Be open to anything: success, failure, change, inspiration. And always keep moving.
 

CONTEXT: It seems to be increasingly important for all of us to revitalize our thinking from time to time, given all the change occurring around us. You’ve somehow managed that difficult trick through your long and varied career. How?

QUINCY JONES: I’ve always been curious. I was 12 or 13 years old when I first picked up a horn. Eventually, I made my way through the entire brass section, playing the tuba, the French horn, the baritone, and the trombone—to be near the majorettes. Finally, I moved on to trumpet and stayed with it.

My friends and I also went out a lot. We led a kind of wild life playing in nightclubs and at dances. I was at a crossroads at that young age. Thank God that one day I found a piano, and it turned me around.

To your question: The basic thing you need for a long and varied career is to have a core love or interest that you can really develop so that you have confidence and really know what you’re doing. You need to learn one thing well before you start branching out. Everything else relates to the approach you take with your basic core skill.

My personal love was arranging and orchestrating. They were so natural for me, and I was interested in learning all about them. I wanted to know how Alban Berg got the sound he did or Igor Stravinsky or Duke Ellington or Gil Evans or Count Basie.

Everybody has his thing. I don’t drive a car, but I sure love orchestration.

My father wanted me to be an architect. In a way, composition, orchestration, and arranging feel like architecture. And once I had mastered those disciplines, they opened the door for all the things that came later.

I was born in the studio. After I worked there, everything else felt possible. The studio taught me how to see things in terms of a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even things far out of my discipline felt like they operated the same way. And so I could relate to them.

The bottom line is that in our field everything starts with a song or a story. You need structure and dramatic values. You have to be able to find things that people can relate to. You have to be able to make people feel good or scared or in love or make them laugh.

The way I feel about change is it’s a very natural evolution. It isn’t something you have to sit around and think about. I’m lucky. I have seven kids—six girls and a boy, ages seven to 47—so, man, I don’t have to think about any of that. It’s an organic part of my everyday life.

You don’t have to make up a plan to change. You just wake up every day and react to the stimuli.

I’ve always had an obsessive curiosity. Between that and not really having had a mother—my brother and I had to make up a lot of stuff about life—and two brain operations, that will give you all the drive for change you need.

CONTEXT: The world is full of people who have been one-trick wonders, but you have a remarkable track record for staying on top of trends for decades. What’s the trick?

JONES: There is no trick. Tricks don’t work. When you trust your instincts, it just happens.

When I was 12 to 13 years old, we played everything—strip music, rhythm and blues. We played pop music, schottisches, and Sousa. It was World War II in Seattle, and all the military was up there. I grew up with Ray Charles, and we played every club in town—black, white, tennis clubs. So, I’ve always had a range of styles to draw from. Working with Michael Jackson or Frank Sinatra has never been a stretch.

Bebop was one thing I was deeply involved with musically, and bebop does affect your thinking. It takes you away from being rigid and helps you always keep your mind wide open for whatever happens. It gives you freedom and breadth. And it helps you stay open and vulnerable to any situation—whether in a record studio or in life.

Whether you are working with Ray Charles or Dinah Washington or Michael Jackson or Frank Sinatra, you have to be working with somebody you really love and respect. You need to love what they are doing and who they are as human beings. Because those things influence why their music is like it is, and that’s why you love them.

When I produce somebody, all I ever think about is: "Are they ready to stop now? Do they really need to be pushed for four more takes?" I need to be in tune with what the musicians are feeling and what they feel comfortable with.

Asking Frank Sinatra to leap without a net takes a lot of guts. I was able to do that because we had a very special relationship. I adored working with him, and I think he felt the same way. We used to have a joke about working with him. We’d say, "You don’t tell Frank something in public. You suggest it to him privately."

That’s just common sense and respect. I wouldn’t want him to make me look like an idiot in front of a band, and I wouldn’t do it to him. So, I’ve never had much of a problem working with people in a studio. I always knew when it was time to say, "Maybe it’s time to take five to grab a bite to eat or play ping pong."

CONTEXT: How do you know what’s going to work?

JONES: You don’t. A lot of it is emotional improvisation. With Michael Jackson, we used to turn the lights out. He had a little podium where he could dance, almost as if he were in a live performance. The only light was a tiny pin spot on the stand. If he had to remember lyrics, he would have a little note up there.

Thinking about what will become a hit, I like to work from the inside out. I trust my instincts rather than sit down and study what the public wants and all that nonsense. I can’t deal with that.

To have a success, you have to get goose bumps every time you hear it or see it. If you don’t feel it, then you’re in trouble if somebody else doesn’t feel it, because you have no frame of reference for what makes it good or bad. The worst thing in the world is to create something that you’re not committed to and that other people don’t like. That’s a waste of life.

The thing that Oprah Winfrey talks about all the time is that we do things either with love or fear. If you’re afraid, you can really mess up. If you just love what you’re doing, whatever happens you’re moving ahead.

CONTEXT: What happens when you end up being wrong?

JONES: It’s a total disaster. Like my first Jesse Jackson show. Like the late-night TV show Vibe.

I know this is a cliche, but you really have to learn how to cherish your mistakes and learn from them.

I’m never surprised when a record is No. 1. That’s what we went in to do in the first place. Everybody in the world goes into the studio to make a No. 1 record, not to make a flop. So, when you get a hit, where does the surprise come in?

What puzzles me is when my antenna is off or we didn’t get the right kind of start. With Vibe, the show that we had in mind wasn’t at all the show that appeared on television. The original idea never saw the light of day. I had no idea about the intensity needed for a five-day-a-week show. I didn’t know how impossible it is to alter things that are in process when you have 11 writers. It is a great feat to get something that complex to work. At the end of the day, you just have to call Oprah Winfrey up and tell her, "You are 300 times better than I thought you were in the first place."

I asked myself whether I wanted to spend my life doing that. The answer is no. If we were to do it again, we’d do it a totally different way. We learned from it.

All of us have to give ourselves permission to say it’s OK to make a mistake, or to take advice, or to say we need help.

It’s amazing to me to see how people deal with defeat and failure. With success, too. I know thousands of people who achieve one great success, and they freak. All of a sudden, they are thrust from obscurity, and everybody knows who they are. There’s a tendency for people who are not centered to feel the world has never loved anyone—not even Shakespeare or Michelangelo—as much as the world loves them. Fame is something that is impossible to identify with until it actually happens to you.

The ego can be dangerous if you don’t get it out of your way. It can be devastatingly self-destructive. There’s a time when we need our egos to help us feel strong enough to get through the rough patches, but most of the time it gets people in trouble. It causes them to become isolated or surround themselves with a shield of cousins and friends who tell them that everything they do is fantastic even when they sometimes know it is literally marinated in mediocrity.

To be successful, you have to put your time in and be centered and humbled enough to observe other people. Stravinsky used to say observation is the key responsibility for creative people. He thought it was important to watch the forces of nature. That’s why African music is so powerful. It’s based on the elements of nature—the sounds of rain, thunder, birds, and the movement of animals.

Michael Jackson used to watch videos of how gazelles and cheetahs would move in slow motion. I pay attention to how the seasons change. I look out of my window every morning to see whether the sky is crimson or gray, primary colors or pastels. It’s like watching the master painter at work.

I think all the answers to our questions are out there in the universe if we just can slow down enough to let God’s whispers be heard.

CONTEXT: Can you talk a little bit more about how you deal with people who can have big egos?

JONES: I don’t like to think of people as "stars" when they’re not performing. I think of them as very talented people who worked hard to develop their craft and over the years have gotten their acts together. I’ve been in this business for 53 years, so many of these people are my friends and have been for a very long time. That’s true of Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Sidney Poitier, and Marlon Brando, who I met in ’51. Barbra Streisand and I got our first Grammys in ’63 when she was 21, and we’ve been friends ever since. She doesn’t feel like a star to me; she’s just B.J., Barbra Joan. And Oprah is my baby sister "Sophia." [Winfrey played a supporting role—the feisty Sophia—in the film The Color Purple, which Jones co-produced.]

There’s an expression that says a person’s age can be determined by the degree of pain he experiences when he comes in contact with a new idea. Somebody might say, "Let’s try it this new way." And an older person might respond, "Well, that’s never been done before." You can actually see the pain. These people will grab their heads. It physically hurts to think of doing something a different way.

The ones who don’t react with fear are the really creative people. "Let’s try it," they’ll say. "Let’s go there even if we blow it."

It is extremely hard to take chances when you’re winning. And that’s exactly what you have to keep doing. The problem is that, when you’re on top, if you trip it can be a bigger fall.

CONTEXT: But you earned the respect and friendship of the Sinatras and Streisands. I gather they didn’t treat everyone the same way they treated you, right?

JONES: Maybe not. After Frank died, Tina Sinatra gave me a ring that he had worn on his hand for 40 years. [Jones touches the ring, which is now on his right hand.] We were close until the end.

I met Frank in ’58 in France at a dinner for Grace Kelly, and he called me back in ’63. I wrote my autobiography, and called the last chapter "Getting the Call." You don’t call someone like Frank Sinatra and say, "Hey, man, this is Quincy Jones. I would like to work with you." It doesn’t work like that. You have to wait until someone like that calls you. And he did.

I didn’t realize that he felt such a special bond with me until I read Tina’s book, after he was gone. Frank had said that when Steve Lawrence and I would come over, he was always so happy to see us. He’d tell Tina to take me to family dinners, to Thanksgiving and Christmas. I felt the bonds, but I knew he was around a lot of people. With someone who has that big a persona, it can be dangerous to take his attention to heart. You can get hurt.

But his feelings were deep, and it touched me. I remember after my son was born in London, Frank sent us a bond for his education, unsolicited. He said, "QDIII, let Uncle Frank welcome you into the world with a college education, knowing you’ll do a far better job than we did." The gesture tore me up. I called to thank him and he hung up on me. He didn’t want to hear it. It was from his heart, and he didn’t need a thank you.

Everybody has a different way of relating to people. I take everybody one-on-one, and I’m happy I do because I’ve had some wonderful relationships that transcend show business.

CONTEXT: When you produced "We Are the World" did you really put up a sign saying "Check your egos at the door"?

JONES: That’s something we used to use when we were working with Jesse Jackson when he first started his talk show. But, you know, we didn’t need to put that sign up with the folks in "We Are the World" because they sincerely came in to give it all up for some people who were in trouble.

People like Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and Tina Turner have incredible talents, and because they are equal forces they all neutralize the others. It would have been a waste of time to bring egos with them. So, everybody surrendered their egos, and they came to do what they could.

CONTEXT: You were talking about how change can pain some people. Is there a particular way you try to motivate people to go ahead and try something new?

JONES: You just put the thought of change out there. You don’t have to make it compulsory, and say, "You should do this." You can suggest, "What if we did this? Why don’t we try this? What is there to lose?" It’s only tape or time or whatever.

Right now, through my Listen Up Foundation, I’m working on a project with Nelson Mandela and [South African President] Thabo Mbeki. What if it doesn’t work? What if it does work? All I know is that we have to try. So all I focus on is, What if it does work?

We’re working to put a lot of people together to make Silicon Valley out of South Africa. It’s the most ambitious idea in the world but, if it works, it will be incredible. They need the economic viability as much as they need the AIDS assistance, which we’re all involved in, too. Even if the threat of AIDS is gone, these people still have to eat and live out of cardboard boxes. They don’t have electricity, water, or anything.

Mandela told us years ago, "We’ve been struggling so long. We don’t know how to do a lot of this stuff to provide infrastructure and aid." I don’t know why I was blessed enough to get so close to South Africa, but it’s like a family.

CONTEXT: There’s a lot of talk these days about how the music business is evolving because of MP3.com and Napster Inc. Within the business, there seems to be a lot of resentment by folks who think their livelihoods may be threatened. What’s your take? How do you think the music business is going to evolve over the next few years?

JONES: You know what that stuff is? It’s called progress.

About a year ago, USA Today asked me, Bill Gates, Steve Case, and some others: Which technology had the biggest effect on our various fields? My answer was the Fender bass, which Leo Fender introduced to us when I was playing in Lionel Hampton’s band in 1953. Without that instrument, there would be no rock ‘n’ roll. There would be no Motown. Nothing. Without it, they’d still be playing upright basses. With upright basses, I don’t think you’d have the Rolling Stones or the Supremes.

Technology is always creating revolutions. I’ve seen the huge changes brought on by any number of technologies: jet planes, television, faxes, cellphones, personal computers, and satellites. I still remember that, when I was working with Phillips/Mercury as a vice president, we went to Holland in ’62, and they showed us the first prototype of an audiocassette. It was a little pink prototype. They also showed us a dime-thin laser videodisc they were just experimenting with at the time. They told us, this won’t be out for another 35 years. They were right.

With technology, my philosophy is to understand it so that you drive it rather than letting it drive you. Here again, curiosity plays an important role. You have to be curious about how a technology interacts with other things.

In some cases, the record industry was slow. They should have fixed the distribution system 35 years ago; it has always been archaic. But because there is such power concentrated there, the industry took its time making changes.

Well, guess what? The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s never going back. Gnutella, Napster, MP3, it doesn’t matter what the specific application or infrastructure is.

When those kids released Gnutella, they ensured that there was no infrastructure for people to sue. [The reason is that there is no central server that houses the digitally formatted songs. They exist on other users’ hard drives.] Only now is the record business finally understanding the technology it’s going to have to come to grips with.

What I worry about are the changes that have already taken root with kids. They’re used to free music now. They’re tired of getting ripped off because there are only two good songs on every 10-song LP. I have to deal with that, but I don’t blame them. I am tired of it, too.

So, the record companies are going to have to figure out a new paradigm. We will be in an era where kids are making records at 5 o’clock, and they’re out on the Internet at 6:30. People may no longer want to pay $17 for a CD. But so what? I think it’s a joke anyway that platinum records are such a big deal.

If a record is really popular, it should sell a lot more than a million copies. In a country of almost 300 million people, selling just a million copies is a joke. The fact that that is such a milestone means we have a flawed distribution system and problems with marketing, promotion, and, unfortunately, too many middlemen. The kids are tired of this big cost being passed on to them.

It’s going to take time and will result in heads bumping and a lot of bloodshed, but the record companies and Silicon Valley will have to figure it out because everybody has to make a living. They may have to change the payment rates, the statutory rates, and the way the songs are distributed.

There will need to be adjustments, but I’m never going to be behind the idea that says to musicians that intellectual property should belong to everybody. That’s easy for someone else to say. If it’s not your work, you shouldn’t own it. Many times someone works 10 to 15 years to get some exposure in a business. And then they have a span of maybe three years or five years where they’re hot, if they’re lucky, and then it’s over. Nobody has a right to keep money that will help send some guy’s kids to school. Please. The idea that somebody else’s creation should be yours: I don’t think so.

My nephew Marlon, whom I love dearly, is a genius and a great barometer for me. He is one of the top testers for Microsoft. We kid each other all the time. I call him Krime with a K because Krime does not pay. He is so, so good. He knows how to make telephone calls free all over the world. He says, "I don’t see why I should pay for anything."

Even he is coming around on this issue of intellectual property. After five years, he is finally saying, "Well, maybe I’ll pay 49 cents for a download of a single. Maybe $1 for a download of a single and a video."

He’s been a great guru for me because where he goes, so goes the world.

What better revolutionary tool could you have than a young, interested kid with a computer? These kids, they can kick old people’s butts with combat boots. The Internet is their rock ‘n’ roll.