Music producer Quincy Jones detailed how he went from a college dropout to one of the most influential people in the music industry for a crowd of nearly 1,000 at Harvard University Thursday night.
A composer, conductor, producer, arranger, music executive and social activist throughout his five-decade career, Jones spoke at Harvard as the “culminating event” of a week-long residency at the university, said Thomas Lee, program manager of Harvard’s Learning From Performers Program.
The event, which began with a short film on Jones’ life and a performance by the Harvard Jazz Band, allowed students to ask Jones questions following a discussion between Jones and moderator Henry Lewis Gates, head of the Department of African American Studies at Harvard.
“Quincy Jones is the Renaissance man of African-American entertainment,” Gates said. “He is an ongoing source of personal and professional inspiration.”
Jones’ career, which earned him a record-setting 76 Grammy nominations, included a musical education in Boston with a scholarship to Berklee College of Music at the age of 18. He later dropped out when he was hired to play trumpet with Lionel Hampton’s big band.
Jones said he came to Boston because it is closer to New York City than the Pacific Northwest, where he was living at the time. New York seemed “a fairy-tale land” to an aspiring musician, he added.
Jones said he got his chance to go to New York when he joined the band, earning $17 a night.
“You grow up real fast” in New York, he said. “You got to survive.”
Eventually landing in Europe, Jones described how he and his friends found themselves in a variety of new and interesting cultures.
“We sat on these high stools in the hotel, rolled up our socks and put our feet in the bidet,” he said. “Man, we had never seen anything like that.”
The European response to their presence was “an amazing respect for American music,” Jones added. “They let the music speak for itself … I had never had that luxury before.”
The audience heard sound clips from This Is How I Feel About Jazz, an album Jones composed, arranged and conducted in 1956 in Stockholm. He was 23 years old at the time.
Of his later work, such as the production of Michael Jackson’s top-selling album Thriller, Jones said, “People asked, ‘Aren’t you selling out with hip-hop?’ But we had been doing that stuff all along.”
The sounds of hip-hop music and even the voices of the singers had been done before, Jones said, with such legendary singers – and Jones collaborators – as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.
Jones also described his awareness early on of all that was happening in music, both in the industry and the underground. The clash between big band music and be-bop music and the emergence of jazz and rock particularly heightened his early sense of the world of music, he said.
“If you want to be hip, man, you got to be aware of everything that’s going on,” Jones said, “There’s nothing worse than having a great opportunity and being unprepared.”
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