Quincy Jones always met them when they were young. Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson – whom he later nicknamed “Smelly” – were all just 12 years old when he first shook their hands. One of his late-life protégés, whom he signed at 81, was Jacob Collier, the toilet-brush-haired boy genius who got many old jazzers worked up with his multi-harmonic YouTube covers a decade or so ago. Collier considered Jones a cosmic father figure, and the venerated producer told him this mind-bending riddle: “Jazz is the classical music of pop.”
This particular belief might be the gift that Jones, who has died at the age 91, gave to music. Epic Records didn’t initially want him to produce the Michael Jackson album that would become Thriller, because they felt he was too “jazz” (he’d once been musical director for Dizzy Gillespie) and they wanted a mainstream pop hit. Yet there is none more pop than Thriller – a basic two-bar rhythm track stacked with layers of synths and sounds and vocals. To Jones, jazz meant versatile. Jazz was an attitude, and an ability. Jazz meant knowing how to do everything – and then executing perfect decisions about what not to do. Which is why the smartest musicians smuggle so much jazz into pop and the rest of us don’t even have to know it’s there.
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