Quincy Jones passed away early this morning. I’m not equipped to write anything meaningful about him, so here are some links: notices from the Associated Press, and from Variety.
“I’ve never been bored or lonely in my life. I’m an orchestrator, a musician, a producer. I love everything. I’ve studied languages from Farsi to French. How can you get bored?”
A short video of Jones in the studio with Herbie Hancock, 1984. And a Rolling Stone piece on the making of the “We Are The World” song and video, and another about the Netflix documentary on him.
And famously colorful interviews in GQ, and in Vulture. From that interview— this is really how art works, our whole lives are based on this principle:
“God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money. You could spend a million dollars on a piano part and it won’t make you a million dollars back. That’s just not how it works.”
As a kid I was most aware of his TV music. There’s a lot of forgettable music on TV, even if you heard them a hundred times. A few of them etch themselves in your brain, they’re so well structured. There’s not one wasted note here, everything has a function, everything connects to something else and leads to something else:
And a more trivial item— from Bill Cosby’s first series in 1969-71. I saw it when I was very young, and then when it was syndicated in the late 80s. Jones got screen credit for the song, and that’s when he jumped out at me as someone with whom to look deeper:
See the links for more meaningful stuff. RIP.