Throughout Quincy, Jones’ musical ambitions are frequently endangered by pervasive racism. Jones studied with a titan of classical music. Jones went on to arrange for Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles, working with nearly every jazz star of the decade. (According to his autobiography, they also had a brief romantic affair.) “Dinah said, ‘I want you to write my next record.’ Her label, Mercury Records, said, ‘Nope, we want a name.’ Dinah said, ‘Here’s a name for your ass: Dinah Washington with Quincy Jones as an arranger.’ The record was a big success. “She became a great friend to me,” Jones says. But it was Washington, one of the most popular jazz-meets-pop singers of the 1950s, whom he credits with jump-starting his career.
Jones had already befriended Ray Charles and toured with Lionel Hampton, who “had the rockingest band in America,” when he settled in New York and started writing arrangements for $12 a pop. Jones got his first big break from the Queen of the Jukebox. “To know where you came from makes it easier for you to get where you’re going,” he says solemnly. He also has a scar from being hit with an ice pick. “I went on the wrong street and they nailed my hand to a fence with a switch blade at seven years old,” Jones says. In that environment, he was exposed to brutal violence. “You want to be what you see, and that’s all I saw.”
“I wanted to be a gangster until I was 11,” Jones recalls. Jones was born in Chicago, where his father worked as a carpenter for a local gang known as the Jones Boys. That idea feels like a guiding principle in Jones’ career as he works with Ella Fitzgerald and Lesley Gore, string players and rappers, grizzled veterans and fresh-faced youngsters. Ellington was famous for composing music that reached across genre lines, changing the shape of popular music and reaching a wide audience as he did so.
In terms of Quincy‘s pacing, this tidbit might work best near the introduction to the documentary rather than somewhere in the middle it serves as a uniting theme that brings together all of Jones’ disparate projects. Duke Ellington instructed Jones to “de-categorize American music.”
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