From Michael and Frank to the Delta, Quincy Jones Was a Musical Octopus
Quincy Jones, who died Sunday after 91 remarkably accomplished years, was known for, among many other things, his musical sophistication.
Clients for his record productions over the years included Count Basie, Ray Charles, Dinah Washington and Lena Horne. He produced a 1973 TV special on Duke Ellington and the music for movies on the level of In the Heat of the Night. He produced one of Frank Sinatra’s signature albums, Sinatra at the Sands. Listening today to his best-selling album, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, it’s striking how the sound, the beat, the arrangements and the sheer dynamics, as shaped by Jackson and Jones, turned decent songs into the best-selling record ever.
His most valuable mentor in record production, Jones said in a 1985 interview, was Ray Charles, with whom he worked so early in their careers when Charles was still “R.C. Robinson.” The big secret to production, Jones said he learned, was “the belly button.” That is, gut instinct.
“I don’t approach music analytically,” he said. “You can study music, you can study harmony and counterpoint, but no one can teach you mystique and melody. There’s no technique. It comes through you from God. You can analyze it when you’re finished.”
Writers love to puckishly note that Jones was also the production brains behind Lesley Gore’s kitschy 1963 teen anthem “It’s My Party” — which, it must be acknowledged, had both melody and, in its own way, mystique. So it’s hardly surprising that Jones’s reach ultimately extended in many directions.
Take The Color Purple, the 1985 movie for which he produced the music. In researching and writing, he spent several days visiting the decidedly unsophisticated world of rural Mississippi juke joints.
Juke joints got that informal name more than a century ago, when black folks who were not allowed into most entertainment venues in the segregated South opened their own places to unwind on a Saturday night.
The trappings were usually, to be generous, rudimentary. The menu was downhome, and the drinks might or might not have been legally produced. But there was almost always a floor on which to dance and a band or a singer playing the music of the day. In romantic lore that was usually the blues, probably “It’s Tight Like That” or “The Georgia Rag” more often than “Hellhound On My Trail.” It’s more fun to dance than to contemplate mortality.
In The Color Purple, female blues singer Shug Avery often performs at a juke joint, and Jones said he considered it essential to capture the ambiance of the story’s early 20th century era.
“I remembered juke joints myself from when I played in Lionel Hampton’s band [in the early 1950s],” Jones said. “They were considered a house of sin. Once they got jukeboxes, things changed a little and they became more like just a place to party. But they’re still around today, so I spent five days just poking around in them. I brought a group down, so they could see how it goes.”
The crew subsequently drained a swamp to build their own juke joint where Shug, played by Margaret Avery, sang the somewhat suggestive “Push Da Button.”
The song doesn’t sound pure early 20th century, and Jones said that was deliberate.
“I didn’t feel it could be distinctive enough if it was just a straight 12-bar blues,” he said. “I pointedly tried to get a combination of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, because Shug was a fictional character for all of them.”
He also considered it important to incorporate gospel influences, which fits the storyline because the protagonist Celie, who becomes close friends with Shug, was brought up on that old-time religion.
“Before she meets Shug,” Jones said, “Celie only had church music. Yet when she sings to Shug, it’s the same [as what Shug sings]. Shug just brings city life to it. There’s a church influence in the blues. ‘God’s music’ and ‘the devil’s music’ come from the same place. I wanted to tie the blues and church together.”
Jones’s view of the music’s importance, he said, was shared by director Steven Spielberg. “Steven said he wanted the music to be a character,” Jones said. “He saw the choir at a 1909 wedding showing the genesis of the blues.”
And speaking of genesis, Jones often talked about doing a three-part documentary on the history of black music in America. He ran out of time before he ran out of plans, which is too bad but isn’t the worst possible epitaph.
“The evolution of black music, that’s what it would be about,” he said in 1985. “From blues to ballet. I think we have to recognize black music as art. Europe has always known that, but in the U.S. people know it as heart, not head. To the masses, it’s all ‘Let’s dance.’
“But it’s really the American soul pool. In a way it’s classical music.”
He would know.
