Enrique Cerna Interviews Quincy Jones

Enrique Cerna Interviews Quincy Jones

This is a transcript of an interview with Quincy Jones on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on March 27, 2009.

EC: Quincy Jones, welcome to Conversations and welcome home.

QJ: Thank you, it’s nice to be back home. And when I speak to you and a lady and the young guy from England, that’s why I miss Seattle. San Francisco and Seattle, boy, they put every other state to shame.

EC: You were talking with our makeup artist and her friend… and suddenly you’re having this conversation — boy, these Seattle people…

QJ: Yeah, these guys know what’s up.

EC: Coming home, you’re here to do a book signing of this incredible book, The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey and Passions.

QJ: I’m not finished yet though.

EC: Really? Another book going to come out?

QJ: No, no, no. Nobel doctors I’ve been working with for five years now at the Helsinki Hospital in Stockholm. And they say every year, they’re going to keep me ’til 110. And don’t make up your mind until 109. We’ll see. Nanotechnology and genomes, it’s amazing what’s going on.

EC: That means we’re going to do more interviews in the future right?

QJ: Yeah, sure. You’ll be 150!

EC: I hope I will be…

QJ: You can live to 150, I’m serious, man. Yeah.

EC: Is that right? You’re obviously studied this. So you’re going to be signing your books while you’re here, at Garfield High School, at the performing arts center that’s named after you. What does that mean to you?

QJ: What do you think? Can you imagine? It’s not like we were the good guys over there, we were the bad boys. I mean in terms of we were working night clubs. At that time Seattle was probably the hottest city in America ’cuz all the military forces were here, and Ray Charles—we all worked four night clubs a night at thirteen years old. I’d get out of the Washington Social Club, Seattle Tennis Club, we worked four clubs, changed costumes, rhythm and blues, Shabbats, bar mitzvahs, everything, you know.

EC: What probably a lot of people don’t know...that, at least, weren’t here during that time, is that Seattle had this vibrant after-hours scene, a lot of jazz clubs, that’s where you hooked up with…

QJ: That’s where Ray and I met. The movie had us meeting on a bus — and I never saw Ray in the daylight I think. He was like 100 years older than me, I met him when I was 14, he was 16. And he had a friend in Florida, some bad things happened to him — he had a friend take a train from the bottom of Florida and take it — I said I want to get it as far away from here as I can, and that’s definitely Seattle. In the forties — in ’48 I think Ray got here. And we, uh, had a relationship like you cannot believe. He teach me — he had sight ’til he was 6 you know, and he lost it at 6 in Florida — he taught me how to write arrangements in Braille.

EC: Really?

QJ: He was an unbelievable man, and I was with him until the very last day. He was teaching Jamie Fox how to do his part in Ray, you know.

EC: Right up to the end?

QJ: Right to the end, yeah.

EC: And there was not only Ray, but also Lionel Hampton used to come through here?

QJ: Lionel Hampton, and all my buddies — Buddy Rich, Charlie Taylor, all those guys. Hamp wanted me to join his band when I was fifteen, and I was so excited I just went and sat on the bus all day. I didn’t want to tell my parents…

EC: So you had your bags packed, ready to go?

QJ: Yep, one bag. And, and a trumpet. Back then we padded our trumpets in, we called them the be-bop bags, little leather bags, you know. I sat on the bus because I didn’t want him to change his mind. Hamp at that time was bigger than Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie — he had it worked all year, you know. It was so exciting. His wife said you know, “Hamp, what’s this child doing on this bus? Come here, sonny. You go back to school!” I was so upset. “Go back to school, we’ll talk later.” And sure enough I got a scholarship to Seattle U…. …and then to what’s now known as Berklee School of Music in Boston, was Schillinger House back then. I got that scholarship so I could get back to the East coast, closer to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzy. And then Hamp called again and I was gone.

EC: You were born in the Depression—what, 1933?

QJ: Chicago, the biggest black ghetto in America, yeah.

EC: It was a hard life?

QJ: I lived in the affluent section…no, that’s a lie.

EC: But it was a hard time?

QJ: Ridiculous, man. All we saw were Tommy guns, machine guns, and stogies, and dead bodies, and piles of money in back rooms. My father was a carpenter, master carpenter for the Jones boys, which is probably the most notorious black gangsters — smart — in America. They started the policy racket, and they also created the first black businesses, five and dime stores which they referred to as the Vs and Xs—in Roman numerals.

EC: Your dad was Quincy Delight Jones Sr.?

QJ: Yes.

EC: And you’re Quincy Delight Jones Jr.?

QJ: Yes. And my son is the third.

EC: Number three. Where did the Delight come from?

QJ: Man, how'd you know that?

EC: I read a lot.

QJ: He’s a hip-hopper.

EC: Where did the Delight come from?

QJ: I don’t know. From back in Daddy’s day.

EC: But did your dad, because everything that was happening there, it was a tough life…how did you end up coming to the Northwest?

QJ: Very simple. The Jones boys had created the policy racket and the five and dime stores. And Capone didn’t know how much money they were making, and when he found out how much money they were making he ran the Jones boys out of Chicago, and they moved to Mexico. The next day my Daddy came to the, the barber shop and got me and my brother and put us on a Trailway bus and we went to Bremerton. Quick! You know, because our names were Jones, we weren’t part of that but, uh, it was dangerous times back then. That was the spawning grounds of Dillinger, Capone, all the gangsters you know. And I wanted to be, honestly, a gangster 'til I was eleven.

EC: Because it’s what you knew growing up?

QJ: You know you’re affected by what you see, and who’s successful. And boy the gangsters owned everything, they ran everything. Had all the girls.

EC: That’s probably another part of it, huh? When you were in Bremerton, I heard a story about how you, along with some other guys, broke into a community center?

QJ: What? We broke into everything, man. It was a recreation center, and it was an armory—right…they had a big pond…and there was an army camp with barbed wire around it. This was real stuff: 50 caliber machine guns. And we had a place next to that called Camp Victory, we were 11 years old you know. And we used to play war, but it was with slingshots, so I was going up to the army camp every day with my paper route, and so every day I’d take a little bit of a 30 caliber machine gun. We had four 30 caliber air cooled machine guns and four 30 caliber water cooled machine guns, and we used to play war out in the woods with machine guns — and we were 11 years old, real hard to handle, so we told them to run first and we’d shoot down the pine tree you know. And the military and the police were at our house every week.

EC: But when you broke into that recreation center one night, I understand that you discovered a piano?

QJ: Yeah. We went to get some ice cream…we were, some lemon meringue was coming in, we were really tuned in, and some ice cream…we stole — we broke in, ate all the ice cream up, and then had a pie fight, then walked around and eventually, I broke into the supervisor’s room, a lady named Mrs. Eyres who I got to know later. And uh, it was dark and I opened it up and in the corner in the dark was a Spinet piano, and I almost closed the door—and thank god I went back in the room… …and walked over to that piano and touched it, and the concept of a human being — I was around music when I was young — but the concept of a human being playing music never occurred to me, because I wanted to be a gangster you know? And I knew that that’s what I’d do the rest of my life. And it saved my life, it really did.

EC: You eventually became a trumpet player…but you learned all these other instruments too?

QJ: Yeah, all the other brass instruments, yeah. Violin, saxophone, I couldn’t handle. But tuba, sousaphone, b-flip baritone, French horn, trombone… I played trombone because the trombone players were up near the majorettes in the marching band. The trumpet player’s way in the back. But I finally got to the trumpet, though.

EC: And what was it about the trumpet…that really was your entrée into the bands.

That’s the top of the brass section you know. And I just love the…that’s why I love to write for brass, and I met Basie when I was thirteen and he kind of adopted me and Clark Terry…it was, I’m very blessed man.

EC: Did you always know—I guess, from that time on—that music was going to be your life?

QJ: Yes, because as soon as I picked the horn up and stayed after school and played all the brass instruments, every time I played I’d hear French horns and trombones and all these sounds in my head and everything. I’d stay up all night, sometimes until my eyes would bleed just writing and writing and writing. I didn’t even know what key signatures were. And I read Underscore by Frank Skinner because I wanted to write for movies since I was fourteen. And I got, finally got a shot at 30 because—no black composers back then.

EC: Was it The Pawnbroker? Was that your first movie?

QJ: Yeah—there was a Swedish movie before that, Pojken i trädet, The Boy in the Tree, with Arne Sucksdorff. But the real one was The Pawnbroker with Sydney Lumet. And I thought everything would be OK then, but I had — my agent was Percy Faith’s son, Peter Faith — and he said, I wanted you to do A-movies. 'Cuz movies like Nutty Professor, he made me turn them down, you know. Jerry was calling about that, and I ended up finally, when I did In The Heat of the Night and Cold Blood. Mirage was the first one — Cary Grant’s last movie, Goldie Hawn’s Oscar…you know, as I get older I realize how little we have to do anything. Art Linkletter was right next door to me, he’s 96 years old, sharp as a tack, and he says all the time, “Quincy, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” It’s true! Very true. We think we have, we…divinity is so much a part of our lives, and the older I get the more I realize that.

EC: I want to read you something and I want you to tell me who said these words and what they meant to you… “Once a task has just begun, never leave it ‘til it’s done, be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all…”.

QJ: That’s my Daddy. My Daddy. He made my brother and I repeat that every day, every day he said that. Cuz, I didn’t have a mother really...

EC: Your mother had mental illness.

QJ: I didn’t have a mother, no. My real mother spoke twelve languages, wrote and spoke, and went to University of Boston, but she got dementia precox, when I was seven in Chicago. And they put her in a straightjacket and took her to Mentino State Hospital. So it was a weird time then, very strange time because I’ve since learned that, I think part of God’s plans is that… …the mother, the Oedipus thing, is the one that, that, uh, nurtures a child’s—a boy’s existence—and the father’s the one that nurtures the daughter’s existence, because I have six daughters. That’s why I have no hair left! Fifteen to fifty-five, man. Girls are smarter—thirteen years smarter than we are. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. They’re so smart they make us think we’re in charge.

EC: Your daddy…

QJ: Don’t they Grace? Look at them shakin’ their heads back there. I’m the man in the house, that’s what you think! And heaven help you if you’ve got a wife, and she’s got some daughters, you’re dead man. I got one son.

EC: Your dad — what kind of influence? Your father, what kind of an influence did he have on you? What did he mean to you?

QJ: He meant everything to me — his work ethic you know? He understood that it’s about black music, you know. Ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. It’s a science and a soul. And it’s interesting because music is the only thing that engages both the left and the right brain—emotion and intellect simultaneously. And that’s why it has healing qualities for autism, dyslexia and things like that. It’s really true.

And we’ve got a foundation now, and we’re working with a lot of that now, and I’ve got a petition online now, I don’t know if anybody’s seen it yet. I’ve got a meeting at the White House May 4th for America to have a Secretary of the Arts and Culture. Every country in the world has a minister of the art—of culture—except America. The most widely imitated music on the planet, everywhere. I go everywhere, I was in Beijing and Shanghai for the Olympics.

Every country in the world plays American music and the American kids outside of Seattle — I just said back there, again San Francisco and Seattle they know what’s up, you know. But I asked a kid, a young kid, a rapper, what do you think about Louis Armstrong? He said, I’ve heard the name. Said, what do you think about John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker? He said, I don’t know who you’re talking about. And it hurts, it really does, because that’s our foundation and everybody in the world knows jazz… …Japan, Russia…the 3 B’s and jazz—and Germany, Paris. And I honestly think of it — if it hadn’t been for France, I don’t think we’d have jazz. Because of New Orleans and France. Nurtured in France, but during the slavery times, the East coast destroyed the culture and the family to control the slaves. And in New Orleans, the Spanish and the French brought over the mulatto slaves—servants, who had clarinets and trombones.

And after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865, the Africans had never seen these instruments before—they were vocal, strong vocal skills, like South Africa, nobody can touch. And the Western Africa is the poly-rhythms, the most powerful rhythms—in the days when they were calling all of us savages you know—the most powerful and sophisticated rhythms on the planet. Stravinsky imitated it and Bizet, Debussy. It’s a powerful culture but nobody took it seriously.

EC: Talk about Michael. You produced Thriller…which is one of the biggest selling albums of all time.

QJ: We did three albums together. Off the Wall, Thriller, you’re right, and…Bad. I met Michael when he was twelve — I met Stevie at twelve, Aretha, all of them. If they’ve got it at twelve you know they’ve got it together. Kevin Campbell. But Michael, when we started The Whiz, Michael said, "I’m getting ready to do an album for Epic, a solo, will you help me find a producer?" You know. I said, "Michael, right now you don’t even have a song in the movie, let’s do the pre-recording" As a musical you have to do the pre-recording first and you have to be really accurate.

So we talked about it later. And I started to watch him, and everybody kept saying Michael couldn’t be any bigger than he was in the Jackson Five, which I never paid attention to. And I saw him memorize everybody’s steps, everybody’s dialogue, everybody’s lyrics, really smart — after five hours of prosthetics, cuz as a scarecrow he had all this stuff on him—he’d pull out little pieces of paper and say, “da da da da da, Confucius,” “da da da da da, Kierkegaard,” then he said “dad a da, So-CRATE-es.” And I said, what the heck is Socrates?

Then I got it. And Diana Ross didn’t say anything, or Sidney, so I wanted to tell him before it became a habit, so I said, "Michael, it’s Socrates [correct pronunciation]." He said, "Really?" And I looked in his eye, I said, "I’d like to take a shot at your record," and he said, "Great, I didn’t think you’ll do it." And he went to the record company and they said, "No way Quincy, he’s too jazzy." He’s never, he’s only done the Brothers Johnson. They went back and said, we want him to do it. I admire him and Freddy his manager, and said, “Don’t worry about it.” And we didn’t worry about it.

EC: You always have crossed all these different lines of music, from jazz to you know, kind of more like that Sinatra sound…

QJ: Anything.

EC: It doesn’t matter to you?

QJ: I learned that here, I learned that in Seattle. In the 40’s in Seattle, you had to play Big Fat Butterfly, ‘cuz we used to play for the Kitty. Do you know what the Kitty is? They have a little wooden box that looks like a cats face with teeth and a light inside and if you knew a song they’d put 50 cents in there or a dollar, that’s what we used to work for, the kitty. We had to play everything, bar mitzvahs, we had to play everything, all kinds of music, rhythm and blues, pop music, to each his own, everything. Ray, too, Ray didn’t sing like that when…he sounded like Charles Brown and Nat Cole and played alto sax like Charlie Parker when we met. He didn’t sing like he sang two years later. Then he started turning gospel into pop music boy, he revolutionized music.

EC: But all those experiences here in Seattle since you had to play across the board, did that then help you as far as down the road, give you this appreciation…

QJ: Help me? It was my foundation. Between Garfield High School and Seattle, boy, because Garfield, probably, to me, is one of best high schools in America. It is diversified – everything - from the richest whites, Chinese, Filipino, black - I lived right across the street. And it helped when they dedicated that building this year, the performing arts center, which almost made me cry, you know. I realized that my concept towards the world after coming from the biggest black ghetto in America, Chicago, through the Depression, helped me diversify my attitude towards life. And take people one on one and drop all the color stuff and the nonsense that’s been going on, and take a person one on one. And Ben Webster said to learn all this language, and I did.

EC: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the book here because when you look at this book, it has all of these things from your past and there’s notes that you have from some of your sessions, there’s some of the brochures and things, programs you had of big awards. But I understand that a lot of this was, who helped a lot, your brother, Lloyd.

QJ: And Gloria, my sister.

EC: And Lloyd used to work at…

QJ: I never kept any stuff, I was movin’ too fast…

EC: And Lloyd worked at KOMO TV for a long time, he was an engineer there.

QJ: He was head of sound…

EC: I know the two of you were very close, you used to take him everywhere. But he kept all these things.

QJ: Yes, and Gloria, Gloria his wife. They were married 33 years and if it hadn’t been for them, we could never do a book like that. She found everything, there’s one in there from the International Herald Tribune which I really treasured when I got it, but I forgot about it because we’d been moving a lot and it had “Quincy Jones, Black Music’s Leonard Bernstein.” And Bernstein was a good friend of mine, and so three weeks later I get a little purple envelope at the Savoy Hotel in London, and he tore the title off and wrote “QJ, I wish I was white music’s Quincy Jones, LB.”

EC: Whoa..

QJ: And Gloria kept that, she found it, I would’ve lost that a hundred years ago.

EC: Let’s talk about what you’re doing now, because you’re not slowing down any, if anything you seem to be speeding up.

QJ: Not a chance, brother, not a chance.

EC: You’re working with Stevie Wonder and Tony Bennett as we speak…

QJ: How’d you know about that?

EC: You told me.

QJ: O.K.

EC: Actually, I read about it. Tell me about that.

QJ: Well, I’m doing three albums and nine movies, but you can’t do that simultaneously because you can’t focus. But, Tony I’ve known since before electricity. I talked to him yesterday… and I told you I’ve known Stevie since twelve and Stevie’s been on almost twenty of my albums and he said,“Why don’t we get together and do an album together.” But he and Stevie are doing Marvin Gaye songs and doin’ a couple of mine and a couple of Stevie’s. And I said, “That’s the best idea I ever heard.” And we’re gonna do another one with Snoop Dog and Clark Terry, who I met here. And Joe Pesci.

EC: Joe Pesci?

QJ: Joe Pesci.

EC: The guy from Goodfellas and Home Alone…

QJ: That’s right.

EC: He sings? He sings?

QJ: He’s one of the best jazz singers I’ve ever heard in my life.

EC: You’re kidding me.

QJ: I’m serious. I couldn’t believe it either. I used to hang out with him for seventeen years with DeNiro and he calls me, “I want you to hear my record.” I said, “Joe, I’m tired, man. I’ve been workin’ all month. I’ll listen to one.” I couldn’t believe it, because he is a jazz singer, and a real good one. I really couldn’t believe it. Pitch, phrasing, phrases…surprises every day. And you know what Linkletter said – wanna make god laugh, tell him your plans? And I never expected to see somebody like Joe Pesci sing like that. He sang since he was eight years old.

EC: Whoa…no one would’ve known.

QJ: He put the Jersey Boys together, you know, the show. He was the one that was behind that. ‘Cuz Travolta, Nicholson, all those guys, I call them the Jersey gangsters.

EC: Of everything you’ve done, from being a musician to being a producer to writing scores to, you know, being involved in all of these things and now you’re very involved with this foundation of yours. Trying to change the world. Is that your passion now?

QJ: Absolutely, absolutely. It has been for a long time, but I didn’t know how to really put it all together, but now it’s world-wide. We’ve adopted Rwanda. I went with President Kagame and his wife Jeannette, we gave a reception at my house for him with the people that helped that country come together.

Because in 1994, I went to Clinton’s global initiative just before I went over to see him and Mandela in South Africa, and Bill said, “Quincy, please tell Jeannette and Paul that my biggest regret politically was not coming in to help them.” Nobody came in to help them in 1994. And I went there on the anniversary of the genocide, I hate to call it an anniversary. I went to four cities with the President, it was the most ungodly thing I’ve ever seen in my life – of what happened between the Hutu and the Tutsis, which I was under the impression were tribes.

They’re not tribes, they’re ten cows, or more or less, it’s a caste system. So, you have man and wife that can be Hutu and Tutsi, or brother and sister. And over the years, you know, the Belguims are encouraging the Hutus to hate the Tutsis and all this stuff, and they led them into this war. It was brutal, I heard testimonies that would make your hair cringe. And I had no idea.

It’s like the Switzerland of Africa, so we’re getting the tourism in there, have a tea company, we’ve got a Nobel doctor, who’s going to help them end malaria in five years. He found what he calls a miracle plant from China called ACT, they put in the insecticide with the bed nuts, you know.

EC: You’ve lived an incredible life.

QJ: That’s all you can do with it. I always tell everybody, I’ll sleep when I’m gone.