Q: Perfecting The Perfect
2008-07-02
By Kevin “Chixo” Gibbs
As recently as last week, Quincy Jones was hailed (on the BET Awards) for a lifetime of achievement in music and philanthropy. As usual, playing to a younger generation, the producers focused heavily on his best-known credits during the 1980s and beyond and after he had reached an age when many people begin to consider retirement.
The world’s best selling album is an incredible achievement indeed, but sales are one thing and influence is another. Let me make the case then for pre-thriller Quincy of 1969-1980 - what I consider to be his golden age of both influence and productivity.
It is during this period that his ability to take the known and make it “well-known” was acknowledged and when some of his most iconic and influential work was about to be born.
Music producers wear many hats. They have a great sense of what each musician might or might not accomplish, are patient yet enthusiastic, provide direction and , above all, are trusted for an understanding of what the musician is trying to articulate, specifically, and what the song will achieve, in general. The producer completes ideas that the artist hopes to communicate to their audience. To that end, Jones frequently went a step further – producing work embraced by a wider audience than artists or genres may have anticipated without conceding the integrity of the musician or musical style and creating a sound that other artists replicated.
In 1969’s pop injected Walking In Space, he begins to showcase R&B songs in a jazz context (“Oh Happy Day”) while employing some the genre’s most respected musicians (Roland Kirk, Kai Winding, JJ Johnson). Freddie Hubbard’s solo on the rendition of Benny Golson’s “Killer Joe” defines the album and, to my mind, is the authoritative version of that swaggering, jazz classic.
His 1970’s jazz-centered Gula Matari, with its 13-minute Afro-fusion title track, held gems that would be also be hallmarks. The album artfully presented big band flavored versions of “Bridge over Troubled Water” and “Walkin’” without alienating either song. His ability to have these diverse styles co-exist on record and (remarkably) to have truly huge jazz men like Herbie Hancock and Milt Jackson assist is a testament to the kind of respect Jones commands.
Even though Chick Corea, Hancock, Jones’ dear friend Miles Davis, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Traffic, and Weather Report were already making waves utilizing the “mash-up” of rock, pop music, jazz, and blues, Walking In Space and Gula Matari were somehow less esoteric. By incorporating more R&B, true blues and pop elements, he was able to impact a critical mass.
Significantly, it was the hit after hit combinations of the pop-jazz-funk-themed Smackwater Jack, 1974’s genre-bending Body Heat, 1975’s Mellow Madness, and his Sounds…And Stuff Like That of 1978 that helped to usher in a new musical era.
Smackwater Jack’s “Ironside” was Jones’ big band version of fusion, employing large horns, intermittent solos, a stumbling bass, and a reoccurring synthesizer reference that would become a staple sample used by hip-hop producers. Songs like “Guitar Blues Odyssey,” “Cast Your Fate To The Wind” and “Brown Ballad” announced the direction Jones would take with Mellow Madness, Sounds… and Body Heat albums.
Through all those efforts, Jones perfected a keen sense of what Bono calls what is “right” with a song. That and his openness and appreciation for all kinds of music and his fearlessness to explore beyond the boundaries of what is expected. He told Downbeat Magazine in 1955, “You can take a rhumba beat, an opera singer, and a rhythm and blues guitar player and produce a record people will like if you do it sincerely and well.”
He remains influential. So essential is he to the latest crop of hip-hop producers that only George Clinton, James Brown, Roy Ayers, and Bob James rival him in the number of songs sampled.
Few producers, however, have ventured outside their known musical landscape to make art. Those that have done so successfully -Don Was, The Neptunes, Rick Ruben, Brian Eno, Timbaland, and John “Mutt” Lange - are among music’s most admired and sought after talents.
Truth is, however, that none of them traveled that far from their original musical associations. Contrarily, “Q” can comfortably call Blues, European Classical, R&B, Rock, Pop, Country, Traditional Folk, and every adaptation of Jazz his home and he has never closed his mind to new ideas. If the music industry were baseball, Quincy Jones would be the game’s first drafted and Most Valuable Player – ever.
Kevin “Chico” Gibbs is a veteran music executive and critic. He covers classic music and throwback culture for Ebonyjet.com