Qunicy Jones
Join now to read essay Qunicy Jones
It takes an extraordinary amount of ego, or perhaps an extraordinary kind of ego, for a musician (or any artist) to think that he can influence his field over a period of several decades and learn to handle new expressions and aesthetic possibilities with the same ease as he did in his youth-that he can learn, in short, to speak to new audiences in their own tongues. And few musicians have the temerity to endlessly impose their will on any material at hand; to shape the world, artistically, not only on any terms but in any terms.
It is interesting that of the beboppers who emerged after World War II only Miles Davis and Quincy Jones survived as major musical presences with fresh ideas beyond the age when anyone would have expected it of them. The careers of both men, in fact, ran parallel to each other, but in different directions. Davis, like Jones, a trumpeter, moved from style to style in jazz, from bebop to cool to a sort of semi-avant-garde in the 1960s to a kind of rock-funk sound in the 1970s that was mostly a furious and sometimes undisciplined extension of the avant-garde ideas he had been experimenting with. He was enormously attracted to youth, and when he became older, his sidemen continued to be young. In addition, Davis displayed his ego by being something of a disaffected exhibitionist and a street-oriented misanthrope, stances that he managed to make appealing and hip, rather than psychopathic and infantile (which, in some measure, they were), by infusing them with racial angst and masculine aggression. He was an extraordinarily proud black man but to some a disagreeable one. However, he never ceased to be a jazz musician, a soloist, a man consumed with the nature and meaning of his own sound.
“All the musicians moan about the level of American popular music,” said Quincy Jones to Gene Lees in an article that appeared in Down Beat in 1960, “but all they do is moan about it. They wouldnt think of going into it to improve it. Well, Im going into it. I dont want my band advertised as a jazz band, even though it is. I dont want to scare the kids off. I want to try to do something about popular music.” And he was true to his word. Jones moved through various forms of popular music-not jazz-from swing to bebop to rhythm & blues to television and movie scoring to pop to soul to hip-hop. Jones was straddling different but related styles of music from the very beginning, when he was teenager. As he told Josef Woodard in a 1990 Down Beat interview:
But Jones didnt get really serious about music until his family moved to Seattle when he was a teenager. There he played in a small band led by Ray Charles, who would remain a close friend throughout his life and who would invite him to be his arranger and producer after Jones established a name for himself in the music business. Jones also sang in a gospel group and played R&B for Bumps Blackwell.
It was on the trumpet that his father gave him that Jones centered his concentration: “. . . my main instrument [at first] was the trombone because the trombone player got to be near the girls in the marching band. . . . But inside my real love was trumpet and eventually I ended up staying with it,” Jones recalled in a 1989 Billboard interview.
But he was never interested in being just a player. From his earliest days, he tried to write and arrange music, pestering professional musicians for guidance when they were in town on tour. One who took the 13-year-old Jones under his wing was trumpeter Clark Terry: “He taught me and talked to me and gave me the confidence to get out there and see what I could do on my own.”
Jones met Count Basie around that time as well, forming a relationship that would endure until Basies death in 1984: “He was my uncle, my father, my mentor, my friend-the dearest man in the world.”