The New Yorker:

By Kelefa Sanneh
September 30, 2001

Everyone knows Quincy Jones’s name, even if no one is quite sure what he does. Jones got his start in the late nineteen-forties as a trumpeter, but he soon mastered the art of arranging jazz—turning tunes and melodies into written music for jazz ensembles. He also mastered the art of turning great musicians into close friends, and, in time, the art of turning close friends into great musicians. “Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones” (Doubleday; $26) is, like the life of the man himself, an appealingly convivial blur of deal-making, celebrity anecdotes, and professional comebacks. Jones’s talent for musical and social arrangement placed him at the center of an extraordinary number of cultural moments from the nineteen-sixties on: he launched Michael Jackson’s solo career and persuaded Miles Davis to give his last major performance, organized concerts for Duke Ellington and Bill Clinton, produced “The Color Purple,” and founded the hip-hop magazine Vibe. He has been a musician, a record executive, and a Hollywood mogul, and every few years he has brought together famous musician friends to make the kind of slick, funky pop music that taught a generation of listeners to dislike jazz. This hasn’t done much for Jones’s critical reputation, and he’s barely mentioned in standard histories of jazz. But it has done wonders for his mantelpiece: he has twenty-six Grammy awards, and Time recently named him an “Influential Jazz Artist of the Century.” If Quincy Jones is not the world’s most celebrated living jazz musician, he’s certainly the most ubiquitous.

Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., was born in Chicago in 1933. Sarah, his mother, was a schizophrenic, and was institutionalized for a time when Quincy was eight. He and his younger brother, Lloyd, were shuttled to Louisville to stay with their grandmother, a former slave whose culinary specialty involved a rat and a skillet. In 1943, the boys moved back to Chicago to live with their father, Quincy, Sr., who did woodwork for the local organized-crime family—“Gangsters need carpenters too,” he explained. The Joneses lived in a South Side neighborhood known as the Bucket of Blood, and Quincy fondly remembers a childhood of knife fights and petty theft. Sarah never again lived with the Jones family, but she followed them around the country, surfacing every few years, like an obsessed fan. At one point, she decided to put an end to her son’s “devil’s music,” and called the I.R.S. to inform the agency that Quincy hadn’t been paying taxes.

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