Lionel Hampton. Count Basie. Frank Sinatra. Ray Charles. Michael Jackson. Film scores. Musicals. TV production. Quincy Jones has had a full life and continues to live it with abandon, even at 90. He is a jazz musician, an arranger, record executive, soundtrack and film score composer, solo artist, entrepreneur, media mogul, film and TV producer, philanthropist, mentor to countless young artists and the producer of the biggest pop album in history (“Thriller”). He has won Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and Tonys and is a four-time Golden Globe nominee.
As an artist his accomplishments are unrivaled. As a human he is as real it as it gets. Never minces words as evident to everyone who meets him and anyone who reads his interviews, most notably one in GQ six years ago where his authenticity raised some eyebrows as authenticity inevitably does. His memory is sharp, his memories the stuff of legends. He knew how to party and credits Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack with teaching him hedonism. He quit drinking at 82 and relishes his “clear mind” since. His anecdotes are wildly entertaining. Miles Davis once made him scrambled eggs, Sinatra cooked pasta for him. He made them lemon-meringue pie, his own specialty. He loves cooking and showed off his talents multiple times on Oprah’s show where he created a special dish called “Thriller ribs”. He learned to cook gumbo from Leah Chase, the legendary New Orleans chef. And he loves traveling and speaks an unbelievable 26 languages.
Jones made it against all odds. Born during the Depression on Chicago’s South Side, he saw his first body at seven years old: “It was the biggest black ghetto in America. Harlem and Watts wer mild compared to Chicago. Now they have AK47 guns but at the time we had switchblades and slingshots. Every street had a different gang. I still have the switchblade mark here where my hand was nailed to the fence and ice pick in my head”, he told the HFPA.
He grew up without a mother after he was six and she was admitted to a mental institution for schizophrenia, and he and his brother were shipped off to Louisville for a while to live with their grandmother in a shotgun shack. They were so poor, they caught rats for dinner. When he was ten, his father who had since remarried, moved them to Washington State. Young Quincy discovered music for the same reason many artists do – to escape family trauma and a less than stable home life. Much later he found out through Alex Haley who researched his ancestry that his grandfather was Welsh and that he is 34% European on both sides of his family including English, French, and Italian. His mother’s family is from Cameroon. And one of his ancestors was George Washington’s sister Betty. At 15 he began working with Ray Charles who briefly got him hooked on heroin, thankfully a short slip, since he never had an addictive personality.
His life is one if many firsts. At a time when segregation was the rule and law of the land, he played with musicians of all colors and stayed in so-called ‘white’ hotels, thanks to Sinatra, who threatened establishments in Las Vegas that he would cancel shows if not everyone in his band was welcomed. In 1971, Jones became the first African American to be the musical director of the Academy Awards. In 1995, he was the first African American to receive the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Jones was also the first black composer to score a major film, a dream of his since he was 15. It was The Pawnbroker in 1964: “They didn’t have that many black composers, maybe Duke Ellington and a couple of other guys, but full screen credit was not happening back then… Lena Horne’s daughter was married to Sidney Lumet and Sidney called me up and said let’s go.”
In 1985 he became a producer with The Color Purple and four years later he pushed an idea for a sitcom starring an unknown young actor who rapped, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: “When I first took Will Smith to NBC in 1989, they were scared to death. The world was too dangerous, and I had to speak to 900 affiliates. I was producing the show and the jury was still out on rap.” He himself was not the biggest fan of the rap lifestyle after his daughter’s boyfriend Tupac Shakur died.
He was married three times, has seven children – six daughters and one son – and five exes including Nastassja Kinski, the mother of his youngest daughter Kenya. They excelled at being a patchwork family long before the term existed. In 2018 his daughter (with Peggy Lipton) Rashida Jones talked him into doing a documentary, Quincy. She recalled what it was like growing up with her father who would bring famous artists around all the time, most notably Michael Jackson: “It was heaven for a kid. Michael Jackson had lots of animals and pets always at the studio. There’s video games and candy which is what we were more concerned about, not the production of the greatest selling album of all time. Looking back on it, it was really cool. It was a very familial atmosphere, my dad worked really hard to create that in whatever creative space he was in to just have family around all the time and friends and laughter.”
The man whose middle name is Delight is convinced he will live to 110. And the world would be better for it.