Q: The Autobiography of Quincy
Jones by Quincy Jones
One Of The Best Music-Related Bios
He reached an apogee of fame in the mid-1980s as the producer-arranger
of Michael Jacksons blockbuster album Thriller and the charity single We
Are the World, but Quincy Jones has been a force in American music since
he was a teenager. He swung hard enough to play with beboppers like
Dizzy Gillespie; he studied composition with the legendary Nadia
Boulanger; he scored dozens of films and TV shows; he arranged and/or
produced albums for everyone from Frank Sinatra to Leslie Gore, and
rappers like Melle Mel dont disdain the old man either. Looking back at age
68 in a good-natured autobiography supplemented with brief chapters by
such friends as Ray Charles and ex-wife Peggy Lipton, Jones asserts, Ive
been driven all my life by a spirit of adventure and a criminal level of
optimism. Given his beginnings, growing up poor in Chicago and Seattle
with a mentally ill mother lurking in the background, thats quite an
achievement. Jones never stood still long enough to let sorrow catch him,
and though his treatment of his personal life is standard Hollywood glib
(Though Nastassja [Kinski]s and my relationship as a couple was not

destined to last, she is a great friend), his prose catches fire when it
touches on music: Dinah Washington could take the melody in her hand,
hold it like an egg, crack it open, fry it, let it sizzle, reconstruct it, put the
egg back in the box and back in the refrigerator, and you wouldve still
understood every single syllable. His furious energy may have been fueled
by personal demons, but his joyous sweep through a half century of
American pop convinces you that Jones was right to keep moving: Nothing
is ever wrong if its going someplace, he asserts. Music is about ever-
changing. --Wendy Smith
Personal Review: Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones by
Quincy Jones
This is a dangerously important and uplifting book. It is subversive in the
sense that it reveals one of the darkest secrets about the "real souls of
Black people:" That music provides the streetlights that illuminate "the
royal road to hope and survival."
This book recalls in my own mind, during the same times that Q's musical
life literally exploded (the two years from 14 to 16) -- the years when he
literally went from "street urchin to musical genius" in one giant step, that it
so happens that this was the same period that my stepfather and his
returning army WW-II buddies were teasing each other about "combat
boots" being their first real pair of shoes. Being essentially true made the
joke all the more painful.
Yet, all of these Arkansas farm boys were in college on the GI Bill; and
most importantly, they could all play musical instruments and could sing
and dance and read music - especially the Harmonica, the piano, and the
guitar. I naturally grew up thinking that doing these things was innate. It
came as a great shock to me: when after getting a harmonic for Christmas,
it did not play itself. I could not play a single song on the darn thing? I
naturally thought that there was something terribly wrong with me: Maybe I
was genetically defective? Although I did eventually learn to play the
trumpet after a painful and lengthy apprenticeship, it still mystifies me, as
to how it was that those in my father's and Q's generation picked up music
as if it blew in through the window from off the wind?
That among other reasons is why this book is so terribly important: right
after the war, music and sports provided the cushions for finding a semi-
normal existence in a world gone mad with poverty and its racist rules and
traditions. Q's life was different than most other inner city black kids only in
the fact that his mother had to be committed to an insane asylum while he
was young. This of course made the urgency for music in his life an even
more important existential imperative: As he notes, his discovery of music
became, not just his mistress (as it was for Duke Ellington), but also his
mother.
But that is only part of the uplifting story told here, somehow, poverty,
depravation, and humiliation during the era of "full" American Apartheid,

could always be turned on its head: Somehow, there were always
unguarded existential escape routes to both sanity and occasionally to
success. Q followed his heart and found his talents, which as it turns out
were considerable.
Living on the margins, on the outskirts of mainstream society, can either
empower you or embitter you, or send you to the insane asylum as it did
Q's mother. But either way, music and sports (and not the bible, the only
thing that Q's mother took with her to the insane asylum) will help
illuminate the way.
Five Stars
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