In 1958 Quincy Jones was working in Paris when he received a call on behalf of the princess of Monaco. Grace Kelly had convinced the principality to host a fundraising concert for the United Nations Refugee Fund and booked Frank Sinatra to perform – but she needed Jones’s help finding Sinatra a backing orchestra.
Within days Jones arrived on the French Riviera with 55 handpicked musicians for a less than appreciative Sinatra – who told Jones, his conductor: “You’ve heard the records; you know what to do.” During the concert, Sinatra made many deviations from the rehearsed show, but the orchestra never missed a beat. “Nice job, Q,” Sinatra told him afterward. Six years later Sinatra hired Jones to arrange a swing album with Count Basie that produced the signature Sinatra hit Fly Me to the Moon.
Jones, who died at age 91 on Sunday, is responsible for so many inflection points in American music – from writing for Ray Charles to launching Michael Jackson’s solo career to producing We Are the World. All the while his legacy as a record producer would serve as inspiration for hip-hop moguls such as Russell Simmons and P Diddy – an era Jones was even at the forefront of documenting with the creation of Vibe magazine.
But Jones would never have emerged as the music industry’s King Midas without first becoming Sinatra’s right-hand man. That Jones even had the audacity to believe a young Black man could do such a thing is something that should be studied alongside Nasa playing Fly Me to the Moon for astronauts during the Apollo missions. “Frank just died when he heard it,” Jones told the Hollywood Reporter, recalling the first time he played his arrangement for Sinatra. “I was so happy because, really, that was my first thing for him. I was 29, you know. Those guys were in their 50s and 60s.”
Jones wasn’t just a relative kid in the game, a 25-year-old Black American trumpeter turned composer/arranger who had been living in Paris for about a year; he moved there partly to study under Nadia Boulanger, renowned for teaching Aaron Copland, Burt Bacharach and other leading composers and musicians of the 20th century. He was racially profiled and discriminated against while touring with jazz bands in the 50s. The endless adversity could have made him mean and bitter. Instead, it turned him into one of the coolest men on the planet, the life of the party that everyone wanted a piece of.
Jones’s grandmother was a formerly enslaved woman from Kentucky who raised him on a diet of cooked rats. He grew up on the unforgiving South Side of Chicago during the Great Depression, thinking his only option for a comfortable life was to become a gangster. It wasn’t until a teenage Jones moved to Washington during the second world war and resettled in Seattle that he developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger who would eventually complement Sinatra to the point of redefining the Great American Songbook. “He either loved you with all his heart or else he’d roll your ass in a Mack truck in reverse,” Jones told GQ. “He was tough, man.”
It was in 1964 when Sinatra and Jones collaborated for that first studio album, It Might as Well Be Swing. At the time Sinatra was a commercial colossus, with a blockbuster career in film and music. But as he neared age 50, with jazz quickly giving ground to rock’n’roll, it appeared as if Sinatra, AKA the Chairman of the Board, wouldn’t remain on top for much longer. After leaving Capitol Records, the company that made him a superstar, Sinatra started his own record label by making an album with Basie – a celebrated bandleader who wasn’t the best at reading sheet music or learning new tunes. Jones didn’t just keep them swinging. He arranged Sinatra’s voice in such a way that it made him sound like an instrument in the band and not just another singer taking the lead.
Originally titled In Other Words, Fly Me to the Moon was written in 1954 in the 3/4 time of a waltz. At Sinatra’s request, Jones adapted it to 4/4 time to make it swing. The American composer Bart Howard reckons the song was recorded more than 100 times before Sinatra and Basie released their take. The two-and-a-half-minute standard – with Jones driving the horns and Sinatra’s immaculate phrasing – became the definitive version. During his live performances with the Basie band, Sinatra would make a point of acknowledging Jones – “[the] gentleman who’s been doing these marvelous orchestrations for me, one of the bright young stars in the orchestrating business”.
After the Swing project, Sinatra tapped Jones again to arrange his first live album, Sinatra at the Sands – one of the most consequential live recordings in history. Soon thereafter, Jones’s partnership with Sinatra would lead to opportunities in Hollywood scoring films – another thing Black musicians were not doing at the time, let alone prolifically. In the end Jones’s fingerprints aren’t just all over everything from the Italian Job to the Sanford and Son theme to Austin Powers’s Soul Bossa Nova, but also on the film scoring careers of the RZA, Pharrell and other Black musicians too.
In his 2001 autobiography, Jones likens his relationship with Sinatra to a brotherhood – to the point where Sinatra even cooked breakfast for Jones on one occasion. Even as Jones became more in demand, he continued working with Sinatra until his death in 1998. “Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet,” Jones told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2015. He went on to share the inheritance Sinatra left him, a pinky ring bearing the family crest from Sicily. “I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don’t need a passport. I just flash my ring.”
It’s as much a token of Sinatra’s gratitude as it is a symbol of Jones’s audacity. If he could make it with the Chairman, he could make it anywhere.
