THE LATE QUINCY JONES, A MAN OF MANY TALENTS:

The death of Quincy Jones, at the considerable age of ninety-one, represents not just the passing of a great American musical icon, but the departure of a truly remarkable man from the stage. The winner of an astounding twenty-eight Grammy awards, he excelled in so many different areas of music — from record production and film soundtrack composition to big band jazz and multi-instrumental playing — that it would not have been particularly surprising to discover that he had written operas or symphonies on his days off. That he accomplished endless feats over his seventy-five-year career, which included playing with everyone from Billie Holiday and Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, was almost taken for granted in his lifetime, but now that he has quit us, it is only appropriate to acknowledge just what an astonishing figure Jones really was.

There is an irony in his highest-profile achievement being as a producer, rather than a performer or composer in his own right, and that his work on Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Off The Wall and Bad turned Jackson into the most successful pop star that there had ever been. Even after all the endless (and often justified) controversy that involved Jackson, Jones’s peerless work on these multi-million selling albums, including steering Jackson to the most lucrative record of all time, in the form of Thriller, will deservedly be remembered as long as albums are bought. It made Jones an extremely rich man, and gave him the luxury of only pursuing projects that he wished to take on for the remainder of his life and career: these included everything from a self-parodying cameo in Austin Powers in Goldmember as himself to recording the score for Spielberg’s film The Color Purple.

We forget that the record industry was in a pre-MTV sales slump when Jones began work on Jackson’s Thriller. He had quite a brief for his engineers at the beginning of the project, telling them, “OK guys, we’re here to save the recorded music industry.” Mission accomplished!