Remembering Quincy Jones, who passed away at the age of 91 on Sunday: A true visionary, from producing Michael Jackson’s Thriller to orchestrating “The Greatest Night in Pop”, with nothing less than 28 Grammy Awards and unmatched creativity, he set a standard of excellence that only few could match.
To summarize the jack-of-all-trades’ life in the modest limitations of a blog post is an impossibility: the man was a musician, composer, producer, connector, father of many, and created magic with everyone from Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Donna Summer, Ray Charles to Big Daddy Kane or Will Smith.
So without any claim to comprehensiveness, here come three hand-picked Quincy Jones moments from the BSTN universe, for which – along with countless others – we are grateful and with which we bow to the legacy that this icon has left the world. Thank you, Mr. Jones.
The Fresh Prince
Quincy Jones played a huge role in bringing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to television, both as an Executive Producer and as the driving force who convinced a skeptical network that the series had broad appeal despite “receiving pushback for it showcasing black culture”. His insistence on casting Will Smith, fresh off of DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince music fame, also kickstarted the latter’s acting career and was nothing short of a bold move:
“I had to persuade the network’s sponsors that they weren’t dangerous (imagine Will & Jazzy being dangerous! Pleeeze…) And then on the day of my birthday in ’90, we’d had a meeting at my home in LA, where we asked Will Smith, a rapper with no previous acting experience, to read a few pages of dialogue for about twenty NBC execs. Well, after 15 mins, we hired him.”
Quincy Jones
Kendrick meets Quincy
If you’ve got about three minutes, do yourself a favor and watch this video of an awestruck Kendrick Lamar interviewing Quincy Jones for their joint HYPETRACK cover shoot in 2015:
Kendrick – whose music is steeped in the influence of jazz, funk, and socially conscious lyrics – speaking with Quincy – who fused jazz and hip hop on Back on the Block in 1989 already – is a beautiful intergenerational dialogue about breaking barriers and the love for music.
It’s a VIBE
“Vibe showed up on a magazine rack where black faces rarely appeared unless they had been charged with a crime or it was a thin August issue and a fashion magazine wanted to demonstrate some token diversity. (Yes, Ebony and Jet got there first, but they were mostly Mom and Dad’s magazines; the Source was founded in the late 1980s but had little for readers who weren’t hard-core hip-hop heads.)”
David Carr, The New York Times
When Quincy Jones launched VIBE in 1993, he aimed to create a publication that captured the essence and complexities of hip hop and R’n’B culture. Spearheaded by its bold and often iconic covers, the magazine provided articles that went beyond music and explored the broader lifestyle, fashion, and social issues tied to both genres.
VIBE helped legitimize hip hop and R’n’B (and everything between) as cultural forces in a time when that was far from being the norm, by pushing the envelope and bringing black culture to mainstream platforms – which runs like a red thread through the life of Quincy Jones.
