[THE MAIN EVENT]
The late creative genius brought out the best in every one of his musical partners
By any standards, it would have been the end of a remarkable run. Quincy Jones released Sounds…and Stuff Like That!! in the summer of 1978. The LP was the bookend to a series of albums where Jones refined his marriage of jazz, soul, gospel and R&B. The title track and lead single with Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson — and Chaka Khan singing lead vocals — was a concession to a marketplace that seemed to be passing Jones by. Yet Jones, who passed away on Nov. 3, was only catching his breath; over the next three years, he would produce three albums (including his own) that would define the trajectory of Black pop for generations.
In his mid-40s, Jones might have been looking for another challenge when he agreed to produce the album that became Jackson’s Off the Wall. For all of his success in the music industry, he had yet to produce a signature album with a singular artist. Even his most iconic outing to date, Count Basie and Frank Sinatra’s It Might as Well Be Swing (1964), was produced by Sonny Burke, with Jones handling the arrangements. At his peak, Sinatra had Nelson Riddle as his arranger and producer; Jones had yet to find his Sinatra.
Perhaps “You Can’t Win,” Jackson’s most iconic moment from The Wiz, convinced Jones — who also had his eye on a young Luther Vandross, who contributed the song “A Brand New Day (Everybody Rejoice)” — that Jackson might be his Sinatra. He certainly seemed to think Jackson was the future, enlisting the songwriting talents of Paul McCartney (“Girlfriend”) and Stevie Wonder (“I Can’t Help It”) for Jackson’s reboot of his solo career. Yet the most important recruit was a relatively unknown British keyboardist and songwriter Rod Temperton, whose claim to fame at that point was writing a first-generation Quiet Storm classic with Heatwave’s “Always and Forever.” It was Temperton’s pen that wrote “Rock With You,” which, along with the Jackson-penned “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” topped the pop charts.
Off the Wall was a template for the Black crossover sound of the early 1980s, and Jones doubled down on that point when he went into the studio (with Rod Temperton) to produce George Benson the following year. Benson, a guitar virtuoso and heir-apparent to Wes Montgomery, broke through commercially years earlier with the surprising Breezin’ (1976), which sold 3 million copies and achieved the chart trifecta of topping the pop, R&B, and jazz charts.
Breezin’ was anchored by “This Masquerade,” which featured Benson’s solid, though supple, vocals, and a style seemingly drawn from the Quincy Jones playbook; Benson’s pairing with Jones seemed natural, if not inevitable. Benson had craved the pop stage as a singer since the earliest day of his career. But Benson wasn’t a twentysomething Michael Jackson; he was more comfortable playing his guitar on a stool than he ever would be moonwalking on stage.
Temperton contributed four tracks, including the singles “Love X Love,” “Turn on Your Lamplight” (reprised from Heatwave), and the title track. In the lead single and title track “Give Me the Night,” one can hear the production strategies that Jones deployed on Jackson’s “Off the Wall” and “Rock With You”; this is George Benson singing Michael Jackson’s music for the aunts and uncles. “Give Me the Night” was Benson’s first single to top the R&B charts, and the highest charting pop single, peaking at No. 4 and receiving four Grammys in 1980.
A month after Jones’ Grammy successes with Benson, he released his album The Dude, which would be nominated for 12 Grammys the following year, winning three. Like so many of Jones’ records from the previous decade, he was able to draw on a wide circle; Stevie Wonder contributed “Betcha Wouldn’t Hurt Me,” which was a platform for Jones’ goddaughter Patti Austin, and one of the album’s five singles. Austin is also featured on the Temperton-penned single “Razzamatazz,” who composed and did vocal arrangements of four of the album’s tracks.
It was the presence of James Ingram that took The Dude to another level. Jones’ success with Jackson notwithstanding (Thriller was released the next year), it was Ingram who first became Jones’ Sinatra. The two highest-charting singles from The Dude, “One Hundred Ways” and “Just Once” (written by the pop tandem of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil), both featured James Ingram on lead vocals. Ingram’s performance of “Just Once” was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Male Vocalist, while “One Hundred Ways” won the Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Male Vocalist. A year later, Ingram and Austin joined vocals on Rod Temperton’s “Baby Come to Me” (produced by Jones), which topped the pop charts on the strength of the song’s placement in the “Luke and Laura” storyline on the soap opera General Hospital.
Though conventional thinking reads Quincy Jones work with Michael Jackson as the apex of his career, in many ways it is more apt to describe Thriller and certainly Bad, as the coda for a career that remains unmatched. Which is not to say that Jones didn’t continue to work, helping to orchestrate, literally and figuratively the recording of “We Are the World” (1985) and producing the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple with Steven Spielberg and others.
Jones’ Back on the Block (1989), featured nearly 50 years of Black performers including jazz vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald (their last recordings); an A-list of rap artists including Big Daddy Kane, Kool Moe Dee, and Melle Mel; two generations of collaborators in Ray Charles and Chaka Khan, who share lead vocals on a remake of The Brothers Johnson’s “I’ll Be Good to You,” and finally Tevin Campbell, on his debut recording “Tomorrow (A Better You, Better Me)” — all of which only scratches the surface of all the talent that Jones collected. The album fittingly closes with a quiet storm track for the ages, “The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite),” featuring Barry White, James Ingram, El DeBarge and Al B. Sure.
By the time of Jones’ last studio album Q: Soul Bossa Nostra (2010), a tribute album that featured contemporary R&B, gospel and hip-hop artists with mixed results, he was settling into his role as the uncle who had long lost his filter. It was a measure of how much the industry had changed that the press spent more time on Jones' lurid tales than recording his thoughts about the broad history of the music. Jones left a treasure trove of information, befitting the person who was Black culture’s institutional memory; there is surely no one alive who can replace him in that role. In that regard, the music speaks for itself, and Off the Wall, Give Me the Night and The Dude are the best places to begin the conversation.
—Mark Anthony Neal
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