But Quincy Jones is much more than that. He touched on everything and all genres. They are rare who can claim to be a composer, arranger, music and film producer, conductor and business leader at the same time.
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They are even rarer to have, like him, touched almost all styles of music. Starting with jazz, his first love, which saw him form a duo with Ray Charles in his early days, but also collaborate with Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra (“Fly Me To The Moon”, that’s him!) , Toots Thielemans and many others. A ruptured aneurysm and two brain operations forced him to give up the trumpet he learned to play at age 11.
Installed in Paris at the end of the 1950s, he collaborated with Henri Salvador, Charles Aznavour and Michel Legrand. Did you know that he was still the one in the studio when George Benson recorded his hit “Give Me The Night”? We can multiply examples like this as we wish.
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Rappers also worship him without limit, he who saw as much strength in this music as in jazz and soul when they emerged. “Since I was thirteen years old in Seattle,” he wrote in his memoirs published in 2001 ( Quincy par Quincy ), I had played rhythm and blues, swing, big band standards, military marches, polkas, Debussy and bebop. […] I have never disdained a genre, ever.”
A very committed pioneer
Throughout his life, Quincy Jones never forgot where he came from: his difficult childhood, the underbelly of Chicago, the racial segregation in the United States in the middle of the 20th century. It is therefore not surprising to see him later alongside great figures of American social movements such as Martin Luther King or the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Far from being a posture, this commitment remains engraved in history. Concretely, Q, as he was nicknamed, was the first African-American to write a song for the cinema. The first also to chart his path to reach the upper echelons of a record label. It was in 1961, at Mercury where he had become vice-president.
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The pioneer also has a big heart. His name is associated with numerous charitable works and institutions often linked to music and more particularly jazz. It was also he who co-produced “We Are The World”, the song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie to help the fight against famine in Ethiopia, one of the best-selling singles in the world (more than 20 million copies).
A legend’s palmarès
With his career as a musician, composer, arranger and producer, Q, as he is nicknamed, has won everything, or almost. If he were ever to appear with all the medals he has received, he would hands down beat the most decorated of all Soviet generals.
With 29 Grammys, he is the second most awarded artist at the American counterpart of the Victoires de la Musique, just behind the Hungarian-born conductor Georg Solti. He is one of fifteen personalities who were awarded a Legend Award. It was in 1992. He is, on the other hand, the one who has been nominated the most times for these trophies. Since 1961, his name has appeared 80 times.
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Even if he has never won a trophy in cinema apart from an honorary Oscar in 1995, Quincy Jones has nonetheless collected nominations. Four at the Golden Globes and seven at the Oscars, notably for The color purple by Steven Spielberg. It is also his name that we find behind dozens of original soundtracks like Kill Bill For example. And it’s a title of his own, “Soul Bossa Nova”, which served as the generic theme for the three parts of the saga Austin Powers. All this without counting his contributions to the world of television, through The Fresh Prince of Bel-AirFor example.
