To Absent Friends - Quincy Jones

 

Quincy Jones

1933-2024

Yes, it crossed my mind right away that I would be doing an Absent Friends post on Quincy Jones when I heard of his death at the age of 91 two days ago.  Just what would I have to say about Jones, I wondered, and then I read THIS COLUMN by  Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.   I urge you to click on the link and read it, because, unlike The Grandstander, Gene Robinson is an actual professional columnist, and nothing that I could write about Mr. Jones could eclipse what was written in this column.

But let me say a few things anyway.

You know I love movies.  How about this partial list of movies that Quincy Jones scored:

• In Cold Blood
• In The Heat of the Night
• The Wiz 
• Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
• The Anderson Tapes

And those are just movies that I happen to like.  There are dozens more. When scoring The Wiz in 1978, he got to know a very young Michael Jackson, and that led to a collaboration when Jones produced these albums for Jackson - Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad.  How is that for a Hall of Fame Ballot?

A few weeks ago in THIS SPACE I wrote about watching the documentary "The Greatest Night in Pop" which was about the recording of the song We Are The World in 1985.  Quincy Jones was the driving force behind that recording, and he was the only person who had the ability to make it happen.  From that Gene Robinson column linked above:

Only Jones, the sun in his own musical solar system, could have convened the multitude of performers who assembled in 1985 to record “We Are the World,” an effort to raise funds for African nations suffering famine. What do Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Paul Simon, Dionne Warwick, Lionel Richie, Al Jarreau, Stevie Wonder and Waylon Jennings have in common? They all came to sing, and to take instruction, when Jones asked.

I urge you to go to your Netflix Machine and watch it to gain a fuller appreciation of what a force Quincy Jones was.

RIP Quincy Jones.