Q: simply the best
Quincy Jones, RIP
Earlier this year, my friend Chris Molanphy devoted an episode of his HIT PARADE podcast to the career of Quincy Jones, which inspired me to freshen a playlist I’d had in iTunes of my Q favorites. I didn’t attempt to get into his jazz work (mostly) of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and I’m not that familiar with it; I stuck with my version of his career, which really starts around 1969’s Walking in Space, his not-strictly-jazz chart breakthrough (#6 R&B). The incredibly funky series of records Jones made through the ‘70s — my god, the breathtaking 1973-78 sequence of You’ve Got It Bad Girl, Body Heat, Mellow Madness, I Heard That!!, and Sounds… and Stuff Like That!, all five #1 jazz records and Body Heat his first to top the R&B chart and go top 10 pop (#6) — well, for that alone he’d be legendary. These albums will swing and funk and groove and pillow talk you like nearly nothing else.
1981’s The Dude gave him his first top 20 pop singles, “One Hundred Ways” and “Just Once,” ballads both sung by his latest discovery James Ingram, along with singles as popping as the deliriously funky “Ai No Corrida” (remarkably a top 30 pop hit in the post-disco morass that was the chart in the early ‘80s) and the Patti Austin feature “Razzmatazz.” She was another Jones discovery, in the ‘70s; her voice is all over his late ‘70s work. The next year Austin-Ingram duet on “Baby Come to Me” — produced by Jones, of course — topped both the pop and AC charts; it’s a gorgeous warm bath of a Yacht Soul record.
Off the Wall you know. Thriller the world knows. Bad you probably know. But I’d suggest you go back and attempt to listen to Thriller with fresh ears; listen to the way/s it sounds. MJ gets a lot of the credit, and obviously should. But what Jones behind the boards with those songs is astounding. And if you’ve not yet seen the Netflix doc The Greatest Night in Pop, about the making of “We Are the World,” I highly recommend it if for no other reason than to see Jones in action, wrangling most of the biggest pop stars in the U.S. at the time and bending them to his will.
There’s plenty of other treasures in Q’s catalog: George Benson’s best album, 1980’s masterwork Give Me the Night; Austin’s 1982 debut Every Home Should Have One; the entirety of the Brothers Johnson’s back-half-’70s-into-’80s output (I mean, “Stomp!” alone!); selections from Donna Summer’s self-titled ‘82 record, which sounds like a Thriller dry run, and Rufus and Chaka Khan’s 1979 Masterjam; and “Blue Monday ‘88,” the remix he did of New Order’s most famed single, tweaked just so. I’ve written about his own Back on the Block elsewhere, and while 1995’s Q’s Jook Joint is quite as good, it’s still fun. Throw my playlist of 90 of his best (below) on shuffle and just luxuriate.
Quincy Jones was an unquestionable genius, in my eyes and ears the greatest musical producer of all time. Fight me — you’ll lose. May he Rest in Power.