Quincy Jones: Remembering a Thriller

I’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to write a tribute to the late Quincy Jones, music man extraordinaire. Now I think the time has come. On Sunday, daughter Rashida Jones accepted the honorary Oscar that was supposed to be handed to her dad at this year’s Governors Awards ceremony. She was even able to deliver the speech he’d penned for the occasion: the man was prepared! Always an optimist, Jones celebrated music and film as having the power to make “the world a more understanding and embracing place for us all to exist.”  (Other honorees included writer/director Richard Curtis—who was warmly roasted by Hugh Grant—as well as veteran casting director Juliet Taylor, and the longtime producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael J. Wilson.)   

 It’s hard to write about Quincy Jones because, in his 91 years of life, he found success as a record producer, composer, arranger, conductor, trumpeter, and bandleader. He also functioned from time to time as a movie producer (the 1985 Spielberg screen adaptation of The Color Purple was one of his projects) and occasional actor. As an arranger and conductor, he worked closely with greats like Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. Hit tunes with which he was involved ranged all the way from Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” to the wacky Austin Powers theme music (originally called “Soul Bossa Nova”) to Michael Jackson’s bestselling Thriller album, on which he worked as a record producer.

 The artistic period I know best is the 1960s, and I’d like to remember Jones in terms of that pivotal decade.  He attracted attention for his very first score, written for Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964), in which Rod Steiger played a Holocaust survivor haunted by his memories. He went on to score films that were both serious (The Slender Thread) and comic (Walk, Don’t Run). But his first of many banner years was 1967, when he was involved with scores for five films, including Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing, the thriller Banning, the very dark In Cold Blood, and the year’s top award-winner, In the Heat of the Night. The last of these featured a bluesy Jones-composed title song performed by his longtime idol, Ray Charles. Though In the Heat of the Night was nominated for seven Oscars and won five of them (including Best Picture), Jones’ contribution to that film was overlooked by the Academy. Still, in that same year he was honored with two of his seven competitive Oscar nominations, one for the jazzy score of In Cold Blood and one for “The Eyes of Love,” an original song featured in Banning. “The Eyes of Love” made hm the first-ever African American to be nominated by the Oscar voters for Best Original Song. His two Oscar nominations in a single year was also record-breaking for an African American composer.

 Ironically, Jones never won a competitive Oscar. He gained another Best Original Song nomination for a Sidney Poitier romantic comedy, For Love of Ivy, and a decade later his film score for The Wiz was also recognized. The Color Purple earned him three nominations, including Best Score, Best Song (with Lionel Ritchie also involved), and Best Picture (he was nominated along with fellow producers Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank Marshall). And the posthumous statuette he just won was not his first honorary Oscar. Back in 1995 he was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, the first musician ever to be so honored by the Academy. (He eloquently called his time on stage to receive that golden trophy “the proudest moment of my life.”)