The Real King of Pop
From bebop to hip-hop—welcome to the fast-talkin', ribs-smackin', spray gun-of-love world of Quincy Jones

By David Dudley

AARP Modern Maturity

Quincy Jones cuts off a generous hunk of meat, slathers it in some soulful brown gravy, and, as is his style, offers you his fork. The steak is from longtime buddy Ray Charles; he sends Jones a case every year.

"C'mon man," the legendary music producer insists, mouth full of meat. "You gotta taste this." 

'"I've never looked back in my life before," he says.'

He's not kidding. Take a bite. Brother Ray's steak is good indeed, thick and tender.

"Smokin', huh?" He looks pleased. "I send him my ribs. I got a rib recipe that'll make you smack your grandmother. Ray Charles is addicted. I got him by the nose."

Q, as his many friends call him—it was Frank Sinatra who gave him the snappy sobriquet—is a man of great and varied enthusiasms. Spend any time with him and you'll get a bellyful of them: his half-century musical career, which bridges the formidable aesthetic gap between big band and gangsta rap; his weakness for beautiful women; his recent fascination with the future of information technology; his relationships with such disparate celebrity chums as Marlon Brando, Ice-T, Chuck Jones, and Bill Clinton ("I love me some Bubba!").

But right now it's dinner time, and Jones is enthusiastic about food. Living in Paris gave him a taste for continental cuisine, but he's never above the pleasures of a mean rack of ribs. He has already shared this rib recipe on pal Oprah Winfrey's show (rub babybacks in chopped peppers, onions, garlic, and jalapeños, wrap in foil two days in the fridge, then bake eight hours in the oven at 250 degrees 'til they fall off the bone). Try it yourself. Q will not steer you wrong.

"It'll hurt you, man," he promises. "Hurt you."

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg once dubbed the popular producer "a spraygun of love." Part of that is the way Jones talks, a spellbinding mix of earthy vintage hepcat and contemporary Bel Air schmooze. Part of it is the way he remembers every name, every face, and every event like it was yesterday. (Editor Gil Rogin, who worked with Jones in the early 1990s, pronounces him "unequivocally the world's best storyteller.") And part of it is the unaffected ease with which Jones navigates the worlds of jazz, pop, film, geopolitics, and anything else he cares to dabble in. By the early 1980s, when his production chores on Michael Jackson's Thriller album turned him into the most famous pop-music impresario on the planet, Jones already had a few careers' worth of achievement under his belt as a jazz trumpeter, big-band arranger, record executive, and film composer. Since then, he has constructed a modest multimedia empire, with his own record label (Qwest Records); partnership in several television stations; Vibe and Spin magazines; and an AOL Time Warner co-venture that produces film, television, and music projects. In December, Jones will receive the Kennedy Center Honors, one of the country's most prestigious arts awards.

But his latest undertaking, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, marks a foray into a heretofore unexplored field—his own past. "I've never looked back in my life before," he says. "I was too busy moving, doing things. So I said, 'Okay, this is it, you gotta look back now!'" What Jones found was a one-man history of postwar American music, sprinkled with enough Forrest Gump-like celebrity walk-ons (Picasso! Malcolm X! Redd Foxx!) to stymie the efforts of at least one cowriter. After four years, the book is finished, and Q pronounces himself both relieved and pleased. "I'm gonna try to do this as well as anyone's ever done it, which is a little presumptuous, I know..... But I believe in my book. I believe in my life. So I don't have to have any fear about it."

Is Quincy Jones afraid of anything? Hard to say. He has, after all, survived three marriages, two near-fatal brain aneurysms, one nervous breakdown, and close working relationships with both Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis, two of the music industry's more notorious hotheads. ("A pussycat," Jones says of the latter. He tells a favorite Miles story: Jones, sick with pleurisy and laid up in the Chateau Marmont Hotel in the early 1960s, woke up to discover Davis in his hotel room fixing him breakfast. "Mother —," rasped the trumpeter. "How you like your eggs?")

The only thing that seems to give him a moment of pause is his neighbor, Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose mansion is perched directly below the massive construction site that will someday be Jones's dream house, now being built next door to his present home. Construction is due to take three more years. "Zsa Zsa ain't speaking to us this year," he confesses, sotto voce, as if she might hear him. If true, she might be the only person in town immune to the power of Q. But one can't help guessing she'll come around eventually.

A typically hazy Los Angeles afternoon is giving way to a cool orange evening atop the gated hills of Bel Air, and Jones is holding court on a sofa in his Grammy-filled (he's got 26 and counting) basement rec room. There behind the bar is the framed sheet music from the 1985 "We Are the World" session, signed by the constellation of music stars who performed on the biggest-selling single in music history. Photographs of Q embracing Count Basie, Lena Horne, Nelson Mandela, and a president or two line another wall, not far from the director's chair that Spielberg gave him for his producer duties on The Color Purple.

In person, the man who made People magazine's 1996 most-beautiful list is finally starting to look a bit more like a contented 68-year-old grandpa instead of the sleek, goateed lady-killer of the past few decades. The mustache is generously flecked with gray, the hair has thinned, and there's a comfortable paunch growing downstairs despite this afternoon's yoga session in the pool. He's wearing a T-shirt printed with a snapshot of himself hugging his eight-year-old daughter, Kenya, who lives next door with her mother, actress Nastassja Kinski. (Jones's romance with Kinski ended several years ago, but the two remain close.) Only the discreet hoop earring on the left ear and the chunky gold pinky ring (a gift from Sinatra) hint that this may be one hip dude.

'For the man who introduced Frank Sinatra to L.L.Cool J, anything is possible.'

Despite the casual attire, Jones is still at work. That steak dinner tonight was wolfed down on a TV tray between a pair of interviews—the Los Angeles Times also called—and interruptions to tend the workings of the Q media domain. There are liner-note issues for the four-CD boxed set that is coming out on Rhino Records to accompany the autobiography. But most of all there are the social obligations of a man whose Rolodex is stocked with 5,000 of the world's most prominent names. The book launch means soirees to host and guest lists to finesse. And it also means mailing a few regrets of his own, which is not the kind of thing Jones likes to do. As his friend, producer Verna Harrah, says, "Quincy's one of those people who doesn't like to miss anything. He gets invited everywhere—and he goes!" This morning's most compelling invitation came from Paul Allen, the Microsoft mogul who flies hundreds of his closest friends to exotic locales for an annual party. Last year was Alaska; this year's trip is to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Jones has come a long way from his birthplace on the South Side of Chicago, in other words, and no one appreciates the ride more than the man himself. Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., was born in 1933. His father was a carpenter for local gangsters; his mother, Sarah, ran an apartment house before her harrowing descent into mental illness when Jones was nine years old. He and his younger brother, Lloyd, lived with a grandmother in rural Kentucky for more than a year. "My daddy used to say he was taking us to our grandma's villa," Jones remembers with a rueful laugh. "It was a shotgun shack, baby!"

The family eventually settled near Seattle, where Quincy Sr. found war work at a shipyard. It was there that Jones discovered music, including the jazz rolling from the juke joints that his father forbade him to visit. A few years later, Jones was tinkering with the trumpet and tailing the touring big bands that hit town, especially Count Basie's. He fell in with a teenage piano prodigy fresh off the bus from Florida named Ray Charles. The two played in local bands, and Jones discovered a gift for composition and arranging.

At this point in his story, Jones scurries upstairs and returns with his 1950 yearbook from James A. Garfield High in Seattle. "Most progressive high school in America," he says. Garfield's student body does indeed appear to be a rainbow of races—black, white, and Asian in equal proportions. Quincy D. Jones ("Operetta; Pen Staff Artist; Noon Program Committee; Student Director of Swing Band; Fun Fest") stares cool and unsmiling beside his goofily grinning teen bandmates. In another year, he would be married, living in New York City, playing with Lionel Hampton's orchestra, and setting off on a remarkable musical odyssey.

Listen to the brassy big-band wind-up of "Kingfish," Jones's first recorded composition with the Hampton band, and play it next to, say, some of the no-nonsense Hollywood car-chase funk Jones wrote for late '60s cop operas. Then let crooner Billy Eckstine's lush "Sophisticated Lady" segue into that dirty four-note sax figure that heralds the indelible Sanford & Son theme. Follow this up with the teenage laments of Lesley Gore, the boozy swagger of a middle-aged Sinatra, some of that inescapable Michael Jackson pop, and the pristine modern R&B balladry of a Patti Austin/James Ingram duet. What it all adds up to is anyone's guess. Which is fine with Q.

"I hate boundaries," Jones says. He recalls a note that Duke Ellington once wrote on a photograph. "It said, 'To Q, who will de-categorize American music.' And that's how I feel about it. I hate to be in a box, and I hate to see anybody put in a box. That's what racism is about, too. If they say white people can't play soul music, then that means I can't play classical music. That's bull—!"

Jones's perambulations between straight jazz and pure pop have alienated some musicians and critics who smelled sellout. He laughs at the idea—"I was one of those guys!"—and recalls a formative lesson learned from Ray Charles. Jones and his young Seattle bandmates idolized Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who were then exploring the foundations of bebop, with its emphasis on virtuosity and rigorous improvisation. Jones tried to apply bebop principles to the dance music his band was playing with Charles. But Charles objected.

"We didn't want to know about somebody playing the melody, man," Jones remembers. "We'd play schottisches [folk dances], and Ray Charles would say, 'What's that supposed to be? You trying to make a schottische sound like Bird or Dizzy? C'mon, man, let's play the real stuff, like the Swedes want to hear it.' And he was right. He made us enter each genre of music with pure soul. And it opens your soul. Somehow, doing the opposite music strengthens your core stuff."

So Jones did just that: After establishing himself as a jazz arranger, he went to France to study composition, took a groundbreaking job as a vice president at Mercury Records (he was the first high-level black executive at a major record company), produced pop hits such as "It's My Party," and periodically made his own albums of snazzy pop-jazz. ("Soul Bossa Nova," a wildly swinging 1962 trifle written "in about 20 minutes" re-emerged to a new generation in 1997 as the theme to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.)

Jones made another sharp turn in the mid-1960s, fulfilling a teenage dream to write movie music. "I always have that restless thing," he says. "I say, 'Let's go try something else now.'" His edgy, jazz-fueled score for Sidney Lumet's 1965 The Pawnbroker was well received, and film work started coming fast and furious. A notorious workaholic, Jones was soon scoring several films a year while taking gigs arranging and conducting. At one point in 1967, working overtime to make up some financial ground after an unlucky stretch in Las Vegas with Count Basie ("Basie couldn't gamble for s—," he grumbles), Jones was in Los Angeles scoring the television show Ironside by day and commuting to Vegas every evening to conduct Frank Sinatra's show at the Sands Hotel.

'"Life is an eight-course meal," he says, "and this is dessert time and finger bowl."'

He caught a glancing blow from the infamous Sinatra temper once when he missed the 5:30 flight to Vegas. "With Frank, that's like the firing squad," says Jones. "He always wanted us to be by the bandstand two hours before the gig, and we're hitting [the stage] at like 8:30 or something." Jones called Sinatra's office in Los Angeles and reached the Chairman himself, about to fly to Vegas via private plane. He tightens his voice into a dead-on Sinatra growl: "'Quincy. Francis. You got 10 minutes to get here.' So we tore over there, got on his plane, and he was like nothing ever happened."

Jones names Sinatra and Nat "King" Cole as the "best singers that ever lived" and praises the technical skills of that generation of vocalists, most of whom apprenticed in big bands and learned the horn players' astounding breath control. "Frank was bad, man," says Jones. "Let's get real. Please. He could do it.... Sinatra sings like a horn player—as does Ella [Fitzgerald], as does Sarah [Vaughan]. Frank told me all the time how he used to watch Tommy (Dorsey's) back"—he hums the long, serpentine trombone melody line from the Dorsey band's "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You"—"Eight bars! No breaths, man!"

When jazz fell into commercial decline in the 1970s, Jones turned to smooth pop—;R&B concoctions—and, in 1979, to a young Michael Jackson. The three albums Jones produced with the King of Pop (Off The Wall in 1979, Thriller in 1982, and Bad in 1987) so overshadowed his previous career that when he reconvened some of his old jazz posse to trade licks with rappers like Kool Moe Dee on the genre-busting 1989 Back on the Block album, some of the younger people had to be told that Jones had worked with Miles and Dizzy before.

Jones says he's still "a bebopper at heart" and credits jazz with giving him the mindset to fearlessly embrace other ideas, in music and in life. "I kind of carried that approach into everything else," he says. "Jazz musicians don't get scared too quickly. There's always a flexible, open-minded way to do everything. You can do it with intimidation or you can do it with love. I think love's the strongest thing in the world."

That love comes back to him. The long roster of Jones's close friends is drawn from every conceivable walk of life. "In France they call it branché," he says. "It means electrically connected, or whatever, to the stuff, whatever the stuff is. I have chefs who are my idols, street dudes, politicians, musicians, actors, writers, singers, whatever." Q's major-league womanizing has never been a secret, either. "You know how much I love women," he adds, shaking his head and offering a not-quite-contrite grin. "It's ridiculous. Always was ridiculous." But such is the power of Q's mighty charm that he seems to have left barely a ruffled feather. As a longtime friend, former Motown Records chairman Clarence Avant, has said, "I've never known anyone who's had so many wives and girlfriends and can get them all to sit down at the same table to eat." Verna Harrah, who dated Jones for several years in the late 1980s, merely shrugs. "He's just not a mean person, so how could anyone hate him?" she says. "I don't know anyone who doesn't love Quincy."

Jones's seven children, ages eight to 48, have five different mothers. Add in all the grandkids, spouses, parents, and assorted friends, and "it's way past nuclear family," jokes daughter Rashida. "My dad has a clan." And from all reports, it's remarkably peaceable. "That's one of the things he's good at—harmony," Rashida says. "He brings it out in people."

That gift for harmony, compositional and otherwise, might be the very foundation of Jones's professional success. Whether it's getting all those stars together to record the USA for Africa project or coaxing an aging Miles Davis into revisiting his Sketches of Spain—era Gil Evans arrangements live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1991, Jones has gently bent many of the world's more volatile personalities to his will. It is a gift that he uses more often these days in the service of his global concerns. His Listen Up Foundation—now run by his girlfriend of five years, Lisette Derouaux—works extensively in South Africa, and he has gotten his deep-pocketed partners at AOL Time Warner and Microsoft in on the philanthropic action. In 1999, Jones joined rockers Bob Geldof and U2's Bono in appealing to Pope John Paul II to support debt relief for the Third World. "Man, have we got balls!" he laughs. "Here's two raggedy-ass Irish rock-and-rollers and a bebop brother from Chicago walking up to the Pope to talk about [urging industrialized nations to write off] $200 billion in debt.... But I'm telling you, it worked!" He sounds surprised. But things in the Quincy Jones universe just have that way of working out.

The sun is setting, but Q's still going. He's talking computers and world peace. "Fiber optics, broadband, nanotechnology," he promises. "It's gonna scare the world to death, man. I was talking to the head of the CIA about this, George Tenet ..."

Wait. You were talking to George Tenet?

"Yeah. I told him, 'No more secrets.'"

Q really does know everyone, and he's as likely to drop the name of Colin Powell as of bebopper Bud Powell. "I love that cross-pollinization thing." And Lord knows he can make them all get along. Jones's plan for world peace would be the same house-party summit technique he's used for his last few albums: Call up some big names, throw them together, and let 'em wail. For the man who introduced Frank Sinatra to L.L. Cool J, anything is possible.

The future for Jones himself is equally open. He's working on a Broadway show based on the life of old friend Sammy Davis, Jr. He's involved in a digital satellite radio system called XM Radio: "Serious 21st-century stuff, man. I want to be a part of it."

But he hints that home and hearth are getting more important now. Hence the dream house. "Life is an eight-course meal," he says, "and this is dessert time and finger bowl. I want to enjoy it with my kids." But first he's got to finish construction—enough of a job for anyone, even Quincy Jones. "It reminds me of every movie, every record, every TV show I've ever done, all together," he says. "'How high do you want the doorknobs?' 'Do you want French limestone or Roman brick?' It's unbelievable!"

Jones has got it all planned out, of course, right down to the plants. He has found a miraculous citrus tree that bears lemons, limes, and oranges all at once. He springs out to the backyard to show one off. Sure enough, the little tree is covered in an unlikely rainbow of different fruit. Jones loves this; he wants a whole crazy orchard of them.

"I'm a gumbo freak, man!" he laughs, and strolls back inside.