![]() I had them come back to New York in Monday and meet me at Mercury with Quincy and play him the song. As she recounted to Anthony DeCurtis, songwriters John Madara and David White played it for her after a gig in the Catskills, after which she “just flipped out. “You Don’t Own Me,” Lesley Gore’s most famous song, didn’t come to her through Jones. “You can’t match a genius like Quincy Jones.” “He heard my demos, Quincy called me up, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” the late Gore said in a live interview with Rolling Stone‘s Anthony DeCurtis in 2006. The first fruit of that creative union, the upbeat, youthful hit single “It’s My Party,” turned Gore into an overnight star just as the Beatles were jumpstarting youth culture for a momentous new decade. “She had a mellow, distinctive voice and sang in tune, which a lot of grownup rock ‘n’ roll singers couldn’t do, so I signed her,” he remembered in Q. Mostly he’d been working with jazzy singers such as Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Nina Simone – but in Gore, he saw the future. At the time, he was doing A&R and production for Mercury Records, where he had been hired as the first black vice president of a major New York record label. Lesley Gore was a typical suburban teenager before her demo tape fell into Jones’ hands. If you keep working in the same style all the time you get stale. “It’s all music – you’re still dealing with the same twelve notes in the scale whether it is Lesley Gore or Gillespie. “I really don’t worry too much about the categories” he told Record Mirror. By 1963, he’d moved all the way up to producing his old boss, on Gillespie’s 1963 album New Wave! Although there’s not much to distinguish the album, production-wise, it’s a clear, crisp document of the Ambassador of Jazz during his potent Latin and Afro-Cuban phase, including spirited runs through Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova standards “One Not Samba” and “Chega de Saudade.” Jones, who was about to have his first pop success with Lesley Gore, was perfecting the fine art of the genre crossover. In his role as a jazz trumpeter, he began playing with Gillespie in 1956, becoming the legend’s music director in the process. ![]() ![]() He had style, soul, technique, substance,” Jones said in Q. “I had loved Dizzy since I was twelve years old. Here are 20 of his greatest productions and compositions for other artists. The pop and R&B of the 21st century would be unrecognizable without his influence. ![]() From there, Jones’ groundbreaking mix of studio technology, top-tier songwriting and sculptural arrangements – culminating in Jackson’s Thriller – altered the sonic landscape of the Eighties and beyond. A stroke in 1974 nearly ended his life, but he bounced back quickly, engineering the triumphant rise of Michael Jackson to solo megastardom, starting with 1979’s historic Off the Wall. In the Sixties, Jones became a prolific soundtrack composer and a recording artist in his own right. His production work began to take precedence in the early Sixties, when he helmed the first recordings an unknown singer named Lesley Gore, who promptly assumed the status of pop icon he also began garnering Grammy nominations, eventually taking home 27 of the awards. He was even in on the ground floor of rock & roll, conducting and arranging Big Maybelle’s 1955 record “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” two years before Jerry Lee Lewis recorded his hit version of the song. Born in 1933, Jones began as a jazz trumpeter, and he worked his way up to a spot in Dizzy Gillespie’s band while honing his chops as a producer, composer and arranger for everyone from Count Basie to Duke Ellington and Ray Charles. When Quincy Jones, in his famously freewheeling interview with New York magazine earlier this year, was asked to name the greatest musical innovation of his storied career, he answered, “Everything I’ve done.” It’s hard to argue with that.
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