FIVE SONGS YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW HE WORKED ON.
The word legendary can be overused in music, but its more than justified when it comes to American musician, producer, composer and songwriter Quincy Jones, who has passed away, aged 91. Even if you’ve only got a vague interest in music, you’ve probably heard Quincy Jones’ name. You may even know that he produced Michael Jackson’s Thriller—still the biggest-selling album of all-time—as well as Bad and Off the Wall. That ground-breaking trilogy alone would guarantee his place in musical history. But with a career that started in late 1940s jazz and continued, almost unabated, for the rest of his life, it’s perhaps unsurprising that his achievements and influence run far deeper than those three classic albums and the many Instagram reel exploring how they were made.
To convey the extraordinary breadth of Quincy Jones’ work in one article would be near impossible. We’re talking about one of the true giants of 20th century music here, a man whose resume includes producing the most unlikely granny-friendly singers imaginable to being sampled by hundreds of underground hip-hop artists. So instead, to give you a flavour of how his work helped to shape the best of not only 20th century music but also film, here are five essential tracks that you may or may not know he had a hand in.
1. QUINCY JONES: ‘SOUL BOSSA NOVA’ (1962)
This is perhaps one of the ultimate songs you didn’t know you knew. Jones was already a veteran by the time he wrote and recorded it in 1962. First as a trumpeter and then increasingly as a musical director and producer, he’d already worked with jazz giants like Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan, rock’n’rollers such as Elvis and Little Richard, and even the easy-listening likes of Andy Williams and Nana Mouskouri.
However, this smooth, Brazilian-influenced track (which Jones claimed to have written in just 20 minutes) became the calling card for his solo work. Today, over 60 years later, it immediately conjures up images of 1960s cool.
But where do you know that impossibly catchy intro from? Just over 30 years later, Mike Myers used it as the theme tune to the Austin Powers movie series, which themselves became synonymous with the 1990s.
2. LESLEY GORE: IT’S MY PARTY (1963)
Many of the defining images of America in the early 1960s are linked to the Civil Rights movement, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One year before that, Quincy Jones—who’d experienced segregation and racial hatred first-hand while touring the southern states as a young jazz musician—had been quietly resetting boundaries in his own way by producing worldwide hit singles for white teenage New Yorker Lesley Gore, of which ‘It’s My Party’ was the first and biggest.
Its lyrics are a world away from the likes of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘A Change is Gonna Come,’ but ‘It’s My Party’ hugely benefitted from Jones’ influence and input and became one of the era’s most evergreen songs, one that has been covered numerous times by artists such as Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin (who had a number-one hit with it in 1981) and Bryan Ferry.
3. MATT MONRO: ON DAYS LIKE THESE (1969)
For the uninitiated, Matt Monro was a former London bus driver who found fame in the 1950s and 1960s as a smooth, safe, middle-of-the-road crooner of the kind favoured by everyone’s parents—hardly the British Frank Sinatra. Yet in 1969, he sung, ‘On Days Like These,’ the theme tune to one of the greatest British films ever made: The Italian Job. And that theme tune had been written by…? Yes, Quincy Jones, who by the late 1960s, was increasingly in demand for film and TV scores.What’s more, Matt Monro’s version of the song was produced by George Martin, who famously worked with The Beatles on all of their records, meaning that it provides an unlikely link between two of the most influential producers of the 20th century.
4. BROTHERS JOHNSON: STRAWBERRY LETTER 23 (1977)
By the mid-1970s, as well as film and TV work (such as the funky theme tune for detective series Ironside), Jones was still as prolific as ever and had worked with soul giants such as Aretha Franklin. One of this most important productions during this time, however, was ‘Strawberry Letter 23’ for a relatively new American funk group called Brothers Johnson.
Like ‘Soul Bossa Nova,’ this is an earworm of a song that you’ll instantly recognise even if the name means nothing to you. Despite disco being everywhere during 1977, this slinky number became a huge hit in America and, again like ‘Soul Bossa Nova’, became forever linked with classic 1990s cinema when it was used in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.
If that wasn’t enough, it was also sampled for Outkast’s ‘Ms Jackson’, one of the biggest and best tracks of the 2000s.
5. THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL AIR THEME TUNE (1990)
You’d be hard-pushed to find a millennial who’s never heard of the 1990s sitcom that made Will Smith a household name, and you’d be almost as hard-pushed to find a millennial who can’t reel off at least some of the theme tune (“chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’, all cool”).
Now, Jones didn’t write the lyrics; Will Smith did, but he did write the music over which Smith wrote his iconic rap. Jones was also instrumental in developing the show as an executive producer and securing Smith as its lead actor.
That’s just five songs out of the tens of thousands Quincy Jones contributed to during his 75-year-long career. It doesn’t even take into account ‘Rock with You,’ ‘Billie Jean,’ George Benson’s ‘Give Me the Night,’ Donna Summer’s ‘State of Independence,’ or even the American Live Aid song, ‘We Are the World.’
Sometimes, it’s only when a landmark artist dies that the breath-taking extent of the influence they created and left behind can be fully appreciated. Quincy Jones is among that very select group of such artists.