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      Quincy Jones: A Life in Photos

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      A musician, bandleader, composer, producer and much more, Quincy Jones, who died at 91 on Sunday in California, led many musical lives. Only supreme talent can explain his accomplishments, but there was another factor, too: a ferocious work ethic.From childhood, he fought to learn the skills that would allow him to build a life in music. He first touched a piano at age 11 after breaking into a recreation center looking for food. Two years later, he persuaded a professional trumpeter to give him lessons every morning before school started.But once he had acquired those musical foundations, he worked to expand the range of his skills at a dizzying speed. Over the decades that followed, Mr. Jones was presented with a steady stream of opportunities — sometimes simultaneously. He embraced them all, turning much of what he touched to gold, and remaking American music along the way in a career that endured for more than five decades.These photographs show Mr. Jones both under and outside the spotlight, often helping other artists bring forth their best work. They also show the public side of him — a musical titan honored for his achievements.PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones and the singer Lesley Gore working in New York on the song “It’s My Party,” which was released in 1963.Franz Hubmann/Imagno, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones leading a band at the Konzerthaus in Vienna in 1960.Gai Terrell/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones guiding a session in a recording studio in 1963.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones and the singer Roberta Flack, circa 1973.A&M Records/ Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones in 1974.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones, left, with Duke Ellington, at the piano, during the recording of the television special “Duke Ellington … We Love You Madly” at the Shubert Theater in Los Angeles in 1973.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesStevie Wonder and Mr. Jones during a recording of the song “Stop, Don’t Pass Go.”G. Paul Burnett/The New York TimesMr. Jones won six Grammy Awards in 1991 for his album “Back on the Block.”URLI/GARCIA and Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones in Paris in 1988.Alain Benainous/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones leading student musicians at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1991.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones and Oprah Winfrey at the 1995 Academy Awards in Los Angeles, where he was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.Associated Press/Associated PressMr. Jones with President Barack Obama in 2011, when Mr. Jones received the National Medal of Arts at the White House.Danny Moloshok/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Jones onstage with Oprah Winfrey at his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013 at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles.Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Jones at a hand and footprint ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theater in Los Angeles in 2018.Damon Winter/The New York TimesMr. Jones in 2013. More

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      Quincy Jones Orchestrated the Sound of America

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      Jones, who died at 91, erased boundaries, connected worlds and embraced delight. As a producer, he coaxed ingenuity from his players and singers.I have this book called “The Complete Quincy Jones,” from 2008. It’s the sort of grand coffee table experience so ephemera loaded that it all but spills out photos and reproductions of letters and sheet music and newspaper clippings and report cards. It’s a book that requires a plan to transport it from a store to your house. Some of this stuff is affixed to the pages, as if Jones, who died on Sunday, had assembled it just for me, even though my name’s nowhere near Oprah Winfrey’s effusive “thank you” note. One of the unglued news items, from a 1989 edition of The International Herald Tribune, has now become a bookmark that reads, inartfully: “Quincy Jones: Black Music’s Bernstein.”It’s a constellatory, celebratory, classy volume, just like the music Jones devoted the majority of his 91 years to. As you make your way through, you realize how ubiquitous this man was. I mean, I knew he was connected. (Maya Angelou writes the preface. The foreword’s by Clint Eastwood, the introduction is by Bono and the afterword belongs to Sidney Poitier.) But not until I sat down with this thing could I truly appreciate something else: what a connector he was, human ligament.That, of course, was also in the music. He played many brasses — sousaphone, trombone, tuba, horns — but settled on the trumpet and quickly became an ace arranger and producer, someone whose brilliance involves having it all figured out. His approach to music involved not simply the erasure of boundaries but an emphasis on confluence, of putting some of this with some of that, and a little of this thing over here. Bossa nova together with jazz, Donna Summer doing Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Van Halen and Michael Jackson. On records, for movies, in concerts, with “We Are the World” and Vibe magazine. Connections.This wasn’t iconoclasm and, officially, it wasn’t civil rights, either. It was vision, curiosity and taste that aligned with civil rights. Jones didn’t want artificial boundaries dictating that vision. So what you hear in all of that music is a little bit of everything — African percussion and R&B rhythm ideas, percolating alongside fur-coat string arrangements and trans-Atlantic flights of falsetto. It sounds like whatever America is supposed to mean. Often, he was orchestrating the sound of America, complicating it while grasping what makes it pop. It’s worth considering how his music opens one of the most-watched television events ever broadcast (“Roots”) and his production is behind the best-selling album ever recorded (“Thriller”). Two titles that nail the depth and sensation of the Quincy Jones experience.Jones, right, at the inauguration of President Clinton in 1993, with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross among the celebrities in attendance.Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis, via VCG, via Getty ImagesBut there’s another, related aspect of that experience, and it’s all over “The Complete Quincy Jones.” In just about every photo, he seems so happy to be wherever he is. Standing next to Hillary Clinton, chatting with Colin Powell, cracking up next to Nelson Mandela, perched beneath a conductor’s podium alongside Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. In one picture he’s got an arm around Sarah Vaughan and the other around Chaka Khan. Elsewhere, he’s planting a kiss on Clarence Avant’s cheek; pressing his cheek into Barbra Streisand’s (she signed that one: “My big ole black butt is sticking out — isn’t it?”; and I’ll just say her dress is dark). A big spread on “The Color Purple,” which he produced and scored, includes a photo of him and Alice Walker, forehead to forehead. Then there’s the intriguing shot of him looking heavenward with Leonard Bernstein at, we’re told, the Sistine Chapel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Robert Treviño, Classical Music Was Never Elitist

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      Robert Treviño, who has drawn acclaim for recent recordings, learned music in public school and wants to break down barriers for others.Classical music’s recording industry may be a shadow of its former self, but sometimes, a bit of light shines through. One of the brightest of late has been Robert Treviño, a Mexican American conductor who has been the music director of the Basque National Orchestra in San Sebastián, Spain, since 2017.Treviño, 40, has drawn acclaim in the past several years for recordings that are carefully prepared, exquisitely rendered and attentively controlled without ever sounding at all cautious. Enthusiastic fanfare greeted two Ravel discs on Ondine that tried to reclaim the composer as fundamentally Basque, and hence subject, as Treviño wrote in a note, to the “gravitational pulls of the Iberian Peninsula and France.”I have particularly admired remarkably sensitive Respighi with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, of which Treviño is currently the principal guest conductor, and a frankly gorgeous survey of Bruch with the Bamberg Symphony on CPO.Most intriguing, and perhaps most revealing of Treviño himself, are “Americascapes,” a pair of bold releases of American music with his Basque ensemble. The first volume smartly explores works by Charles Martin Loeffler, Carl Ruggles, Howard Hanson and Henry Cowell. The second, which was released last Friday, begins with George Walker and ends with Silvestre Revueltas. At its dark heart is an aptly eerie, indeed at times quite ghastly account of George Crumb’s “A Haunted Landscape.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      14 Essential Quincy Jones Songs

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      As a producer, arranger, composer, bandleader and recording artist, he made a powerful mark on nearly every genre he touched. He died Sunday, at 91.Quincy Jones, who died at 91 on Sunday, was a colossus of American music, leaving a profound influence on nearly every genre he touched, from the 1950s on — jazz, funk, soundtracks, syrupy R&B and chart-topping pop.The scope of his career is so vast, it seems almost impossible that it’s the work of a single person. He cut his teeth as a trumpeter in Lionel Hampton’s touring band in the early ’50s, then studied in Paris under the great classical pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He produced jazz albums for Mercury Records, made fast friends with Frank Sinatra — who called him “Q,” a nickname that stuck — and recorded “It’s My Party,” a No. 1 hit by a teenage Lesley Gore.Then came gorgeously textured movie scores, slithery funk and a fantastically successful partnership with Michael Jackson, whose 1982 LP “Thriller,” produced by Jones, is the biggest seller of all time. And it didn’t end there. In 2018 documentary, “Quincy,” Kendrick Lamar, the reigning rap laureate, is seen bumping fists with Jones and crediting him as the inspiration for “combining hip-hop and jazz.”Here is a sampling of some of Jones’s essential work, as a producer, arranger, composer, bandleader and recording artist in his own right.‘Evening in Paris’ (1957)Jones was a jazz journeyman in the 1950s, playing trumpet with Hampton, working at Mercury and putting together his own albums. This gorgeous ballad, from “This Is How I Feel About Jazz,” his standout early LP, was composed by Jones and features an all-star band including Herbie Mann, Zoot Sims, Hank Jones and Charles Mingus.Ray Charles, ‘One Mint Julep’ (1961)Jones and Ray Charles met as teenagers in Seattle in the 1940s, as dramatized in the 2004 film “Ray.” By the time of his big band LP “Genius + Soul = Jazz,” Charles was a giant who seemed to remake American music with every step. Jones arranged half the tracks on the album, including “One Mint Julep,” a hot and swinging instrumental take on the Clovers’ original that Charles — leading from the organ — made a Top 10 hit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Quincy Jones, Giant of American Music, Dies at 91

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      As a producer, he made the best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” He was also a prolific arranger and composer of film music.Quincy Jones, one of the most powerful forces in American popular music for more than half a century, died on Sunday in California. He was 91.His death was confirmed in a statement by his publicist, Arnold Robinson, that did not mention a cause. The statement said that he had died peacefully at his home in Bel Air.Mr. Jones began his career as a jazz trumpeter and was later in great demand as an arranger, writing for the big bands of Count Basie and others; as a composer of film music; and as a record producer. But he may have made his most lasting mark by doing what some believe to be equally important in the ground-level history of an art form: the work of connecting.Beyond his hands-on work with score paper, he organized, charmed, persuaded, hired and validated. Starting in the late 1950s, he took social and professional mobility to a new level in Black popular art, eventually creating the conditions for a great deal of music to flow between styles, outlets and markets. And all of that could be said of him even if he had not produced Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the best-selling album of all time.Mr. Jones’s music has been sampled and reused hundreds of times, through all stages of hip-hop and for the theme to the “Austin Powers” films (his “Soul Bossa Nova,” from 1962). He has the third-highest total of Grammy Awards won by a single person — he was nominated 80 times and won 28. (Beyoncé’s 32 wins is the highest total; Georg Solti is second with 31.) He was given honorary degrees by Harvard, Princeton, Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, the Berklee School of Music and many other institutions, as well as a National Medal of Arts and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master fellowship.His success — as his colleague in arranging, Benny Carter, is said to have remarked — may have overshadowed his talent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Anitta Mesmerizes the Weeknd, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks from Ethel Cain, the Black Keys featuring Beck, Ilham and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.The Weeknd featuring Anitta, ‘São Paulo’The Weeknd gets top billing on “São Paulo,” but the song is defined by its Brazilian funk-style synthesizer riff and a hook that Anitta borrowed (with credit) from the Brazilian funk singer Tati Quebra Barraco. Anitta chants about her irresistible body (and dominates the version edited for video), while the full song gives the Weeknd ample time to bemoan how thoroughly he’s in her thrall.Champion, Four Tet, Skrillex and Naisha, ‘Talk to Me’Three top producers concocted the sparse beat and boinging riff that accompany a nearly weightless melody from the Indian singer Naisha Bhargabi. She sings and raps in Hindi about solitude and self-sufficiency — “My nights are by myself alone, never lonely.” But she switches to English for the simple invitation to “talk to me.”The Black Keys featuring Beck, ‘I’m With the Band’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yeat’s Chart Topper and Rage Rap’s New Wave

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music“Lyfestyle,” the latest album from the 24-year-old rapper Yeat, recently debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart. It was the biggest success yet for an artist who’s been gaining popularity while studiously avoiding the spotlight, and whose music is legible to his most devoted fans and students, but maybe not far outside that tent.Yeat is one of the most visible exponents of this generation of rage rap — music that’s almost industrial in texture and inscrutable in lyrics, but inspires fervent fandom and dynamic live shows. (Others include Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely, both protégés of the Atlanta psych-punk star Playboi Carti.) This generation writ large is indebted to Future, Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert and the rock-star hip-hop surrealists of the 2010s. And coming up now is a post-Yeat generation of genre-breakers including Nettspend, 2hollis, Lazer Dim 700 and more.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how hip-hop’s splintering has helped popularize its less lyrical wings, how the pandemic was a boon for artists who wanted to lean in to personal mystery, and whether in a few years, all rap will be rage rap.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      How Robert Smith of the Cure Became Rock’s Most Dogged Activist

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      At Brighton Electric, a warren of rock rehearsal spaces in an old brick tram depot in this English seaside town, young guitar luggers stream in and out while the thudding jams of baby bands reverberate throughout the building.But a corridor in the back leads to a spacious, gear-crammed private studio occupied by the Cure — the multiplatinum band that defined a gloomy strand of British post-punk, and scored international hits with spiky confections like “Friday I’m in Love.” On a recent Sunday evening, the band was gathered to prepare for promotional gigs supporting “Songs of a Lost World,” its first studio album in 16 years, due Friday.Seated beside his guitar rig was Robert Smith, the group’s leader, explaining his reluctance in recent years do an interview. “I don’t really want my head to be drawn back into this idea that I’m ‘Robert Smith of the Cure,’” he said, raising a blue-shadowed brow. “It just doesn’t suit me anymore.”Robert Smith onstage in 1989. The Cure’s latest release, “Songs of a Lost World,” is its first studio album in 16 years.Pete Still/Redferns, via Getty ImagesYet at 65, he is still unmistakable as Robert Smith of the Cure, dressed all in black, with a smear of lipstick and his signature tangled mop of dark hair, now a shade of ash. At the Cure’s commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, he was a dandy prince of the alternative scene, his disheveled haystack inspiring not just a look but also an entire indie-kid personality type — the lovesick goth — while the band charted a path through melancholic angst (“Boys Don’t Cry”), danceable ear candy (“Just Like Heaven”) and an expansive, moody neo-psychedelia (“Pictures of You”) that made it a model for generations of artists.Inducting the Cure into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails said that Smith had used his “singular vision to create that rarest of things — a completely self-contained world with its own sound, its own look, its own vibe, its own aesthetic, its own rules.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More