Quincy Jones, musician and music mogul

Quincy Jones, who died at the age of 91 in Los Angeles, was an American phenomenon.  He was a competent musician himself and he scored the musical score for many films of artistic merit, including the most successful, ‘The Color Purple’, directed by Steven Spielberg, which had received eight Oscar nominations but did not win any award.

But it is as a music producer, spotter of talent, including Michael Johnson, that Jones became the tycoon, climbing the corporate ladder of record companies, and ending up as a record company owner himself. And Jones who began life as part of the Chicago gangs soon found his genius and solace in music when his father moved to Washington state on the western coast and settled in Seattle.

Jones became a music apprentice and became part of the musical bands of the day before he formed his own band and travelled across the country, and even went over to Europe for some years. He did this in the late 1950s and early 1960s when racism in America was as bad as it ever could be, but he broke into the dress circle of musicians and then of the music business on the sheer strength of his talent.

Most of the obituaries started off by saying that he was the producer of Jackson’s “Thriller”, an album that broke sales records. But Jones was much more than the producer of Jackson’s phenomenal musical fame. He was a man of enormous talent and an impresario par excellence. His concert for US-Africa fund which created the great iconic number, “We Are The World”, which was sung by an ensemble that included Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan and Jackson. Jones displayed the qualities of an extraordinary orchestrator, businessman with a heart of gold.

Given the glaring racial divisions of America, no black man or woman could remain aloof from politics. Jones was impressed by Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement, and later became close to Reverend Jesse Jackson, the Democrat politician who had the makings of an American president but did not reach his potential due to the social dynamics and politics of the time. And Jones was close to liberal Democrat politicians like President Bill Clinton, for whose first inaugural he organised the music.

He was wise enough to be close to politicians and not become a politician himself. He seemed to have known that there are far more important and lasting things to be done than politics. This became evident when he, a conservatory drop-out, set up a chair for music and jazz studies at Harvard University, and set up other foundations for music.

The many-sided genius that he was, Jones was the great musical visionary who had helped produce in every genre of American music, from jazz to hip-hop to rap. He saw the signs of the times and he sensed that crossing boundaries without slipping into feckless fusion was the way to keep the different genres alive, without each cannibalising the other as it were. American music is an example of how the New World created its own musical history and traditions.

Of course, the Gospel music and jazz of the Blacks can be traced back to the African roots, but evolved into a multi-hued treasure of cultural values and riches. It is the singular contribution of Jones to contemporary American music that he felt that no musical genre can exist on its own, and he brought them together under a single recording label and he also brought them together on a single stage. Jones quipped that music and music business are two distinct things. But he combined the two talents in an impressive manner.