Remembering the Rare and Extraordinary Life of Quincy Jones
Quincy Jones at the 1983 Berklee commencement ceremony, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate.
Image courtesy of the Berklee Archives
What do Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, and Jacob Collier have in common? They all have Quincy Jones ’51 ’83H to thank for playing a part in their rise to fame. They are three of countless others. In many ways, his life could be arranged as a film montage, revealing his presence at a host of major moments in American history.
Picture it:
| There he is at age 14 introducing himself to his 16-year-old schoolmate Ray Charles at the Black Elks Club in Seattle. |
| Moving across the country on a scholarship to attend Schillinger House (which would later become Berklee College of Music). |
| Joining Lionel Hampton's band at age 20, where Monks Montgomery was given—by Leo Fender himself—one of the first electric basses. |
| Playing second trumpet on “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis Presley’s first six television performances in 1956. |
| A year later moving to Paris to study with composer Nadia Boulanger, who would go on to teach the preeminent minimalist composer Philip Glass. |
And this is all before he turns 30, let alone all that was to become an unmatched career of influence in music, film, television, philanthropy, and beyond, that garnered innumerable accolades, inculding 28 Grammys—the third most amount of wins ever.
An undated photo of Jones during his time as a Berklee student.
Image courtesy of the Berklee Archives
If Jones had stuck to just one creative path out of the countless trails he blazed throughout his 91 years, he would still be a legend. But his curiosity and ambitions were endless and unbound by genre. In what nowadays we’d call a “growth mindset,” Jones saw his career as one of constant evolution, not a series of sector pivots. As he described it to Mark Small, founder and former editor of Berklee Today, in the spring 1995 issue of the magazine, “It was an expansion. I didn't shift gears; I just went into another territory.”
Terri Lyne Carrington, founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice was the house drummer for Jones's late-night TV show Vibe, and says that "his ability to weave between genres and his pure passion about good music, no matter the style, as well the ability to remain relevant through many musical trends, will always make him a role model for me and shoulders to stand on."
As an advocate for Black culture, he was a force. He was the first African American to gain an upper-level executive position at a music label (as vice president of Mercury Records) as well as to score a major motion picture (for Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film The Pawnbroker). He helmed production credits for a large portion Michael Jackson’s imperial era, including Thriller, which remains the best-selling album of all time. Jones had prominent roles in the making of the TV series Roots (1977), the musical The Wiz (1978), and the film The Color Purple (1985), all of which have become landmarks for centering Black history and experiences in American visual media.
I wouldn't trade the time that I got on earth for anything—it was just right.
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From big band to bebop, R&B to hip-hop, classical to pop, Jones was an early adopter and innovator, where many at the time saw these genres as independent of each other. “Everybody keeps getting hung up with categories,” he told Small in 1995. “Black music feels like a music that is a voice of the whole people, so it will jump around to different sources at various times—from rhythm and blues to delta blues, or jazz. . . . It is always going to be very vital to what is going on.”
Jones’s ties with Berklee only strengthened in the decades after he attended as a student. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1983 and made countless visits to campus over the years. Former Berklee President Roger H. Brown, who got know Jones over the years, says that "Quincy loved to talk about the larger world. 'If you wanna know, you gotta go,' he would say, meaning, you have to travel, understand other cultures and transcend the artificial boundaries that keep us divided. His life was like his music and reflected his voracious appetite for experience, innovation and connection." He was a global ambassador for the Board of Trustees, and through one of his organizations, the Quincy Jones Musiq Consortium, he partnered with Berklee City Music, where he also served as the national honorary ambassador.
“I wouldn't trade the time that I got on earth for anything—it was just right,” he told Berklee Today. “I've felt and experienced a lot of different attitudes and eras. I thank God for it.”
Take a listen to just a small sample of the wide-ranging music that Jones created, produced, arranged, or composed over the course of his legendary career in the following playlist:
