“All the greats bring the streams together,” Quincy Jones once said. The music producer was talking about the artists he worked with or admired: Ray Charles was as much jazz and R&B, while Marvin Gaye was as much jazz as soul, he explained. But Jones, who has died aged 91, could just as well have been talking about himself.
One of the most influential producers of all time, he brought together the streams of disco, pop, jazz, soul and classical music like no other over a career lasting seven decades. We won’t see his like again.
It was, of course, Jones’s work with Michael Jackson that is most lodged in the public’s consciousness. He produced Jackson’s classic trio of albums Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad, which between them sold a staggering 130 million copies and made Jackson the biggest star in the world.
Their reach and influence cannot be overstated. For most producers, such a body of work would be beyond their wildest dreams. But there was so much more to polymathic Jones, who was born in the south side of Chicago in 1933.
As a young jazz trumpeter and arranger, he played with Elvis Presley and toured with Dizzy Gillespie before taking, for a short while, a senior job at Mercury records. As arranger or producer, he worked with Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong.
He scored almost 40 feature films, including The Color Purple and The Italian Job, co-writing Matt Monro’s On Days Like These. He produced charity single We Are The World and, unsurprisingly, won 28 Grammy awards.
Despite Jones’s innate pop sensibility, he could do darkness too. His soundtrack to the 1967 film of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was genuinely chilling. The title track drips with menace while compositions such as I’ll Have to Kill You and Murder Scene are as scary as they sound.
Jones’s score seeped into popular culture, even influencing some of musical director Billy Goldenberg’s arrangements for Presley’s televised Comeback Special in 1968, although thankfully everyone escaped from that alive.
Jones also had a good business head. Seeing the growth of hip-hop in the early 1990s, he co-launched Vibe magazine, a self-styled “Black music Rolling Stone”. With its distinctive photography and hard-hitting writing, the 1992 launch was a huge success. It attracted a big readership and tentpole advertisers such as The Gap, Nintendo and Nike, and contributed to the mainstream development of the “hip-hop lifestyle” (a 1988 article headlined “Racer X” was reportedly the inspiration for The Fast and the Furious film franchise).
Despite his jazz and soundtrack roots, though, it’s his work with Jackson for which Jones will be remembered. I have often thought that the opening bars of Billie Jean – the snappy snare drum, the funky bass, the oh-so-simple four-note synth motif – must be the most universally danced to 30 seconds in pop music history.
Across generations, and at discos, parties and weddings from Beverly Hills to Brisbane, people have strutted onto the dancefloor as those distinctive bars have rung out. They’re utterly infectious. And we have the sadly departed titan Jones to thank for that.
