Quincy Jones, world-renowned musician, in the M&G profile
Dina Rabinovitch
NELSON Mandela didn’t want a state banquet, so he was given a concert instead: in the red and gold of the Albert Hall, on a night when the sun set huge and orange behind the building. Three hours before the music would start, the players began ambling in.
Phil Collins, at the back for this gig, playing the drums. In the loose denim-striped shirt with the yellow and black baseball cap tight on his head, Hugh Masekela, whose jazz would, later on, silence the audience, then have them swaying as one. And the mover among this crowd — Quincy Jones, conducting tonight, wearing pleated black Issey Miyake.
The big one, the really huge white guy with such pale skin and that moon-shaped face under the black glasses, he was the gate-crasher who came in with Jones. Marlon Brando. Or Leroy, as Jones and Masekela call him.
Leroy, why Leroy? Two hours before the concert, and the men, all hot off planes, are sitting down to platefuls of corn on the cob, fried chicken and watermelon. “He just called me this morning,” said Jones.
“Pretended to be one of those guys from Paris Match, then I caught his voice, and I said, Leroy, that’s Leroy. He just wanted to come and hang out, he’s a Mandela man.” And Jones remembers he hasn’t got Brando a pass yet — Brando’s in the building, though not a lot of people have realised, but with the heavy-duty security here tonight, he needs a pass like everybody else. Jones calls someone over. “I got passes for eveyone except my daughter. I still need one for her. And Marlon Brando.” The man thinks it’s a joke.
Yes, but why Leroy? “Oh, Leroy’s a nickname, old New York story, you don’t want to go into that.” Masekela’s hooting with joy now, still managing his corn fine, though. “He, he,” Masekela chortles in his smoke-charred voice, “you can’t tell that Leroy story.”
“Marlon went to this club when I first met him,” Jones starts, settling back and licking his fingers. “In Harlem. He was the only white dude there, and he sat off by himself, and he saw five girls sitting over by a table with a dude. So one of the girls looked at him and said, `Let’s go dance’ — Marlon was a great dancer then, this was 1951 — so he goes out on the dance floor, and he’s tearing it up, and he takes the girl back to the table and the dude’s there with a toothpick in his mouth and his hat lowered, and he doesn’t look too happy about this.
“So Marlon goes and sits down and sees the dude giving him cold stares, you know, and he’s the only white dude in there. So he goes back over there, and he goes, `Look man, I just danced with the girl, no problems, I brought her back to the table, and we were just having a little fun.’ The guy didn’t even look up. He had his hat on and the toothpick, and he said, `The name ain’t man, the name is Leroy. L.E.R.O.Y.'” It may be 45 years old, that story, but it still has them near off their chairs cracking up at the telling.
It only takes five minutes with these men — and five minutes is about as long as I get to see Brando before he disappears — to know that this is it. Real comradeship: men, tough men, who can call each other when things go wrong, with the women maybe, or the fame or the children.
Sidney Poiter introduced Brando to Jones a long time ago at the Birdland Club in New York. So maybe it’s the longevity, the stuff they’ve seen, the places they came from. Maybe it’s the music.
Quincy Delight Jones makes the music happen. Owner of 26 Grammy awards, it’s Jones who produced Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the biggest-selling album of all time (“I haven’t heard from Michael much lately,” says Jones. “He’s been busy, and I certainly have”) and Jones who wrote We are the World — a sentiment which sold the biggest-selling single ever. When Buzz Aldrin stepped off the spaceship, he took the cassette of Fly me to the Moon that Jones arranged and conducted for Count Basie and Frank Sinatra, and that’s the first earth music ever to vibrate on that moon.
Tonight the music is big band. “Everybody’s getting back to their roots, I tell you” says Jones, “I haven’t had this much fun, man, since I worked with Sinatra and Basie, man.”
“Whoa,” go Masekela and Jones together, and laugh again. “This is why we got in the business, man,” says Jones. Really? I ask. Really as good as with Sinatra and Basie, because it never is, is it? “Oh yeah,” says Jones. “With Tony Bennett, you kidding? Every time we were getting ready to make a record, Frank would say, well listen, let’s see what Tony’s been recording — maybe we’ll use one of those.”
People say Jones’s address book is the best there is. “If you’ve been around long enough, you get to meet folk on the way,” he says. He’s had five relationships with women over that time, starting with Jeri when they were both 20, high-school sweethearts, and finishing, most recently, with Nastassia Kinski, from whom he split last year, and with whom he had a child. But that’s about all he’s saying on this subject.
“Honey, I don’t want to get into all that,” he says, and it’s serious. “I got seven kids with seven women over 43 years — that’s it.” Seven women? “No, seven children between, uh, five women, over 43 years. That’s it.” “Well, who’re you sleeping with these days?” Masekela says to me reprovingly, his open, merry face looking displeased. When I tell them, though, they’re choking on that corn again, wondering which planet I stepped off.
Jones has six daughters and one son. The son was born in London. “The morning we went in to have him, Lennon went in with a sleeping bag because Yoko was there. She lost the baby, but my son was born on the same day in 1968. He was premature though, 14 weeks, we didn’t know if he was going to live or not. He made it though — he’s a big sucker now.”
In the past, Jones’s children have said he was a neglectful father. “It wasn’t so bad,” he says. “I understand much more now about nurturing children, but I always loved my children. They know when you don’t know what you’re doing; they forgive that. The way I was raised, if you were able to eat every day, and had clothes on, and a roof over your head, you were being a good father. We didn’t understand words like nourishing and cholesterol and all that kind of stuff then. I don’t think they knew about it in the Thirties and Forties.”
Jones has come a long way from his childhood, South Side Chicago apartment slum, and a mother who was taken away from him and put in an asylum.
He’s paid his dues. In 1974 he suffered two brain aneurisms and came close to death. In the Eighties he had a nervous breakdown. Working too hard, people said. He doesn’t suffer any depression or anxiety attacks now though, he says. “After two brain operations and a nervous breakdown, you have given it the office. It’s enough.”
And so being rich and famous, is it good? Is it over-rated? Does he like spending money on things? “You know, I don’t think of it like that, I think of it as protecting you, so you aren’t vulnerable to external stuff — that’s what I like about it a lot. I got my first message about that from Picasso (he worked in France in the Fifties, across the street from Picasso).
“I saw his independence, and his ability to create into old age, do whatever he wanted to do. And I loved that. That hasn’t been normal circumstances for Afro-Americans, you know, so I like the idea of that very much. He had 12 litho plants, and nobody forcing him to go in any direction except the way he wanted — he was independent. Only way to be. Somebody else is going to own it if you don’t, right?
`The only good of being famous is if you can help somebody,” he says. “People were there for me, you know. Ray Charles. We used to have dreams. And we lived out a lot of the dreams.”
But even tonight, as the crowds are beginning to throng outside the round concert hall, the mounted police moving into position, there are still bad things going on out there.
“I think racism is at its worst ever,” says Quincy Jones — and he’s seen plenty. “Marlon said this to me, he said: `After all the shit we went through in the Fifties and Sixties, I can’t believe it’s as bad as it is.’ Especially young people, I can’t understand that — young people have no reason at all to be into racism.”
Maybe it’s the music, I think later on, after hearing Masekela play. Maybe the kids just can’t hear the music.
`I think racism is at its worst ever. I can’t understand — young people have no reason at all to be into racism’