Quincy Jones started out his career in music as a teenaged trumpet player. And while Jones would have had an important place in music even if he’d only played trumpet and nothing else, it was Quincy Jones’ emerging talents in composing, producing, and arranging that made the man a legend in the music industry. He became the man behind the scenes who made music happen.
Quincy Jones always had a love of music. With a mentally ill mother in and out of mental hospitals, Jones counted on creating music to get him through. He had his first real contact the piano at age 11, when, working on the Army base, he and some friends broke into a recreation room. When Quincy Jones touched that rec room piano for the first time, he says that “every cell in my body said this is what you will do for the rest of your life.”
And it was. Quincy Jones created a relationship with that piano, teaching himself popular songs and composing new ones even before learning a thing about the technical aspects of music. And when he heard a barber in town playing the trumpet soon afterwards, he fell in love. He was determined to play one himself.
So began his life in the nightclubs of Seattle. After the war, Quincy Jones started sneaking into clubs to watch the jazz greats: Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and others. These men must have seen something in Quincy Jones, because Count Basie took Jones under his wing when he was just a 13 year old boy, and Basie’s trumpeter, Clark Terry, began to give the boy music lessons. And history was made.
During the 1950s, Quincy Jones was constantly on tour. Working with Lionel Hampton, he traveled and toured over Europe and South America, learning something new and incorporating new sounds from every place he visited. He loved traveling so much that, in 1959, he put together a band to tour Europe. Violence in Paris put the tour to an end, but Quincy Jones just kept on-- the band played for almost a year, and instead of making money, Jones spent it. By the end of the European tour Jones was $145,000 in debt.
The Arranger
Throughout his career, Quincy Jones didn’t just play music for the bands he worked with-- he composed, produced, and most of all arranged it. This continued through the 1950s and 60s until in 1963, only a year after being appointed Vice President of Mercury Records (the first black executive at a major label), he struck gold with a 16-year-old singer named Lesley Gore. “It’s My Party” was recorded in 1963, the first of 17 hits by Lesley Gore. And Quincy Jones cemented his position as one of the most respected producers in music.
Jones would go on to become the first African-American to become a prominent composer for films, as well as a conductor, a producer, and an arranger. To learn more about the incredible career of Quincy Jones, visit the Smithsonian Magazine Website at: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/
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