The Journey So Far

If Quincy Jones’ life could be arranged as a score, it would be one of those crowded, thunder and lightning charts Lionel Hampton preached about--”I want those pages dark! A lot of notes,” he’d implore, sending young arrangers like Jones back to pages, sweating and scheming.

Jones took it to heart: He either never forgot or never knew any other way to live. For five decades, Jones has been filling those lines, pages and pages of them, in major and minor keys. As a jazz trumpeter, he sat in on many firsts--stereo recordings and hearing the first Fender bass. He shared stages in the shadows with Dizzy and Billie; produced a range of voices from Sarah Vaughan to Michael Jackson. Although some have called Jones the Zelig of pop music, present at the most pivotal moments and knowing when and where to find the next opportunity, Jones quickly pares it down--”I’m just a ghetto Gump.” The metaphor works. He’s the man who told pop music’s top-dollar divas to “check their egos at the door” when recording “We Are the World.” He’s done Rat Pack Vegas (Frank Sinatra first called him “Q”). He’s entertained the Dogg Pound at his Bel-Air home. But for all of the jet-setting glamour, Jones’ path has been deeply rutted with debilitating poverty, the mental illness of his mother, years of emotional abuse, his own near-death experiences and a famously tumultuous romantic life.

“Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones” (Doubleday), a 360-degree look at Jones’ life, arrives on the heels of the release of two CD retrospectives from Rhino Records, “Q: The Musical Biography of Quincy Jones” and “Play It Loud: A Celebration of Black Music in America”--an aural scrapbook of the travels of black music. Together they bring into focus a life that has known no strict boundaries.

Jones cleared some time--and his couch--to explore what all this looking backwards means. “Jazz,” he says, “gave the black man dignity.” But it also has been a ‘round the world tour. This book and this music--Jones’ crowded score--are our souvenirs of the journey.

*

Question: What does it feel like to take stock in your life in such a comprehensive way?

Answer: This is the weirdest experience I’ve had in my life. Because I’ve worked on all this other stuff.... You do “Thriller” in two months, “The Color Purple” with Spielberg and ... two years altogether. This took five years . Five years. To get it all where it feels right. And it is a trip, you know. You have to get your tone and your voice and your feelings. It’s about a very, very personal experience and I underestimated it.... That book said: “You sucker! You pay attention to me. There is nobody else.” I’m famous for getting 50 things going. That book said: “No, man, you ain’t going nowhere!” There were a lot of things that you don’t want to deal with or look at. I’ve never looked back in my life. I don’t want to see that stuff. It explains it to the people who read it. It explains who I am now. It explains it to me, though. Because I never understood it. I had blanked out a lot of stuff ... putting my mother in a straitjacket, my father holding her down, screaming.

Q: In the book, you step back from moments like that and say, “Memories kill me.” As a person who spent his life “closing doors,” what helped you begin to peel away the layers?

A: You can’t get them at first. I didn’t take the book seriously at first...The book was kind of part time then. I was supposed to talk into the tape recorder, then write, rewrite, get facts straight, get the chrono down. Talk to friends--try to recall this stuff. It was a lot of stuff to remember. Trying to remember the dates: There was a lot of pain. I lost two brothers [while writing] this book. My mother and my stepmother--[writing about them] was very rough because I had a dysfunctional relationship with them.

Q: Why were you so reluctant to tell your story? What were the hardest things for you to confront?

A: The reality of the pain. I always run away from that. Friends dying. You’re dealing with the reality of mortality.

Q: What kept you from running away this time?

A: It’s your whole life, you’ve gotta respect that. You must respect that no matter how hard it was. Just to deal with it. It’s going to end up being good for you and healing in a way.

Q: Has it been so far?

A: After I got past the pain, losing my brothers and Elvera [his stepmother] and Sarah [his mother] too. They’ve been a part of my life too, even though they kicked my [behind] with combat boots. I told my daddy, “You sure picked two lulus.”

Q: You’ve revealed a lot of difficult things. Is there any story that makes you uncomfortable being out there?

A: I don’t know. I have no objectivity at all. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been able to read it straight through because I can’t get past the last two chapters ... and the first two. I have to get back a little bit because it derails me. I know what they are. The whole experience is overwhelming. After the pain left, it was like looking at 20 people’s lives. It didn’t look like my own life. It was really such a strange feeling. I think a healthy feeling too, because you have to go back and pick up the pieces and deal with it. It’s like sweeping the cobwebs out and getting the clarity and understanding that at the end my mother had a harder time than all of us. She was probably scuffling because she didn’t know just how to handle it. Neither did we. Subsequently, I didn’t know how to raise my children. I thought they needed a roof over their head, food in the house, clothes and went to school, that was it. Because back in those days, in the Depression, back in Chicago? They didn’t talk about nurturing and cholesterol and dieting. You were dieting if you were starving to death.

Q: How difficult was it discussing your own limits as a father, raising children, your days as a player?

A: Well, I’ve been into everything.... Everybody knows it. I understand it better now. Coming out of the ghetto and going to Bremerton [Wash.,] where [my family and I] were the only blacks. You see the composition of the school: Jews, Filipinos, together, all the time. I was playing in the band then. Ladies were all over us. We could not even handle all of them. I’m not braggin’ about it--that’s the way it was.

Q: That community of musicians, that family, really comes alive on the page. In looking back at those times, how does it differ from the sort of companionship available to musicians today?

A: No. Because of the nature of the music. The essence of the music is designed to interact. Synthesizers and drum machines? That’s not interaction. We did live dates. When I recorded with Sinatra, Sinatra sitting right there in the booth, looking me, the rhythm section and the trumpet section straight in the eye. That was the only way we knew. And I can handle it any different way. Because I’ve worked with all the generations. It keeps moving. A lot of the guys didn’t want to change. They wanted to do live dates and see the band and everything else. Now it’s modular and layers and overdubs and all of that. And jam sessions. Everywhere we played in the world, after the gig, there was a jam session. The guys would go out and just blow--Cleveland, Ohio and Brussels ... the jam session was it. And it’s funny, all over the world everybody knows each other.

Q: Music then required versatility--pop tunes, R&B;, bebop--sometimes within the space of one evening. Musicians had to know the range like knowing different languages.

A: We were proud of that, that we had that kind of versatility. Don’t even have to stretch. In New York I’d do Sonny Stitt, [blues singer] Big Maybelle, Aretha [Franklin], Ray Charles. It’s all the same. And it was that way all over [the world]. Aleppo, Beirut, Cyprus, I know what it feels like, tastes like.

Q: How have your travels influenced your music? The way you score, the way you write, the way you play, think?

A: What it does is enhances your soul. Because you see that most countries, the evolution of their music is based on the roots of their folk music, like ours is. Bartok came out of Hungarian folk music. The Scandinavian folklore is awesome. All those tunes that Miles [Davis] and Stan Getz played, “Dear Old Stockholm,” beautiful folk music, you can’t believe how beautiful it is. Traveling is the best education there is. You’re experiencing their food that they like to eat and their language and their music. And that’s the soul. That’s the real stuff. They would tell us: Don’t go to the souk! Don’t go to the casbah! That’s just where we went. That’s like going to the ‘hood! I’m right up in there in a minute, baby.

Q: But you’ve often found surrogate homes in music?

A: It was a home and a mother I could depend on. I never felt at home in my home. It was pitiful. My stepbrother wasn’t allowed to go in the refrigerator [to take food out]. You can get used to anything. It was like Pavlov. You just get trained.

Q: But does music affect you the same way now?

A: Even more. I conducted the L.A. Philharmonic the other night with Esa-Pekka [Salonen], and we were doing the Duke Ellington tribute and I had the band out from New York. And it made me feel 15 years old. Made me act 15 years old. Actin’ a fool.

Q: What do you suppose would have happened if you hadn’t found music?

A: Probably would have been a criminal. I don’t know ... but I know the path we were on. There was nothing else to do. And it is all that amazing energy. We just went to South Africa last year. Mandela invited me to co-host a visit to his HIV kids. Eight hundred of them up near Botswana. So our foundation, Listen Up, I went with my lady, Lisette, she’s African and Portuguese, and five kids from South-Central who have dealt with these horrible things--incest, heroin, three generations of uncles killed with the Bloods and Crips. They met Mandela, got on their knees and cried. We meet with them every week. We’re makin’ leaders out of them now. They are going into prisons and talking to juvenile delinquents. One of them came back. He said even though it was only orange juice in there, he did have a refrigerator. It’s all relative you know, because they are looking at Puffy--having million-dollar parties with [Donald] Trump.

Q: Moving into pop music--from A&R; to producing and then running your own business--you’ve had to listen to people who have said: “Oh, Quincy’s sold out. Quincy isn’t playing jazz. Quincy became a businessman.” Does that smart as much as it did in the beginning?

A: It’s so stupid. What does that really mean? What bothers me, people young and old try to minimize you by saying, “Well, Quincy’s strongest suit is that he’s got a strong telephone book ... and he can just call up anybody!” Now that’s the funniest thing. I spent most of my life perfecting my skills. I wanted to be a great arranger, great orchestrator and great composer. That was it from 13. I did my thing. And then I was able to apply all of the elements. They see you sitting at a console holding your head like this, thinking, people don’t know what you’re doing. I’ve done 40,000 arrangements, 40 movies, I’ve worked with every singer on the planet, black or white, Nana Mouskouri, Charles Aznavour, Stevie [Wonder]. That’s a lot of work. Like you don’t have to do anything. You just have a telephone book and call a bunch of great guys up and that’s [ridiculous]. “You’ve got telephone numbers and charm.” Please, man! That will get you two inches.

I started as an arranger first. That’s how I became a producer. It’s a path you go through as an arranger that opens up a lot of doors of understanding. You work with all kinds of different people from Dinah Washington and Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Paul Simon, Sinatra, Aretha, Sarah, Ella [Fitzgerald], Carmen McRae. You learn so much by that school. That school doesn’t exist now, so it’s hard for them to understand what that gives you. Seven hundred miles a night for years. Traveling on that band bus. Seventy gigs in just the Carolinas. Twenty-seven in California. Everywhere. It’s ridiculous. And get stranded with a big band in Europe, and some sucker is gonna come talk to me about sellin’ out. Please . Give me a break. Yo mama!

You better know how to sell out and have something to sell. The other thing that is real key is I have a line of integrity that I will never go over. I have to do it so I feel it and the goose bumps jump up and say: “Yeah! Whatever happens after that is just fine.”

Q: You acknowledged that in your time, “the easiest way to starve in America was to be a black arranger writing for strings.” How has the business of music changed for better--and worse--for black musicians, arrangers, composers who want to experiment, broaden their range and genres?

A: Both, probably. I think there are fewer people who are interested in doing that anymore. The pendulum always swings so drastically far away from everything. There was so much exploitation in the past--you know in the ‘50s. So now, everybody’s got high-power lawyers and everything else, it’s all about the Benjamins. They are making so much money, [rapper] Master P, [rap artist and producer Sean “Puffy” Combs], they makin’ a lot of money, honey. And I’m happy about that. Nobody should starve. But it’s different. Hopefully everybody gets wiser. The media is bigger and that helps a lot. It helps to define different stuff. You see who’s doing it.

Q: But the magic is figuring out what sticks through trends and styles?

A: You got that right though. The first 30 years are the hardest. I know, the old guys told me that. Basie, Clark Terry, and it was an amazing education. I talk a lot now. But I used to sit down and shut up and listen to them. Because old people know what they are talking about, they’ve been there. All of the young brothers that call Louis Armstrong a Tom and all that stuff. This is the man who invented our music. He had no samples, he has no radio station or nothing to listen to. He’s just inventing it. Art Blakey told Branford Marsalis, “We had to take a lot so you can do your little flip stuff.” It’s true. There is a lot of blood out there. Every Puffy masterpiece that makes $50 million, there is a lot of them that died penniless.

Q: One of the shifts many musicians, historians and critics have made note of in regard to popular music is the lack of musicianship, that it has been replaced by electronics and sampling. To what degree does this worry you?

A: A lot. Our heritage is slipping away. We have great guys--Christian McBride and Terence Blanchard, and what Wynton [Marsalis] is doing hasn’t been done before. He’s the granddaddy of that now. And there are some great musicians out there. But the tradition of the big-band thing was part of our everyday--Basie, Duke, Louis, [bandleader Jimmie] Lunceford and people, they were dance bands. They made you shake your booty. And innovation and genius crawled through that in spite of it.

Q: As you’ve made your journey back through your music, through black music in general--what has been the through-line?

A: We’re dealing with rhythm, harmony and melody. They are dealing with beats and rhymes--rhythm. The media can help a lot. Before I die, I want to be a part of a way for Americans to know their own music. They don’t get it. We’ve got the greatest mother ship on the planet. We’ve got to talk to the administration. We need a minister of culture--I don’t want to do it, but we need one. Everyone’s got one. This country’s culture is the Esperanto of the world. It’s the first thing that they cut from schools, but if they had it, [there] would be a better spirit in the country. When the Berlin Wall came down, it wasn’t Interpol, CIA, FBI, KGB--it was music. It was music. *