“He’s a winner ’cause it’s in his blood
Ain’t nobody who’s out there like him
Any corner in the neighborhood
That’s the place that you’ll always find him…” — “The Dude”
By any standards it would have been the end of a remarkable run. Quincy Jones released Sounds…and Stuff Like That in the summer of 1978. The album was the bookend to a series of albums where Jones refined his marriage of Jazz, Soul, Gospel and R&B. The title track and lead single with Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, and Chaka Khan singing lead vocals, was a concession to a marketplace that seemed to be passing Jones by. Yet Jones was only catching his breath; over the next three years, Jones would produce three albums (including his own) that would define the trajectory of Black Pop for generations.
In the 1950s Quincy Jones was a middling trumpet player in an era that saw Miles Davis, Donald Byrd, Art Farmer, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard, among others, take flight. Jones found his voice in arranging, and eventually producing. And if his talent for musical arrangement made his genius legible, it was only matched by his singular ability to arrange talent. Jones’s recordings were not quite the finishing school that was Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, but he had this innate ability to provide a bigger platform for geniuses, in their own right, who were struggling on the margins.
Jones worked in the C-Suite at Mercury Records in the 1960s and produced records for artists like Dinah Washington and Lesley Gore, as well as his own Big Band recordings and more than a dozen film soundtracks, including In the Heat of the Night. In the late 1960s, Jones moved to the fledgling A&M Records, co-founded by Herb Alpert of Tijuana Brass fame. Jones later launched his boutique label Qwest Records out of A&M’s shop. It was on those first A&M albums, Walking in Space (1969), Gula Matari (1970) and Smackwater Jack (1971) that Jones would begin to curate the “Quincy Jones Sound.”
Bob James, Valerie Simpson, flutist Hubert Laws, and guitarist Eric Gale are among the rising stars that appear on those first A&M albums alongside veterans like Freddie Hubbard, Jimmy Smith, Grady Tate, Milt Jackson, Ron Carter, and Herbie Hancock. Even then, no one in the industry had the social capital to bring together such an extraordinary group of musicians. The Quincy Jones sound was the collaborative sound of genius; the genius of community, in which Jones willingly submitted his own sense of self, to shout out fellow musician and arranger, Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. for the beauty of the collective.
Ironically, And…Stuff Like That was released four years after Jones suffered two aneurysms that should have killed him. Jones reflected years later that his health challenges were a sign for him to slow down, but in the 18 months before the release of And…Stuff Like That, Jones provided the score and produced the soundtrack for the groundbreaking television mini-series Roots, and served as the musical supervisor and producer for The Wiz, the cinematic adaptation of the stage musical that was itself an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, featuring an all-Black cast. It was during the production of The Wiz that Jones first worked with Michael Jackson aka “The Scarecrow.”
Now in his mid-forties, Jones might have been looking for another challenge when he agreed to produce the album that became Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. For all of his success in the music industry, Jones had yet to produce a signature album with a singular artist. Even his most iconic outing to date, Count Basie and Frank Sinatra’s It Might as Well Be Swing (1964), was produced by Sonny Burke, with Jones handling the arrangements. At his peak Sinatra had Nelson Riddle as his arranger and producer; Jones had yet to find his “Sinatra”.
In might have happened in 1973, when Aretha Franklin sought to move out of the comfort zone of Jerry Wexler, seeking out Quincy to produce (they co-produced) Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky). The album remains one of Franklin’s most adventurous — she was at her vocal peak — though it was the weakest, commercially, of her Atlantic albums to that point. With Franklin taking melodic and phrasing license — and perhaps her best piano solo — with the Bernstein and Sondheim classic “Somewhere” and her interpretation of Bobby Womack’s “That’s the Way I Feel About Cha”, Hey Now Hey offered insight into the future of Quincy Jones music, notably on the breathtaking Body Heat (1974).
Whereas Franklin was a seasoned and generational talent when Jones worked with her, Michael Jackson was a teenager, whose best years, many believed, were well behind him. Perhaps “You Can’t Win,” Jackson’s most iconic moment from The Wiz, convinced Jones, who also had his eye on a young Luther Vandross, who contributed the song “A Brand New Day (Everybody Rejoice)”, that Jackson might be his “Sinatra”. He certainly seemed to think Jackson was the future, enlisting the songwriting talents of Paul McCartney (“Girlfriend”) and Stevie Wonder (“I Can’t Help It”) for Jackson’s reboot of his solo career. Yet the most important recruit was a relatively unknown British keyboardist and songwriter Rod Temperton, whose claim to fame at that point was writing a first-generation Quiet Storm classic with Heatwave’s “Always and Forever.” It was Temperton’s pen that wrote “Rock with You”, which along with the Jackson penned “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” topped the Pop Charts.
Off the Wall was a template for the Black crossover sound of the early 1980s, and Jones doubled down on that point when he went into the studio (with Rod Temperton) to produce George Benson the following year. Benson, a guitar virtuoso and heir-apparent to Wes Montgomery, broke through commercially years earlier with the surprising Breezin’ (1976), which sold three million copies and achieved the chart trifecta of topping the Pop, R&B, and Jazz charts.
Breezin’ was anchored by “This Masquerade” which featured Benson’s solid, though supple, vocals, and a style seemingly drawn from the Quincy Jones playbook; Benson’s pairing with Jones seemed natural, if not inevitable. Benson had craved the pop stage as a singer since the earliest day of his career. But Benson wasn’t a twenty-something, Michael Jackson; he was more comfortable playing his guitar on a stool, than he ever would be doing choreographed dance steps on stage.
Temperton contributed four tracks, including the singles “Love X Love”, “Turn on Your Lamplight” (reprised from Heatwave), and the title track. In the lead single and title track “Give Me the Night”, one can hear the production strategies that Jones deployed on Jackson’s “Off the Wall” and “Rock with You”; this is George Benson singing Michael Jackson’s music for the grown and sexy. “Give Me the Night” was Benson’s first single to top the R&B charts, and the highest charting Pop single, peaking at #4.
And yet, beginning with that cold opening, Jones provided ample space for Benson to do what he did best — just listen to the song’s break, and thereafter, where Benson could have played on for another five minutes. Jones particularly created a compelling environment for the musical interplay between Benson’s guitar and his voice, with “Love X Love” (a personal favorite), being the most resonant example. Give Me the Night received four Grammys: Benson for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Male for “Moody’s Mood for Love,” and his instrumental “Off Broadway” received Best R&B Instrumental Performance; Jones and Jerry Hey earned a Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement.
A month after Jones’ Grammy successes with Benson, he released his album The Dude, which would be nominated for 12 Grammys the following year, winning three. Like so many of Jones’ records from the previous decade, he was able to draw on a wide circle; Stevie Wonder contributed “Betcha Wouldn’t Hurt Me”, which was a platform for Jones’ god-daughter Patti Austin, and one of the album’s five singles. Austin is also featured on the Temperton-penned single “Razzamatazz,” who composed and did vocal arrangements of four of the album’s tracks.
It was the presence of James Ingram that took The Dude to another level. Jones’ success with Jackson notwithstanding (Thriller was released the next year), it was Ingram who became Jones’ “Sinatra”. The two highest charting singles from The Dude, “One Hundred Ways” and “Just Once” (written by the Pop tandem of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil), both featured James Ingram on lead vocals. Ingram’s performance of “Just Once” was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Male Vocalist, while “One Hundred Ways” won the Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Male Vocalist. A year later, Ingram and Austin joined vocals on Rod Temperton’s “Baby Come to Me” (produced by Jones), which topped the Pop Charts on the strength of the song’s placement in the “Luke and Laura” storyline on the soap opera General Hospital.
Though conventional thinking reads Quincy Jones work with Michael Jackson as the apex of his career, in many ways it is more apt to describe Thriller and certainly Bad, as the coda for a career that remains unmatched. Which is not to say that Jones didn’t continue to work, helping to orchestrate, literally and figuratively, the recording of “We Are the Word” (1985) and producing the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple with Steven Spielberg and others.
Jones’ Back on the Block (1989), featured nearly 50 years of Black performers including Jazz vocalists Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald (their last recordings), an A-list of rap artists including Big Daddy Kane, Kool Moe Dee, and Melle Mel, two generations of collaborators in Ray Charles and Chaka Khan, who share lead vocals on a remake of The Brothers Johnson’s “I’ll Be Good to You”, and finally Tevin Campbell, on his debut recording “Tomorrow (A Better You, Better Me)” — all of which only scratches the surface of all the talent that Jones collected. The album fittingly closes with a Quiet Storm track for the ages, “The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite),” featuring Barry White, James Ingram, El DeBarge and Al B. Sure.
Jones was clearly the elder statesman when he returned to the well with Q’s Jook Joint — Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles joined Bono on the Louis Jordan classic “Let the Good Times Roll” — which conceptually looks back to the role of Black music in the social fabric of Black life. Like Tevin Campbell five years earlier and James Ingram in the early 1980s, Q’s Jook Joint on-boarded the career of Tamia with “You Put a Move on My Heart”.
By the time of Jones’ last studio album Q: Soul Bossa Nostra (2010), a tribute album that featured contemporary R&B, Gospel and Hip-Hop artists with mixed results, he was settling into his role as the uncle who knew too much and had long lost his filter. It was a measure of how much the industry had changed that the press spent more time on Jones lurid tales, than recording his thoughts about the broad history of the music. Jones left a treasure trove of information, befitting the person who was Black Culture’s “Institutional Memory; there is surely no one alive who can replace him in that role. In that regard the music speaks for itself, and Off the Wall, Give Me the Night and The Dude are the best places to begin the conversation.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Mark Anthony Neal's work on Medium.