It’s indicative of the surprising paucity of our idea of Quincy Jones that the definitive profile of him is the rather short review of his autobiography, “Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones,” that Kelefa Sanneh published in the New Yorker in 2001. Sanneh writes:
Everyone knows Quincy Jones’s name, even if no one is quite sure what he does. Jones got his start in the late nineteen-forties as a trumpeter, but he soon mastered the art of arranging jazz-turning tunes and melodies into written music for jazz ensembles. He also mastered the art of turning great musicians into close friends, and, in time, the art of turning close friends into great musicians. "Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones" (Doubleday; $26) is, like the life of the man himself, an appealingly convivial blur of deal-making, celebrity anecdotes, and professional comebacks. Jones’s talent for musical and social arrangement placed him at the center of an extraordinary number of cultural moments from the nineteen-sixties on: he launched Michael Jackson’s solo career and persuaded Miles Davis to give his last major performance, organized concerts for Duke Ellington and Bill Clinton, produced "The Color Purple," and founded the hip-hop magazine Vibe. He has been a musician, a record executive, and a Hollywood mogul, and every few years he has brought together famous musician friends to make the kind of slick, funky pop music that taught a generation of listeners to dislike jazz. This hasn’t done much for Jones’s critical reputation, and he’s barely mentioned in standard histories of jazz. But it has done wonders for his mantelpiece: he has twenty-six Grammy awards, and Time recently named him an "Influential Jazz Artist of the Century." If Quincy Jones is not the world’s most celebrated living jazz musician, he’s certainly the most ubiquitous.
Jones is, in other words, one of the premiere middlebrow culture producers of our time, “the greatest impresario in American popular music,” as another pop music critic wrote of him. He’s a mainstreamer of black music into white American culture, a friend of and collaborator with literally hundreds of America’s most well-known musicians of the last half-century, and a man of impeccably pretty not half-bad taste and not really all that much in the way of authentic artistic genius. He has been immeasurably influential—helping to introduce to the American public, for instance, icons like Ray Charles, Oprah Winfrey, and Tevin Campbell—and yet if he’d never lived it’s difficult to see how our culture would be very different (there would be, perhaps, slightly less in the way of Al Jarreau, which would be a shame, perhaps).
I’m also pretty sure, though I can’t find the photographic evidence to back this up, that he’s been instrumental in the popularization of the muumuu as an option for the beefier element of the black male celebrity set.
