He was doing a free Q&A session on Saturday afternoon at the Guitar Center in Hollywood, and I had the chance to attend it. May be the thing hadn’t been advertised too much, since I managed to get a good seat, despite the fact I was running late.
It’s weird to be face to face with a legend, although the legend shows a little bit his age, well, he is now 77. Wearing a hat and a multicolor scarf, he was helped by Nic Harcourt, Santa Monica radio KCRW’s music director, to get up on stage for a long interview, in front of a public mostly composed of musicians from what I was hearing around me.
Long? Yeah, Quincy is definitively a talker, he can go on and on just to answer a simple question, wandering into his maze of memories, narrating every anecdote he can remember about, and not necessarily answering the question. But people listen because he had a full long life and every detail seems fascinating.
His life is not over though, he has just released a new album ‘Soul Bossa Nostra’ a collection of newly recorded versions of songs with an impressive guest list, and, last summer, a book ‘The Quincy Jones Legacy Series: Q on Producing’ which were both for sale at the Q&A.
‘What makes a great song?’ asked Nic Harcourt for his first question. ‘God’ answered Quincy, and when I began rolling my eyes, he developed what he meant, because he is not someone that comes up with short answer like this one, and after venturing a little bit too much into his youth he got to the point. ‘The left and the right parts of the brain, emotion and science!’, ‘Science?’, ‘Yes, learning the craft, learning how to read music, I felt in love with orchestration when I was 13, and studying orchestration is part science, part personal,… but the melody comes from God, a connection with the divine element,… a great song is when you have great lyrics and a great melody, but the melody is first.’
He talks a lot about his childhood, how he started picking up the trumpet, and learning piano after school, because he was told he was born to do this, and knew that was what he wanted to do.
‘How did you know?’ asked Nic, ‘I don’t know, I just knew!’
That must have been God again, but if Quincy Jones sees music like a sort of divine revelation, he is smart enough to know you have to work your ass off to succeed. And he drops formulas like old wise Yoda (actually he looked a little bit like the fictional character), saying during the talk ‘I learnt early on why we have TWO ears and ONE mouth’, or ‘Life has hills and valleys, and valleys are the best way to find who you are’.
Nic Harcourt asked him several times about composing for a movie, and how it was different from song composition, but once again Quincy was too eager to tell anecdotes and realizing after a while he hadn’t answered the question, he said something like ‘There are brackets, but so many elements are involved for a movie, and a piece of music must cover all the dramatic aspects’.
Quincy also drops names faster than light, as he knows everyone dead or alive in the business, and he is hard to follow, often giving only the first name of the person, so you end up most of the time wondering who the hell is he talking about now? Louis, Ray, yeah, I got those ones.
He went back many times to his hard beginning, when segregation was the awful rule, and when white kids could only listen to Patti Page’s ‘How much is that Doggie in the Window’, whereas Rock’ n’ Roll was played in black neighborhoods. ‘They had to protect America’ said Nic jokingly, ‘Well they lost!’ laughed Quincy.
Very early on, at 19, he was already a traveler, and he praised this early habit, saying how much he has learnt from it, listening to the music of the country, eating the local food and speaking the language. ‘Everybody everywhere knows about American Music,… except Americans!’ deploring the lack of musical education in the US, and the fact that many schools have cut it from their curriculum.
It is not the case in Cuba, where he discovered Alfredo Rodriguez, a brilliant pianist and his new protégé he brought with him at the Q&A. ‘He knows everything, everybody!’ citing obscure composers with Polish sounding names I had never heard about.
Quincy also talked about changes in the business, he has known the time when the mafia owned the liquor companies and the night clubs, but today, the business is different and he said that dues are paid with things like Russell Simmons’ Phat farm and P Diddy’s clothing line, … he will recognize later he is himself involved with AKG headphones.
‘We did not know we could sell vodka and perfumes in our time!’ yes, he drops names once again, but that’s all right, he likes everyone, and the rappers? He likes them too, ‘They could revolutionize education’ he said, ‘if they would change the content!’
Nic Harcourt also asked him about his approach when producing an artist. ‘Love and trust are the two components of what makes it happens!’ he answered, for once going directly to the point. ‘The priority is that you have to know and love the artist, to be fully aware of what’s going on’.
‘But you have to be a trained musician’, going back to the ‘science’ aspect of the game, ‘And, you know, if the tempo is too fast or too slow, it’s the producer’s fault, if it’s a hit, it’s the artist’s merit!’ But he also insists on the quality of the material as ‘a great song would still make the worst singer sound great, and a bad song cannot be saved by the greatest singer’… well I’m not that sure of this, but if Quincy Jones says so!
The Q&A was almost finished, and Michael Jackson’s name had hardly been pronounced, whereas, after all, Quincy is best known as the producer of ‘Thriller’ by the king of pop. At last, Nic asked him about the famous album, ‘Did you know it would be a game change when you were making it?’, ‘Noooooo! You don’t know when you make it!’ Then Quincy Jones talked about the making of the album, the unbelievable work ethic of Michael Jackson, how he changed the intro of ‘Billie Jean’ which he was judging too long (but not Michael who was only thinking about dancing!), and how they finally picked 9 songs among,… 800! I don’t know if this number is real, but this is what he said.
‘At that time MTV would not play black music!’ something that would seem unbelievable today if MTV was still playing music. But yes, this was definitively a game change for everyone.
The two men talked a little bit about the making of ‘We are the world’, another big event in Quincy’s career, but like for Michael Jackson, they avoided the controversial stuff, they did not talk about the end of Jackson’s career, nor about his death, and did not go too much into the fact that the sign pinned at the door ‘Please check your egos at the door’ was not completely respected by the all-star ensemble of ‘We are the world’.
I wanted more controversy! I wanted a question about Kanye West whom Quincy had recently qualified of ‘just a rapper’, I wanted more questions about this kind of stuff, but the conversation never left the dignified side.
In the last part of the Q&A, both men talke
d about the future of music, a very hot subject these days. And Quincy dropped a bomb, or hardly a bomb, because we have heard this so many times before: ‘In 10 months or a year, all record companies will be finished.’ Still the public reacted with ooohs and aaahs. Quincy continued, ‘It’s a very interesting transition, … the soul wants to be closer to the creator,… the new technology will blow your mind!’
‘How will musicians make money?’ inquired Nic, ‘We are all trying to figure it out, cell phones will be part of the solution’ said Quincy, ‘Yes, I have noticed that in China nobody is buying music anymore’ replied Nic who visited China recently, ‘Nowhere! Not in the Middle East, nowhere!’
So will we all download songs from our cell phone very soon? And how will it change the problem?
These questions were still pending when Quincy introduced his new protégé Alfredo Rodriguez who brilliantly played several piano compositions, which may have been improvisations or crazy compositions? He had this unique way to play with one arm inside the piano, getting the weirdest dry noise out of the instrument:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JllXzHJAz4M