![]() ![]() Sinatra himself bestowed Jones' nickname upon him. He thinks he has been so successful because he knows, as Frank Sinatra described it, how to push their buttons: "That certain major seventh note that you go to a minor seventh on - just certain things musically that I know that emotionally it turns them on, 'cause it turns me on too." They're thinking about one thing."Īs an arranger for a singer, says Jones, he is above all trying to make the vocalist sing better than he or she ever has before. ![]() "Playing one composer's music and one conductor, they're all thinking about one thing: sixteenth notes, eighth notes, whole notes and half notes. "I think of all these people doing different things but doing exactly the same thing," he says. I look at everything I do in life - with my foundation, everything, business organizations, everything - like a big band: four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, a rhythm section of a piano, bass, drum, and guitar," he says. 1 is understanding the range of every instrument singularly, and then collectively. With decades of experience and awards under his belt, Jones is an expert arranger. "In those days we didn't care about money or fame," he says. "I spent 28 years to hone my craft so I could write any kind of music." And he learned from conducting and arranging for the greats, like Billy Eckstine and Peggy Lee. "My teacher said, 'Quincy, you're going to learn everything everybody ever did with the 12 notes, from Stravinsky to Elvin Bird to Duke Ellington - everybody,' " he says. Jones continued his musical education at the Schillinger House of Music, which is now the Berklee College of Music. "It was the most exciting, educational, learning experience I've had in my life," he says. Hampton's wife, Gladys, kicked him off the bus and told him to go back to his parents, but when he was 19 he joined up with Hampton's big band for real. The bandleader heard a piece of music Jones had written, called "Suite for the Four Winds." Hampton immediately hired Jones as a trumpeter and arranger, and Jones just jumped on Hampton's tour bus, without saying a word to anybody. After Al Capone's gang ran his family out of town, Jones eventually ended up in Seattle, where at 14 he met Ray Charles, who was only 16.Īnd Jones was only 15 when he met Lionel Hampton. "I wanted to be a gangster until I was 11," he says. He says he grew up in Chicago in the heart of the ghetto, and back in the 1930s all he saw was gangsters with machine guns and stogies. It's more like a scrapbook filled with photos, ticket stubs, sheet music and memories. Jones' new book, The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey and Passions, is not an average autobiography he has already published one of those. He has managed to be the coolest cat in the room for more than six decades. Jones has worked with everyone in music at some point: Count Basie, Bruce Springsteen, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, Sarah Vaughn, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Nat King Cole, Ice T - the list is a testament to the diversity and genius of his career. ![]() At 75, he's still keeping up a blistering pace. Through the '80s and '90s there were more hits: The Color Purple, Michael Jackson's blockbusters and humanitarian work in Africa. Always restless, he moved to producing films and TV shows in the 1960s and '70s. As a record executive he churned out chart toppers. Quincy Jones - known as Q to his friends and a legend to the rest of us - went from performing and arranging to producing. Music producer Quincy Jones' new book is a scrapbook of photos, notebooks, letters and stories. ![]()
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