Quincy Jones: the genuine musical genius who reinvented cool

 (AP)
(AP)

Quincy Jones greeted everyone as though they were part of his extended family. Everyone was a brother, or at least a friend, and he went out of his way to charm people he met, not least because it was the charming thing to do.

I last saw him play with his big band in Spain about six or seven years ago, but around 2011, when he was still fully operational, I spent an evening with him in his Los Angeles palace, which also doubled as a museum of the collected work if a genuine musical genius.

Then 78, Quincy lived way up in the Bel Air mountains, in a 20,000-sq ft mansion bought six years previously from Julio Iglesias, far away from the hissing of summer lawns in Beverly Hills.

This was real luxury, a proper Hollywood mansion with extraordinary views across LA that stretched all the way to Long Beach. The house was full of soul, as well as the trinkets of success. This was a house of spoils, a house of acknowledgement, the recognition of a creative life lived to the full.

The walls of his screening room were covered in framed movie posters of many of the films he scored, while the rest of this wing, the music wing, was full of gold discs, Emmys, Grammys, framed album covers, posters of everyone from Frank Sinatra to Bill Clinton, a couple of director's chairs, silver table frames containing photographs of Quincy with just about every triple-A famous person in the world, art lying on the floor waiting to be hung or mounted, and framed caricatures.

There was a huge wall-mounted presentation box from Epic Records, full of mini gold discs, "for being the No.1 producer in the world". You had to be careful how you trod in case you knocked over an Oscar or ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Producers) gong.

 (PA Archive)
(PA Archive)

The main living section of this wing was an enormous circular room surrounded by a tropical garden containing more than 100 speakers powered by his three Creston sound systems, which pumped out jazz and classical music all evening (from CDs, cassettes, DVDs, vinyl, DAT tapes etc). At the back of the house, in the middle of the driveway, a leafless tree was covered in Chinese lanterns.

Quincy Jones touched pretty much every genre of music since the Thirties, from swing to jazz to R&B to soul to disco and most things that came after it. A definitive link between old and new schools (as the DJ Robbie Vincent once said), Jones worked as an arranger for Dizzy Gillespie, as a touring trumpeter, bandleader, composer and producer, and sauntered between bebop, funk and hip-hop.

His fingerprints were on everything. Known as "Q" to his friends, Quincy, born during the Great Depression, never stopped working. The man with more Grammy awards (28) than any other producer in pop music, he was a musical Forrest Gump.

He also composed nearly 40 film scores, including In The Heat Of The Night, The Italian Job, Body Heat, The Pawnbroker and In Cold Blood. He worked with Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and George Benson.

The man with more Grammy awards than any other producer in pop music, he was a musical Forrest Gump.

He founded Vibe magazine, co-produced The Color Purple, executive produced The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, wrote the themes for TV series such as Ironside and Roots, and released dozens and dozens of his own records.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, Aldrin played Quincy's arrangement of Fly Me To The Moon. To put Quincy Jones in context, Bono once said he was the coolest person he'd ever met. Which is a bit like Mark Cavendish telling someone they're the best cyclist he's ever met.

Quincy was the only man to have worked with Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, the only man to have successfully used his diplomatic skills on the world's most irascible crooner and one of the world's most troubled chanteuses.

"Quincy Jones was too cool for cool... so he reinvented the whole concept... made aloof engaged, made elitist get off the bus and press the flesh," wrote Bono in 2008. "His rebirth of the cool involved intense heat, his cool would be hot like a Brazilian beauty, hot like an African queen, hot like the sticky streets of New York in the summer, the sweat of the rhythms he would bring to popular music... The intense warmth of the man himself offered a new kind of sexiness to the way a musician could carry himself."

"I like all music," Quincy told me. “The only music I don't like is bad music."

Michael Jackson, left, holds eight awards as he poses with Quincy Jones at the Grammy Awards in 1984 (AP)
Michael Jackson, left, holds eight awards as he poses with Quincy Jones at the Grammy Awards in 1984 (AP)

Quincy Jones' emotional jukebox was full and comprehensively compiled. As a musical encyclopedia of the 20th century it couldn't be more complete. The arc starts in the jazz clubs of Chicago, Seattle and New York during the late Forties and early Fifties.

"Night after night, as I wandered in and out of clubs, bars, and juke joints with my trumpet beneath my arm and my scores tucked beneath my shirt, a tiny glint of something new began to emerge in my life, something I'd never had before," he said.

"I had no control over where I lived, no control over my sick mother, no control over my hardhearted stepmother and my overwrought father. I couldn't change the attic where I slept, or stop the anguished tears of my little brother, Lloyd, who sometimes cried himself to sleep at night; I couldn't control the angry whites who still called me n***** when they caught me alone on the street, or the bourgeois, high yella blacks who considered me too poor, too dark, and too uneducated to be a part of their lives. But nobody could tell me how many substitute chord changes I could stick into the bridge of Cherokee. Nobody could tell me which tempo to play Bebop or A Night In Tunisia in."

He had greeted me with prime cockney, taught to him by Michael Caine when Jones was scoring The Italian Job at the end of the Sixties. "He taught me so much rhyming slang. It's the damnedest thing." (Quincy and Caine were born in the same year, the same month, the same day and, it's widely reported, the same hour – "celestial twins".)

Quincy was one of those people who tended to answer a dozen questions at once, probably because a) he'd been interviewed so many times that he had a spiel that he used on journalists and people he hadn’t met before, and/or b) it was a defence mechanism.

When I transcribed the tape, I realised Quincy barely paused for breath, moving from problems in Darfur, his humanitarian escapades with Bono, Barack Obama's budget problems, Joe Pesci's ability to sing jazz, gangsters old and new, black and white.

It was almost a stream of consciousness that took him around the world and in and out of the years, moving from Brazil to Paris with ease, via charity, philanthropic duties, campaigning, humanitarian projects, family tragedies – a pinball monologue masquerading as a conversation.

Obviously, in some people's eyes, Quincy's career was been defined by his work with Michael Jackson. When Jackson decided to make his first proper solo album, there was one man whose advice he sought first. He had worked with Quincy on the film The Wiz, a remake of The Wizard Of Oz, and had started to put his trust in him.

Sorry: Music producer Quincy Jones (John Sciulli/Getty)
Sorry: Music producer Quincy Jones (John Sciulli/Getty)

The two first met on the set the day Jackson had to rehearse a scene in which he read a Socrates quote. When the crew started stifling their laughs when he spoke – he pronounced it "Soh-crates", to rhyme with "low rates" – it was Quincy who whispered the correct pronunciation in his ear. And when Jackson asked Quincy to recommend someone to produce his record, the producer naturally suggested himself.

They started making the record in earnest in LA, with Quincy indulging his young protégé, taking his ideas seriously, and making sure he was comfortable in the studio. He also surrounded him with experienced, non-confrontational musicians, and offered Jackson hundreds of songs to choose from.

Weirdly, their work ethics dovetailed almost perfectly. "Now I'm a pretty strong drill sergeant when it comes to steering a project," said Jones, "but in Michael's case it's hardly necessary."

When Off The Wall was eventually released, in August 1979, the extraordinary collection of songs – Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, She's Out Of My Life, the title track and Stevie Wonder's I Can't Help It – showed an entertainer coming of age, wrapped in the kind of sophisticated packaging (Jackson was wearing a tuxedo) that was automatically going to appeal to an older, wider demographic than before.

This wider demographic turned out to be a lot wider than either of them imagined, although the album's success was nothing compared with its 1982 follow-up, Thriller, which would go on to become the bestselling album of all time, with sales estimated in excess of 65 million copies worldwide.

It contained some of the most famous songs of the Eighties – Billie Jean, Beat It, Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'. These were the first "black" records to be played on MTV, being so successful that mainstream media couldn't afford to ignore them. (Perversely, Quincy initially didn't want to include the album's second single, Billie Jean, on the record – not least because he thought some might think Jackson was singing about the tennis player Billie Jean King.)

Quincy never stopped being in awe of Jackson's talent, his single-minded dedication to his craft

They worked together on Thriller's successor, Bad, released in 1987, an inevitable disappointment that still ended up selling more than 30 million units. Barbra Streisand was offered the album's big duet I Just Can't Stop Loving You, but allegedly turned it down on account of the age gap between her and Jackson. Prince was also going to be involved at one point. After a first meeting, Prince said to Quincy, "This is going to be a hit with or without me, man."

By the time of 1991's Dangerous, Jackson had tired of Jones – foolishly, in many experts' opinions. In J Randy Taraborrelli's biography, Michael Jackson: The Magic & The Madness, he writes, "Michael no longer wanted to work with Quincy because he felt that the producer had become too possessive of him and his work, and had taken too much credit for it. Michael was still miffed that Quincy gave him a tough time about Smooth Criminal – Quincy didn't want it on the Bad album. For Quincy's part, he felt that Michael had become too demanding and inflexible. With emotions running so high, the partnership that had once sold millions and millions of albums had soured. Still, Quincy figured he would work with Michael again. He was never informed otherwise."

Although they fell out, Quincy never stopped being in awe of Jackson's talent, his single-minded dedication to his craft. Up in his Bel Air mansion, surrounded by the dozens of gold and silver discs celebrating his success with Jackson, Quincy was sanguine about his relationship with his former protégé.

"You know, I always deal in forgiveness and I'd forgiven Michael a long time before he died,” he said. “We did some amazing work together, produced some remarkable, special records, and you can never forget that. You shouldn't. I forgive people because I expect people to do the same with me. If you don't forgive then it's a poison, and it eats you up and takes hold of you. Me and Michael had some amazing times together, unforgettable times."

Quincy Jones had quite a few of his own.