Quincy Jones Orchestrated the Sound of America

Jones, who died at 91, erased boundaries, connected worlds and embraced delight. As a producer, he coaxed ingenuity from his players and singers.

I have this book called “The Complete Quincy Jones,” from 2008. It’s the sort of grand coffee table experience so ephemera loaded that it all but spills out photos and reproductions of letters and sheet music and newspaper clippings and report cards. It’s a book that requires a plan to transport it from a store to your house. Some of this stuff is affixed to the pages, as if Jones, who died on Sunday, had assembled it just for me, even though my name’s nowhere near Oprah Winfrey’s effusive “thank you” note. One of the unglued news items, from a 1989 edition of The International Herald Tribune, has now become a bookmark that reads, inartfully: “Quincy Jones: Black Music’s Bernstein.”

It’s a constellatory, celebratory, classy volume, just like the music Jones devoted the majority of his 91 years to. As you make your way through, you realize how ubiquitous this man was. I mean, I knew he was connected. (Maya Angelou writes the preface. The foreword’s by Clint Eastwood, the introduction is by Bono and the afterword belongs to Sidney Poitier.) But not until I sat down with this thing could I truly appreciate something else: what a connector he was, human ligament.

That, of course, was also in the music. He played many brasses — sousaphone, trombone, tuba, horns — but settled on the trumpet and quickly became an ace arranger and producer, someone whose brilliance involves having it all figured out. His approach to music involved not simply the erasure of boundaries but an emphasis on confluence, of putting some of this with some of that, and a little of this thing over here. Bossa nova together with jazz, Donna Summer doing Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Van Halen and Michael Jackson. On records, for movies, in concerts, with “We Are the World” and Vibe magazine. Connections.

This wasn’t iconoclasm and, officially, it wasn’t civil rights, either. It was vision, curiosity and taste that aligned with civil rights. Jones didn’t want artificial boundaries dictating that vision. So what you hear in all of that music is a little bit of everything — African percussion and R&B rhythm ideas, percolating alongside fur-coat string arrangements and trans-Atlantic flights of falsetto. It sounds like whatever America is supposed to mean. Often, he was orchestrating the sound of America, complicating it while grasping what makes it pop. It’s worth considering how his music opens one of the most-watched television events ever broadcast (“Roots”) and his production is behind the best-selling album ever recorded (“Thriller”). Two titles that nail the depth and sensation of the Quincy Jones experience.

But there’s another, related aspect of that experience, and it’s all over “The Complete Quincy Jones.” In just about every photo, he seems so happy to be wherever he is. Standing next to Hillary Clinton, chatting with Colin Powell, cracking up next to Nelson Mandela, perched beneath a conductor’s podium alongside Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. In one picture he’s got an arm around Sarah Vaughan and the other around Chaka Khan. Elsewhere, he’s planting a kiss on Clarence Avant’s cheek; pressing his cheek into Barbra Streisand’s (she signed that one: “My big ole black butt is sticking out — isn’t it?”; and I’ll just say her dress is dark). A big spread on “The Color Purple,” which he produced and scored, includes a photo of him and Alice Walker, forehead to forehead. Then there’s the intriguing shot of him looking heavenward with Leonard Bernstein at, we’re told, the Sistine Chapel.

I know, I know: Sir, these are pictures. How else would he look? But there’s something going on here for me. On the one hand: I’m just dropping names. On the other: this was a Black man born in 1933 who somehow survived an ominous Chicago upbringing (he remembers somebody pinning a knife to his 7-year-old hand), and now here he is not simply moving and shaking but magnetizing and mattering. I’m sorry, but I have another name to drop. Jones’s middle one: Delight. His parents didn’t miss with that one. He radiated it. His music prioritized it.

Delight is a prime engine of his artistic achievement. Whenever I’ve felt torn about racing to a dance floor because a DJ just dropped a needle on “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” or “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” I set my sense of tarnation aside and remember the temperature of those songs, the unzipping opening bass line of the one and the climactic porch-stomping breakdown of the other. Those are as much Jones’s songs as Jackson’s. I’m drawn to the arrangement of what I’m hearing, the newness of it, the ingenuity he cajoled, coaxed, coached and charmed from players and technicians.

I began studying liner notes on albums because I wanted to know who was making the sounds in music Jones happened to produce: the handclaps and flash of tumble-down-the-steps drumming that has helped keep Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” a banger; the chanting and overdubs on George Benson’s “Give Me the Night”; all nine tracks on, say, my favorite Donna Summer album (“Donna Summer”); that chain saw noise that menaces Jackson’s “Speed Demon,” from “Bad”; or some of the way-up-here singing Charles May and Patti Austin do on “Ai No Corrida,” a hit jam from Jones’s own “The Dude.” The names were often the same: Greg Phillinganes, Paulinho da Costa, Michael Boddicker, Steve Porcaro, Rod Temperton. Herbie Hancock! I learned that the rhythmic squeak on Jones’s “Soul Bossa Nova” (now immortalized as the “Austin Powers” ditty) is the cuica.

Prolonged exposure to Jones’s process reveals that part of a producer’s job is casting. For instance, he discovered the personal delight of James Ingram’s voice and lured him from anonymous demo singing to R&B stardom. Ingram did for the impassioned “woo” what Marilyn Monroe did for moles. Jones could hear that and knew we’d clamor for it. You can see in that “We Are the World” documentary that’s been living on Netflix all year how much the warm tone of Jones’s sound is also a signature of his people management. In one scene, it’s clear what an exasperating job it can be to maintain that warmth. Jones is trying to get his superstar cast to please for two minutes stop talking to one another and listen to Bob Geldof’s explanation of the moral and humanitarian stakes of the long night these dozens of singers are about to spend together, belting. The sign urging them all to check their egos at the door was evidently his idea.

That, I suppose, is another thing about “The Complete Quincy Jones,” really about all of this man’s work. It’s miracle of egolessness. He’s so obviously proud of his endurance, longevity and almost peerless achievements (one of the many foldout pages showcases his extensive prize collection). It’s a pride that comes through in just about every production; you can hear it in his deployment of horns alone. However, this isn’t someone with designs on world ownership. It’s not a person aiming to put it on a string and yo-yo it. But it’s conceivable that some of his superstar-producer progeny have misinterpreted that ubiquity and delight. He embodied what he made. It wasn’t even that he was the world. The world was simply in him.