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Quincy Jones: The Story of an American Musician
by Gerald Early
PART I:
THE LIGHTNING STRIKE OF EGO
In the opening paragraph of his monumental essay on the first Ali-Frazier fight, Norman Mailer calls ego "the great word of the twentieth century." But the magnitude of ego has long endured. Ego has probably been the great term for all human centuries, even before Freud invented the concept; for ego is the engine that drives human achievement, and, as Mailer wrote, "gives us authority to declare we are sure of ourselves when we are not." Ego is the great cauldron of confidence, the design of daring.
Still, Mailer has a point about the 20th century, the American Century. What society has so defined itself by the power of its inner desire, by its own yearning to accommodate the fantasies and impulses of its citizens? There is no French Dream, or Russian Dream, or African Dream, or British Dream, but everyone the world over knows about the American Dream. America is the place to come, so the myth goes, to get what the ego wants, to fulfill the longings of the self.
No other period has given the ego bigger stages or platforms upon which to realize itself and its ambitions than the American century. And one of those outlets is American popular culture, the great circus, bazaar, and shell game of diversions and pastimes, the vast populist prairie and New World frontier of cheap yet captivating entertainment and mass-appeal art. Popular culture is where the leveling and liberating impulses of democracy and the voraciousness of capitalism meet to produce the sublime and the ridiculous. And there, African Americans have vaunted their egos and made their psychic need for expression and their unwavering cry for justice and power reverberate around the country and across the globe. In American popular culture, Quincy Delight Jones, Jr.-African American, musician, entrepreneur, handsome ladies' man, and American dreamer-has become one of the realm's grand princes, a monarch of all he surveys. And his success, his rise to greatness, is as much the result of ego as of the immensity of his talent.
As music critic Nelson George points out, ". . . along with Miles Davis, [Quincy Jones] is the only survivor of the bebop era who has stayed contemporary and continued to have an impact on today's music." This is highly unusual for any musician. Most enter music emotionally and professionally at a young age and play the kind of music they explored then for the rest of their lives, either with small variations to acknowledge the passage of time or with none at all. The reason for this has a great deal to do with the inability of most people, even musicians, to listen to, let alone absorb and perform, a wide variety of music. Moreover, musicians who begin playing a kind of music when they form their identities as adults often continue to perform this type because it is so intricately and intimately tied to their sense of self when they reached that pivotal stage in life. And not only is it difficult emotionally and psychologically to play many widely different forms of music, but it is difficult technically as well-insecurities about limitations can bind even the most impressive player to a certain style.
It takes an extraordinary amount of ego, or perhaps an extraordinary kind of ego, for a musician (or any artist) to think that he can influence his field over a period of several decades and learn to handle new expressions and aesthetic possibilities with the same ease as he did in his youth-that he can learn, in short, to speak to new audiences in their own tongues. And few musicians have the temerity to endlessly impose their will on any material at hand; to shape the world, artistically, not only on any terms but in any terms.
It is interesting that of the beboppers who emerged after World War II only Miles Davis and Quincy Jones survived as major musical presences with fresh ideas beyond the age when anyone would have expected it of them. The careers of both men, in fact, ran parallel to each other, but in different directions. Davis, like Jones, a trumpeter, moved from style to style in jazz, from bebop to cool to a sort of semi-avant-garde in the 1960s to a kind of rock-funk sound in the 1970s that was mostly a furious and sometimes undisciplined extension of the avant-garde ideas he had been experimenting with. He was enormously attracted to youth, and when he became older, his sidemen continued to be young. In addition, Davis displayed his ego by being something of a disaffected exhibitionist and a street-oriented misanthrope, stances that he managed to make appealing and hip, rather than psychopathic and infantile (which, in some measure, they were), by infusing them with racial angst and masculine aggression. He was an extraordinarily proud black man but to some a disagreeable one. However, he never ceased to be a jazz musician, a soloist, a man consumed with the nature and meaning of his own sound.
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Thursday, June 23, Noon-1 p.m ET
