musical adventures of Quincy Jones. They started very early, at the end of the 1940s, his first jazz recordings date back to the mid-fifties.

That said, his own musical personality, shimmering and multicolored, manifested itself, undoubtedly a few years later, after his visit to Paris, which I spoke to you about yesterday. Yesterday, my choices fell on, roughly, the production of Quincy Jones between the early 60s and the mid 70s.

It evolved very quickly, it must be said that American popular music, in those years, was changing visibly. The interest in Quincy Jones’ contribution, at least that’s what I understood by looking at his career, which was unfamiliar to me, is that he brought all his musical knowledge , I mentioned yesterday the way in which he perfected it, in very varied genres, which he helped to enrich more than to shape, perhaps, by giving them, at a touch, his touch of harmonic sophistication , rhythmic, his art of learned orchestration, elegant but always at the service of the essential, of a certain simplicity, which he never lost sight of.

You heard « Stuff Like That »spontaneously we would describe it as a disco song, in quotes. However, I do believe that Quincy Jones and his collaborators, the Philadelphia composer-performer couple Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, the soul-jazz singer Chaka Khan, the elite musicians present in the recording studio, well I don’t I’m not going to inflict an avalanche of names on you but there was the late guitarist Eric Gale, who had frequented John Coltrane, the drummer Steve Gadd, one of the great names of what we could call the fusion of jazz with other music, of course, rock of course.

So in my life I have come across quite a few purists who, in rock and in jazz too, they are generally older but they have the same thought mechanisms, who consider that variety, in general, is a genre inferior, bastard, commercial, whatever. This was not the opinion of Quincy Jones, obviously, whose role was to bring to all the music that he was responsible for dressing, it was his role as arranger, of the stupidest kind, in quotation marks , to the most intelligent, the same care and the same professional conscience.

And he thus shaped a sound which will remain that of American and world music, the most striking, without doubt, of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s. With in particular Michael Jackson, of course, co-author, he was, of an unprecedented fusion between soul, funk, jazz and rock.

We will hear it, of course, but there were some milestones before. Like this track from an album Quincy Jones released in 1976 called “I Heard That!! “. It is co-written and performed by the Johnson Brothers, two brothers from Los Angeles, George, guitarist and singer, Louis, bassist and singer also, both now deceased, unfortunately. Quincy Jones had spotted them from their first success, the song « I’ll Be Good to You ». Louis was the session bassist for Michael Jackson’s triumphant albums. This song is called « Is It Love That We’re Missin’ ».

To find out more, listen to the show…

Playlist :

Quincy Jones – « Stuff Like That – Single Version » (feat. Nickolas Ashford, Valerie Simpson, Chaka Khan) album « The Best of Quincy Jones »
Quincy Jones – « Is It Love That We’re Missin’ » (feat. The Brothers Johnson) album « I Heard That! »
Aretha Franklin – « Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) » album « Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky) »
Diana Ross – « A Brand New Day (Everybody Rejoice) » album « Diana Ross Sings Songs from The Wiz »
The Jacksons – « Blame It on the Boogie » album « Destiny »
Michael Jackson – « Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough – 2003 Edit » album « Number Ones »
George Benson – « Give Me the Night – Edit » album « The Best of George Benson »
Quincy Jones – « Ai No Corrida » (feat. Charles May) album « Greatest Hits »
Michael Jackson – « Bad – 2012 Remaster » album « Bad » (Remastered) 4’07’’
Quincy Jones – « The Dude » album « The Dude » 5’37’’
Quincy Jones – « Back on the Block » (feat. Big Daddy Kane, ICE-T, Kool Moe Dee, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Tevin Campbell, Andrae Crouch) album « Back on the Block »
THE WEEKND – « A Tale by Quincy » album « Dawn FM »