Quincy’s contributions to the world of music will never fade.
As a child, Quincy Jones — who died on Sunday at 91 — wanted to be a gangster. It was the ’40s, Quincy was about seven, and all he saw besides racial discrimination, was abject poverty that came at the back of the Great Depression. In South Side Chicago, Quincy grew up in a ghetto where he fought and stole. He ate anything his grandmother found, “including rats and possums,” as he mentions in the 2018 documentary, Quincy. Wanting to be a gangster was the top tier of the only food chain he thought existed.
Then one day, after he moved to Seattle with his father, Quincy broke into an armoury and tinkered with an old upright piano. He saw Black musicians, the only people from his community who seemed to lead dignified, happy lives. And so, Quincy Jones from the out-of-order neighbourhood became a musician, a great one at that. “Music offered me freedom,” he’d say. It was the one thing he could control. And the world is grateful that he did. Because if Jones, the master producer, composer, arranger, excellent trumpeter and entrepreneur, had chosen violence over music, the world would not have witnessed a musician who shifted gears with splendid dexterity between chart-topping pop, film music, jazz albums, conducting the famed Count Basie Orchestra and arrangements for legends like Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughn, Dizzy Gillespie and his closest friend, Ray Charles.
And who can forget The Dude, the triple-Grammy winning album nominated for 12, his arrangements for Frank Sinatra and of course Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982). This is just the tip of the iceberg for an artiste who took a whopping 27 Grammys home. Quincy’s contributions to the world of music will never fade.
