Quincy Jones Was a ‘Musician’s Musician’ Who Was Uniquely Beloved in the Cutthroat Music Industry

The cultural influence and importance of Quincy Delight Jones Jr. cannot be overstated. As one of the most significant artists in any discipline of the last century, Jones, who died Sunday at 91, had been involved in American culture for more than seven decades, as a musician, music producer, film and television producer, and activist.

He produced Michael Jackson’s albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad, giving the world the songs and sounds that would go on to shape music history. He also produced and composed music for The Wiz and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” a show he also served as an executive producer on. His fingerprints are on so much pop culture. The list of luminaries he collaborated with is long and legendary: Jackson, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and many, many more. Later this month, Jones was set to receive an honorary Academy Award for his contributions to film.

“A creative genius, Quincy Jones shaped American culture as we know it today,” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said in a statement on Monday. “A longtime supporter and council member of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Quincy organized a concert to celebrate the museum, an amazing evening that lifted spirits. It was my privilege to call him a mentor and friend. Quincy and I shared long conversations about museums and music. His joy for life was infectious.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Dwandalyn R. Reece, the museum’s curator of music and performing arts and associate director of curatorial affairs, discussed Jones’ towering legacy.

How would you begin if you were called upon to summarize Quincy Jones’ importance to the last century of American culture?

I like to say he’s a Renaissance figure, but he was a figure not only in music, but in the culture and what he stood for and what he knew. He started out as a trumpeter, but he was a musician, a composer and an arranger who trained and studied with the best of all genres of music. And then he moved into film and television and scoring and producing. But what I liked and appreciated most about Quincy Jones was that he was also very grounded. He understood what music meant to people and how music affected people.

I can’t say enough about his own creativity, but he also understood the history of music, and that groundedness made him a wonderful advocate for culture, for African American history, for creativity, and really following your own muse. In many ways, Quincy Jones, like some artists, managed to stay current—even at 91 years, he managed to move with the times.

He started out in jazz, he studied with Nadia Boulanger, he’s worked in every genre of music. He’s worked with Michael Jackson, hip-hop artists. He didn’t pooh-pooh anything. He embraced it and really respected what creativity has to offer the world.

Why do you think that’s such a rare quality? Why do we have so few people at that high level of success who have that same kind of openness and curiosity and eagerness to learn new things and share their knowledge?

It is a rare quality and all the more rarer. It could be a little bit of people knowing where they came from and having an appreciation that goes beyond just creating music. Being a music historian, [my colleagues and I] talk a lot about that in African American music, no genre is completely new. Musicians borrow from the antecedents of people who have created and struggled, and that’s just being fed into new genres and reinterpreted into new ways of listening and enjoying music.

Having that root in history, I enjoy talking to people who really have that grounding. There’s just something that they’re bringing to their musicianship, and Quincy Jones has always been one of those people. I had the pleasure to interview him in, I don’t know, maybe 2017, onstage here at our museum and just talk about his career, the people he knew, the stories and what they meant to him. And he always struck me as someone who’s very wise and has a lot of wisdom and understands what it’s all about.

Do you have any personal recollections about that interview?

I remember one quote, because I was asking him about African American music, and he said, “Its salient point is that it’s the music of life. That through music you tell the African American story.” And that just hints at the centrality of why music for Black people everywhere is so central in that identity and exposure and communicating with the world.

And to have him say that validated the work that I was trying to do and the messages we try to get across in telling the story and history of music.

So many times, when we have new musical styles, [we see] intergenerational tensions and things like that, but people listened to Quincy. He talked to them in a way that they can see themselves and see their own value and their own musical creativity and their own sense of self.

Getting that 45 rpm single of “We Are the World” was a big deal for me as a little kid. And for a long time that was just where I knew Quincy Jones’ name. I knew he had produced that song and that all the biggest stars were on it. And then I figured out not too long after that, who Michael Jackson was. Michael Jackson is the biggest star in the world at that time and sort of understood that Quincy Jones was pivotal to his success. But it took a long time for me to realize that that was just a six-year period of what is now a 70-year career.

And we all come to people’s stories at different places and then we learn about who they are in their totality.

But it does seem like there is something unique about his ability to be a great success in one field and then just dabble in other things, but to be equally successful once he gets into film and television production. It’s not some show you haven’t heard of, it’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” which people still remember 35 years later.

Is there anything we can glean about, I don’t know, about ambition or about curiosity, but from someone who has just seems to have figured it all out?

Quincy Jones is a facilitator. I get back to his talents as a composer and an arranger because when you think about what they do, they have to look at the big picture. They bring in different voices, different instruments. They’re putting things together. And if you think about Quincy Jones’ career, that is what he’s done. He’s putting people, musicians together.

He’s producing film projects and scoring things. He’s always looking down and putting all the pieces together to create something new. So, in some ways, he’s orchestrated his entire career. That’s one of his God-given talents. He was able to use that as an executive, as a producer, as working with artists, bringing out the best of them and helping them find their own voices.

And that is probably the one thing that distinguishes him aside from everything else. He nurtured people. He worked with people creatively, and he’s always just orchestrating and making things happen on various levels. That’s his superpower.

There’s this idea that people who are hugely imaginative and creative can’t be good at business or about practical things. And one thing I’ve been struck by just reading more about his life and watching the many documentaries available about him, including the one that his daughter Rashida Jones co-wrote and directed, it seems like this is something that he taught himself, recognizing that a lot of artists like him were exploited financially. He figured out how to play the game and got really, really good at it. How critical a piece of his story is that, do you think, to making sure that we are aware of what Quincy Jones was writing and arranging and composing in the ’50s, not just lately, not just the latter part of his career?

He started out traveling with Lionel Hampton and studying Count Basie, but when you look at the trajectory of African American musicians within the music industry, they were the talent. But to be behind the scenes as an executive, that’s where the real power lies. And so when you see this offshoot of Quincy’s beyond-the-musician creativity, he’s in those positions of power to develop content that appeals to all audiences that represents African American history and culture. He is very savvy about that, and that is a testament to his success and that he used it to noble ends.

Sometimes, the creativity looms large: You’re just the big idea person. You just want to make music. But he saw that there was more that he could do if he positioned himself in jobs that allowed him to really have his imprint on the work. He was one of the pioneers to do that. It was not an easy thing for African Americans to break through some of those barriers. I’m sure he faced many challenges, and he talks about them himself, but he got in that position and then you see this flourishing of: He’s scoring television programs and films. He’s producing shows like the Academy Awards.

In his autobiography, he writes about how spending so much time in Europe in the 1950s—a period when segregation was still in full force in the U.S. and was not at all hidden the way it would continue to be even after it legally was supposedly solved. He keeps referring to that throughout his book, about how he kept extending his stay in Paris because he’s in his early 20s, and he is seeing this glimpse of life without the restrictions on it that he was experiencing in his home country. It seems like getting out of the U.S. for a few pivotal years early in his career was a very significant part of his development.

I think particularly for an African American man, it is a sense of possibility. To imagine, to leave a place where you live in a segregated society, and the impact of race is always pressed upon you 24 hours a day. While we have so many musicians who lived abroad and chose to stay abroad, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be in that kind of environment. What that does to your psyche, what that does to your own creativity, your own sense of value.

It’s so much so that it can sustain you, that when you do come back to the States, you still feel those challenges, but you’ve also had the opportunity to sense a level of freedom that you never experienced here. And with that possibility and with that sense of encouragement, you feel perhaps more capable or willing to really imprint yourself as you choose to be.

So many artists talk about that, how they felt when they lived in Europe and felt in Europe and how they were treated. And if you just think of the psyche of it all, it has to change you and impact you, and make you feel better about yourself.

And another thing I was trying to glean from just looking at his life was how he managed to interact creatively with all these other luminaries without being subsumed into that. First Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles, then Frank Sinatra, then Michael Jackson, but we know Quincy Jones’ name. I think it’s fair to assume, whenever you’re talking about anyone of the stature of a Michael Jackson or a Frank Sinatra, there are a lot of other people involved in their success. But we don’t know their names the way we know Quincy Jones’ name.

Quincy commanded respect and trust, and he walked the walk. He had the talent and the skill that he could work with artists of all types. Any artist is going to know who knows their stuff, and who doesn’t. And he displayed that. In his relationships with people, they were very collaborative and nurturing. He brought out the best in people, and people always wanted to work with him.

Are there any particular artifacts in the collection of the museum that you feel like really express something meaningful about him?

We were able to display what he was really proud of: a score sheet from “We Are the World,” which was autographed by people.

One of the things I like to say about collecting, I want to collect around the whole person, not just one dimension of their career or their life. And I think about Quincy Jones: What was it like to grow up in the Northwest? He spent some time in Chicago; all the bands he worked with; the arrangements that he’d done; the business records; the copious amount of awards.

But I’m particularly interested in the collaborations, the larger projects, his relationship with other artists and musicians, and also his intellect. He’s done several projects really promoting African American music. He’s not just a musician. He’s a spokesperson for multiple things.

And that’s a really important point to get across in the work that we do here at the museum. It’s obvious we can talk about all the accolades and all the things, but his legacy means more in the people that he’s touched and the reverberation of that. I hope people cherish him for his living example of what he left behind and how he did it.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind for you when you think about Quincy Jones?

When I was in college, taking music theory classes, just to learn that this guy you see in this popular venue studied with Boulanger. Who is this guy? I mean, you could actually operate in different genres and do these things and have the same musical skills. And it really kind of taught me something … that musicianship knows no borders and that in the best of worlds, we don’t draw lines, whether we play jazz or sing pop or hip-hop or classical music. He was a musician’s musician and appreciated it all. And that was very attuned to my own vantage point and beliefs. And so I had a new level of respect for him and understanding of who he was.

You have someone whose life has contained as many multitudes and as many periods and as many successes and as many different mediums as this person. How do you approach it? How do you come at the task of making sure that this person is fairly represented within the museum so that generations to come will know who he was, what he meant?

You don’t interpret him through one lens. We have 12 permanent exhibitions, and obviously Quincy could go in the music exhibition, but we could talk about him in the segregation exhibition. We could talk about him in the community exhibition, the theater exhibition, the art exhibition, the Cultural Expressions exhibition. And so a life impacts more than the sum of its parts. These are real people who have carried a legacy and tell a story. They have uplifted the culture and honored the culture in a variety of ways.

You can’t just talk about him through one lens and do him justice. You have to talk about the multifaceted musician, historian, creator, arranger, producer, and then what drove him, what were those intangibles, those qualities that made him him. And that gets back to the facilitator, the composer, the arranger, that talent and drive and acumen to really make an impact in this business, which—it was a business. It wasn’t just art, but it was a business.

If you had your choice of any artifact from his career, from his life to add to the collection of the museum, what would you ask for?

I’d like to have his first instrument, which started that, his first trumpet. I don’t know if he still has it. I had also like to see band parts and arrangements, his creativity. We have a photograph of him just sitting at a table when he scored The Color Purple, just to have those parts and coming up with the music. So I really look for the pieces that really show the full picture of him. Not all the flashy stuff necessarily, but kind of the inner him that we were all so touched by.

Do you have any personal favorite performances or recordings of his?

I just saw MJ the Musical, saw all the stuff from Off the Wall and Thriller. And just remembering what the genius work that was. There were a couple of scenes in the show about MJ and Quincy working together and just understanding elemental pieces of the music, listening to African drums and just that sense of creativity and imagination. You could always expect something different out of him. This is Quincy Jones and James Ingram. This is Quincy Jones with Lionel Hampton, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan. He was all over the place, and he is a polymath in that regard. I just really appreciated that.

I want to ask you a cruel and unfair binary of a question: You can only have Off the Wall or Thriller. Which one do you choose?

Ooh, Off The Wall has one of my favorite songs, but Thriller as an album, that kind of tops it. “Rock With You” is one of my favorite songs, but Thriller as a complete album, and I’m looking at the whole album, piece of work, nothing surpasses that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.