Jones, Quincy

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    Quincy Jones Receives Posthumous Oscar, and Daughter Gives His Speech

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    At the Governors Awards, Rashida Jones spoke on behalf of her father, who died earlier this month at the age of 91.Before his death two weeks ago, the musician and producer Quincy Jones wrote a speech he intended to deliver at the Governors Awards, where he would receive an honorary Oscar at the ceremony created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.On Sunday night in Hollywood, his actress daughter Rashida Jones delivered that speech on his behalf before a rapt audience.“As a teenager growing up in Seattle, I would sit for hours in the theater and dream about composing for films,” she said while channeling her father, who was a Black trailblazer in Hollywood: “When I was a young film composer, you didn’t even see faces of color working in the studio commissaries.”Nominated seven times, Jones was given a different honorary Oscar — the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award — in 1995, back when these awards were still part of the televised Oscar broadcast. To shorten that show, the honorary awards were spun off into their own event in 2009.“He has so many friends in this room,” said Rashida Jones, center, of her father, Quincy Jones.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThough the Governors Awards are not televised, they still attract an A-list crowd that rivals any major ceremony. An early stop on the awards-season circuit, the event offers plenty of unfettered face time with Oscar voters during its cocktail hour and post-dinner break and serves as the season’s starriest schmoozefest.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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      Remembering Quincy Jones, a Bridge Between Genres and Generations

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicEarly this month, Quincy Jones, one of the most influential and creative forces in American pop music history, died at 91. The scope of his success almost defies comprehension — his work began in the 1950s and continued all the way up through recent years. He produced the most important Michael Jackson albums, and also Frank Sinatra, and also “We Are the World.” He won 28 Grammys. Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Usher, the Weeknd, Lionel Hampton, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,”: He crossed paths with all of them, and more.His broad reach was a byproduct of his musical facilities, as well as his social adeptness and ability to bridge worlds, scenes and audiences with a combination of the two. It’s a scale of influence unlikely to be matched by anyone else.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Jones’s long and unique career, how he bridged musical styles and generations, his willingness to share stories and the role of long-form journalism in the social media age.Guest:David Marchese, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and co-host of The Interview podcastConnect 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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      9 Great Songs That Mention Baseball Stars

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      The playlist to get you through Major League Baseball’s long offseason.Bad Bunny has frequently mentioned baseball players in his songs.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,I’m back! A big thank you to Jon Caramanica, Marc Tracy and Dave Renard, the three guest playlisters who filled in for me while I took a few weeks off. The Amplifier returns to its regular schedule today, though, just in time for … I don’t know, anything important going on this week?Ah, yes, of course! It’s the first official week of Major League Baseball’s off-season.The M.L.B. playoffs were particularly thrilling this year, and for a moment it looked like we might get a New York miracle: a Subway World Series. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Despite deep postseason runs from the Yankees and my beloved Mets, the Los Angeles Dodgers ultimately prevailed and won it all. At least we Mets fans got to see The Temptations serenade Citi Field with the shortstop Francisco Lindor’s beloved walk-up song, “My Girl.”Those two great American pastimes, baseball and pop music, have long gone hand in hand. (Or is it hand in glove?) In honor of another great season in the books, today’s playlist is a collection of just a few of the many songs that refer to great ballplayers, with era-spanning tunes from The Treniers’ novelty hit about Willie Mays up through Bad Bunny’s many recent shout-outs to modern superstars. You’ll also hear tracks from the Beastie Boys, Faye Webster and Belle and Sebastian, among others.You certainly don’t have to know anything about baseball to enjoy this playlist. If you’re a fan, though, I hope it helps you endure the long offseason drought. When times get difficult, just remember: Pitchers and catchers report in mid-February.Life outside the diamond is a wrench,LindsayListen along while you read.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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      When Quincy Jones Worked With Michael Jackson, ‘We Had No Limitations’

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      Their work on “Off the Wall,” “Thriller,” and “Bad” set records for commercial success and defined the sound of the 1980s.Quincy Jones first met Michael Jackson in the early 1970s at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house in Los Angeles, when the 12-year-old was still a bubble-gum soul singer leading his brothers in the Jackson 5.Jones and Jackson’s second meeting, at the end of that decade, proved the more pivotal, both for them and for the future of pop music. Jackson landed a role as Scarecrow in “The Wiz”; Jones had been hired as the music supervisor for the film.What came next cemented one of the most celebrated musical relationships of all time. The pairing of Jones, a noted composer, arranger and producer for jazz and R&B acts, and Jackson, the child star looking for a breakout sound, over three albums remains a career-defining arc that transformed pop music in the 1980s.Jones, who died Sunday at 91, spoke extensively about his working relationship with Jackson, telling The New York Times in a 2012 interview, “You’re looking at one of the most talented kids in the history of show business. Michael was very observant and detail-oriented. You put that together with my background of big-band arranging and composing, we had no limitations.”From left, Jackson, Diana Ross and Jones worked together on the 1978 film “The Wiz.”CBS, via Getty ImagesWith “Off the Wall,” Jackson’s solo debut released in 1979, Jones called on his wide-ranging network of studio musicians and collaborators, notably recruiting Rod Temperton from the band Heatwave to write songs for the album, including “Rock With You,” and “Burn This Disco Out.” “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” the single that established the album’s polished disco grooves, won Jackson his first solo Grammy for best male R&B vocal performance.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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      How Quincy Jones Brought Pop’s Greats to the Studio: Eddie Van Halen, Bob Dylan and More

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      For decades, he had many of the pop world’s best players on call — and knew how to coax out their sharpest performances.“Quincy called me.”That is the opening line of the best stories told by some of the best musicians in the world over the last half-century or so, as they recount being recruited for recording sessions by Quincy Jones, the super-producer whose work was often as much a matter of casting as of capturing sounds on tape.Eddie Van Halen got the call one day in 1982, to add a pyrotechnic guitar solo to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” He declined credit for it, but after Jackson’s death in 2009, Van Halen said that session was one of the “fondest memories in my career.”Greg Phillinganes, the synthesizer virtuoso who began his career with Stevie Wonder, got many such calls as an in-demand session player, working on Jones-helmed albums by Jackson, Donna Summer and James Ingram, among others.“By virtue of getting a call,” Phillinganes recalled this week, “that was the endorsement that you were worthy of being there” — an induction into an elite circle that included both big stars and supremely skilled but lesser-known musicians, each chosen with intention by Jones for what they could bring to a project.Jones, who died on Sunday at 91, was the master of a nearly vanished mode of record-making that relied on groups of talented musicians working under the finely attuned ear of a producer. For decades, he had many of the pop world’s best players on call, and — in what could be a career-making enlistment or just the umpteenth studio gig — would hire them to spice up a track with a guitar lick, or smooth its contours with a synthesizer part, or ground it with just the right beat.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: 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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      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