Wallace Terry

Task 7

Quincy Jones is a star. A record producer, a composer, and a recording artist, he admits that he is "blessed." But life has not been easy for Jones. Read of his physical and emotional pain and spiritual awakening.

YOUR REAL HOME IS WITHIN

Wallace Terry

1 One night 16 years ago, Quincy Jones screamed into the silence. "It felt like a shotgun had ripped open the back of my head," he said, recalling the aneurysms that brought him close to death and required two brain operations.

2 That was the first crisis. Then, four years ago, fully recovered from the surgery, Quincy Jones—jazz musician, composer, arranger and producer—faced another crisis, an emotional one. He was riding a string of successes: He'd scored the movie The Color Purple, produced Michael Jackson's Thriller album and mounted We Are the World with the most glittering cast of pop singers ever assembled. But the same man who was filling the world with so much joy was drowning in despair. Yet Jones found a way to survive this too, and bring peace to his life.

3 Now entering his fifth decade in the music business, Jones has worked with just about everyone, from Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles to Ella Fitzgerald, Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand. He has scored 40 films. He won an Emmy for scoring the TV miniseries Roots. He has earned 19 Grammys. He is that rare producer whose own recorded performances are best sellers. And he remains at the frontiers of music fusion, orchestrating new hybrids from classical, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, African and Brazilian music.

4 To Streisand he is a Renaissance man who displays "as much integrity personally as he does professionally." "He's too damn nice," says Ray Charles. "He doesn't have one strand of evil hair in his head." Indeed, no one in the entertainment world seems to have anything bad to say about him.

5 I traveled to California to meet Quincy Jones at his ranch-style home in the exclusive Bel Air section of Los Angeles. In a world of egos larger than life, I found a man as modest as a monk, obviously more comfortable making music than talking about himself.

6 We sat down together in his comfortably cluttered living room. "Do you ever pinch yourself, Quincy?" I asked. After all, this is worlds away from the Chicago ghetto where he was born 57 years ago. "Is this all a dream come true— your dream?"

7 "Yes," he answered. "Enormously so. But you can't get hung up in mate­rialism. One reason for my breakdown was the fear that—bang!—all this could be snatched away. I thought things were important. You have to know that your real home is within." He pointed to his heart.

8 There was nothing in Quincy's pedigree to suggest that he would be a musical prodigy. His parents were plain folk, and after their early divorce Quincy helped his carpenter father make ends meet by shining shoes and delivering dry cleaning. At 5, he realized that people could make music when he watched his baby sitter, Lucy Jackson, play the piano.

9 When the family moved to Seattle, Quincy became obsessed with the school band. "I was curious about orchestration," he said. "How could that many people play together and not be playing the same notes? But I got totally obsessed with playing. I would stay in the band room all day and play every­thing. Piano. Percussion. Tuba. French horn. Alto horn and finally trumpet [his signature instrument]."

10 When he was 14, Jones met Ray Charles, who had just moved to Seattle from Florida. "He was like the big man," Quincy said. "He had his own apartment. He was 16. He had these older women. Three or four suits."

11 In order to play in clubs, the two of them pushed their ages up to 18. And Ray began teaching Quincy how to write arrangements—in braille!

12 They got jobs all over town. In the early evening, they would play pop standards for white audiences at the Seattle Tennis Club. Later on they would exchange their bow ties for zoot suits to play boogie-woogie at the black clubs. By evening's end, the two of them would fall into the red-light district, playing bebop for free until dawn. "We were pretty hot stuff," Quincy recalled, "for 14."

13 When he was 15, Quincy was asked to join Lionel Hampton's band, at that moment one of the hottest jazz groups in America. "I was ready to go," he recalled. "I had my little trumpet bag and I sat for three hours on the band bus." Then Mrs. Hampton threw him off, admonishing him to stay in school.

14 After high school and a semester at Seattle University, Jones transferred on a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. As he played around the jazz clubs, his reputation mushroomed. He finally joined Hampton's band. And the new kid on the block was quickly introduced to jazz legends like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. "I couldn't believe they were human beings," Quincy recalled. "I talk a lot now, but I couldn't talk then. I was so overwhelmed meeting them."

15 Another awakening for Quincy came when the band traveled south. For the first time, he encountered "white only" signs. The band members were unwelcome at hotels and restaurants. "It freaked me out," Quincy recalled. "It was scary."

16 By the mid-'50s Quincy was writing arrangements for Tommy Dorsey and Dizzy Gillespie and working with Count Basie and Duke Ellington. Over the next two decades, he studied classical composition in Paris, became the first black executive at an established record company (Mercury) and, as jazz record sales slipped, began producing pop-rock performers and his own jazz-fusion compositions, and writing scores for films. He also had been married twice—to Jeri Caldwell, his childhood sweetheart, and Ulla Anderson, a Swedish model.

17 By the mid-'70s, his highly original musical style had emerged. Quincy was all over the music map. "I hate categories," he said. "It tells you that you don't have the capacity to grow. I get a vision and try to get it into focus. It is, at first, a charcoal sketch. Then a watercolor. Then an oil. I see sound."

18 Thee was no stopping him. Until that night in 1974.

19 Quincy was stricken at the Brentwood home he shared with his third wife, the actress Peggy Lipton. The swellings felt "like a hose that is on frill force, and somebody lets it go into your head," he said.

20 At the hospital, doctors found his brain so swollen they waited eight days to operate. When they did, they discovered another aneurysm. Doctors inserted a clip on the artery in his head and warned if he tried to play his trumpet, he could blow his brains out.

21 "When I came out of intensive care I asked what was in the little bag on my stretcher," Quincy recalled. " 'That's your hair,' the orderly told me. 'If you didn't make it, they could put it back on you to make you look good in your coffin.'

22 "I was thinking when I got hit, 'No, God, I'm not ready yet. I haven't begun my dreams.' Now I feared that I wouldn't be here to execute them unless I hurried."

23 And hurry he did. In the next dozen years, the master trumpet player became the master producer. Thriller became the largest-selling album in history, selling 40 million copies worldwide. We Are the World raised $50million to combat world hunger. But by 1986, his 11-year marriage to Lipton was crumbling. His mother-in-law was dying. Quincy Jones was totally exhausted.

24 "There was too much going on," he recalled. "People were buggin' me about a lotta things. Lots of pressure. I didn't want to eat. I couldn't be around people. I didn't feel whole. That scared me to death, because I love life."

25 His doctor told him he was suffering from adrenal syndrome. "That's just a fancy name for a nervous breakdown," Quincy surmised. Get away, the doctor suggested. So Quincy postponed all his projects and went off alone to Tahiti, where his old friend Marlon Brando had offered him a home. Armed with several books—including the Bible, The Essene Gospel of Peace, The Rays of Dawn and The Road Less Traveled —Quincy looked to find a spiritual connec­tion. "I went there to really heal myself," he recalled. "And I went through changes like you never saw in your life."

26 For 31 days, he filled his hours with prayer, meditation and yoga, filled his body with papaya, coconut milk and raw fish, and cleansed himself in hot herbal baths.

27 "I just stayed with the books and went inside myself," he said. "I wanted to build a spiritual base that would be strong enough for the rest of my life. That means turning negative energy into positive energy and living by the Golden Rule. You must love the joy of giving. You can care for people you love and some you don't love too. And you don't worry about what you get in return. It may sound corny, but it feels great."

28 When he returned home, he was still in bad shape, he said, and it took fully two years for him to feel completely recovered. But now, he said, "I have my life in my hands."

29 Quincy certainly looks and acts revitalized. "The '90s are my decade," he proclaimed. And he has opened it with an auspicious first act. His first perfor­mance album in eight years, Back on the Block, is a virtual summary of black popular music in the 20th century.

30 This fall, he is producing Jesse Jackson's TV talk show and Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a sitcom. Listen Up, a documentary film about his life and musical times, has been released.

31 "I feel like the most blessed person in the world," Quincy told me. "I worked with the first team of American music—Louis, Duke, Basie, Ella, Sarah, Miles, Dizzy, Eckstine, Sinatra—right up to all the kids around now, like Kool Moe Dee and Michael Jackson."

32 He thought for a moment. "I know there are some real bad racial things happening out there that are polarizing some of us. And that freaks me out. But consider what happened to Michael Jackson in the '80s. Little kids all over the globe had a black hero. That changed the truth about the world in which we live."

33 "You know," he added, "we have a culture that is vastly underrated. Especially by us Americans, black and white. We don't have a clue as to what it's about. The Europeans know. The world knows.

34 "There is a statue of [jazz saxophonist] Sidney Bechet in Paris. When the Europeans come over here, they expect to see statues of Charlie Parker or Louis Armstrong in front of Radio City. But we just think of them as a couple of black dudes who played nice. And black people, we have no sense of our musical history. And that's a shame, man. I just hope, before I get out of this world, I can do something about it. One thing we can look up to with pride is our heritage. That is a legacy that the whole world admires."

35 If anyone can teach that heritage to the next generation, it is Quincy Jones, who deserves to have a statue of himself sitting there—right next to Armstrong and Parker.

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