Quincy Jones (born 1933)
In a 70-year entertainment career, Quincy Delight Jones Jr has been a musician, arranger, bandleader, songwriter, composer, record producer, and film and television producer and has received 28 Grammy Awards.
Born in South Side, Chicago, Jones was introduced to the piano by a neighbour who played stride piano. After the family moved to Seattle, Jones developed as a trumpeter and arranger during his high-school years. At 14 he introduced himself to a 16-year-old Ray Charles, who was an early inspiration and became a close friend.
He earned a scholarship to Seattle University to study music, then transferred to what is now Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Jones left his studies in 1953 to join Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger. After touring in Europe he worked in the studio bands of CBS and ABC-Paramount, and started his recording career as leader of his own band.
During the 1950s Jones lived in Paris and toured in Europe. He joined Mercury Records, and was appointed vice president of the company in 1961. In the 1960s he wrote film scores and worked as an arranger for Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington.
The 1970s saw Jones continue his success as a record producer before producing the 1982 album Thriller for Michael Jackson, which became the best-selling album in history. His debut as a film producer was The Colour Purple in 1985, which received 11 Academy Award nominations.
Biography by John Rosie
A&R work – It’s dictatorship
In his final interview with Les Tomkins in 1965, Quincy Jones talks about life as a musical producer and how working for a record company “makes you money conscious”.
Read the original article in Crescendo, September 1965, p17.
Quincy Jones: Interview 3
Image Details
| Interview date | 1st January 1965 |
|---|---|
| Interview source | Jazz Professional |
| Image source credit | Tom Pich |
| Image source URL | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wi... |
| Reference number | |
| Forename | Quincy |
| Surname | Jones |
| Quantity | 3 |
Interview Transcription
When you’re on the other side of the booth, as they say, in a recording studio, you are completely at the mercy of whoever’s in control in the booth. Because the A and R man is actually the boss. He’s the last word, and if there’s a discrepancy he gets the benefit of the doubt as to what’s wrong. Most people go along with this, because you have to have a pilot and a director in a thing like recording. There are problems of musical balance, electronic balance, conception, feel, soundeverything. There’s many things that can go wrong.
Being in a studio hearing the dry sound itself, it’s hard to be objective enough to really be able to judge what’s coming through. The A and R man is in the position of being able to hear the overall thing and so that’s why his judgment has to prevail. But many times we were at the mercy of people who were in this position and who, in many ways, weren’t qualified to judge what the overall sound should be like.
There’s a lot of sacrifices you have to make when you become an A and R man—if you’re a musician, anyway but I think the sacrifice justifies itself insomuch as it gives you a certain freedom to do the type of projects the way you want to do them. It’s selfish, in a way.
I don’t know whether it’s the ego or what—but it gives you a chance to use your imagination completely. If you use your imagination only in the music and don’t think of overall packaging it still isn’t complete. This way we have complete control. It’s a dictatorship. Also your concern is to find talent every way possible. They’re brought to you, you go out and look—everything that’s new on the scene you’re aware of it. And in many ways being in that position does stimulate your awareness, because, naturally, you have to look for all the new things that are happening. You have to be right on top of every thing that’s talked about, or that holds a possibility of becoming the “new thing”. You have to feel the pulse of the whole music world.
One of the most important things I’ve found out is that you must also be aware of the acceptance in the business sense. Because working for a record company makes you very business–conscious. This has led me to come to one conclusion—that you shouldn’t record if you don’t want your records to sell. It’s not a thing that you can afford as a luxury.
And to do this there has to be some commercial element. I don’t mean this in a commercial sense of where it has to go along with every fashionable fad that comes along, be it bossa nova, rock’n’roll, folk, or whatever. I think now the commerciality is sincerity. If you do what you think that you like, and do it well—that’s the most commercial position you can be in. Because the public will back this up. Artists must sound almost like they live and sound like they look. It’s an overall thing of where the image has to project a certain thing.
But I wasn’t aware of all these things before, and I used to come up with the usual stupid complaints like: “Man, I went to the record store in Waukeeshaw, Wisconsin, and my three cousins wanted to buy my record and they didn’t even have it in the store.” It’s an artist’s ego that will cause him to say to himself that if success is attained he attained it completely alone, and if not—with a record company, especially—it’s someone else’s fault. This is very, very untrue—and I’m not trying to sound like a company man now, because I’m not. It’s an awakening that I had, and it taught me a lot about what was really happening.
An artist always talks about promotion. If promotion was the only means to an artist’s success, RCA Victor would have a hit with every record they put out, because they have the most money and they can afford the most promotion. It’s not true. And I’ve seen them whip and kick artists to try and push them through, until the seams break. But if it isn’t in the grooves it isn’t going to happen. And many times a little jack–leg B flat label can have a sound, and they can’t even press up 300 copies. But it’s just the sound everybody wants.
