LSuperlatives are lacking to summarize the prolific career of Quincy Jones, born in Chicago into a modest family and died at the age of 91. At the same time a jazz trumpeter, revealed in Lionel Hampton's orchestra, arranger and producer of the greatest singers, from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson, he had all the talents to offer the best of himself to artists, his taste for clear melodic lines and the science of ample orchestrations. Recently, he had arranged three songs, including “Les Champs-Élysées” by Joe Dassin for the album of the French singer Zaz in whom he saluted “the strength and energy of the ghetto”.
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A Francophile, this former student of the great pianist Nadia Boulanger and the composer Olivier Messiaen lived in the 1950s in Paris where he worked as an arranger for Eddie Barclay's label. At this time, he supervised and advised artists like Henri Salvador, Charles Aznavour, Boris Vian and Jacques Brel. In 2012, he worked for Nana Mouskouri in her album recorded in New York.
In his autobiography, Quincy Jones, Memoirs (at Cherche Midi), translated by his friend Mimi Perrin, the singer of the famous Double Six, he summarizes in five hundred pages his life which he admits is not limited in his case to two acts but to at least ten.
“As the Spanish poet Calderon famously said, life is a dream. Mine has always been in technicolor, with Dolby sound extended via THX amplification,” he writes in the epilogue.
For seventy years, he shone on the musical planet and produced three legendary albums by Michael Jackson, Off the Wall, Thriller et Bad. Without his presence at the helm, the singer would never have become a world star with this exceptional sound, this swaying beat and this instantly recognizable style. He alone was capable of achieving a synthesis between jazz, pop, rock and hip-hop.
“The future of music is in the streets”
Considered by Time Magazine as one of the most important musicians of the 20the century, with more than 400 albums produced and arranged for dozens of artists to his credit, Quincy Jones remained humble, aware that his musical gift flourished especially with the great artists who sought him out: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Stevie Wonder and the group Chicago, to name a few. Which did not prevent him from recording nearly thirty albums under his own name and conducting.
Broadening his palette, he wrote the music of The Iron Man a you Cosby Show and for the cinema of numerous original soundtracks, notably In the heat of the night by Norman Jewison, The sang-froid by Richard Brooks and The Color Purpleco-produced in 1985 with Steven Spielberg. The same year, he co-organized the recording of a global hit, « We Are the World », against famine in Ethiopia.
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Active until the end of his life, he was present on July 8, 2018, during his 85the anniversary at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
The one who lived for music leaves a beautiful legacy and also a vision, he who predicted before the advent of hip-hop and rap that “the future of music is in the streets”.
