[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Tiffany Hansen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hansen, in for Alison Stewart. Thanks so much for spending part of your Friday with us. We are so grateful you're here. Now, look, if you're looking for something to binge watch this weekend, we have a suggestion for you. How about The Penguin on HBO? In fact, the last episode of the first season premieres on Sunday. I believe one of the actors who is stealing scenes in that series is Cristin Milioti. She plays Sofia Falcone, a member of a crime family who has, well, complicated relationships with her relatives.

She joins us on Tuesday for a watch party, so you can get ahead of that conversation by catching up on The Penguin this weekend, but that's coming up next week. Today's show we will hear live in studio a performance from the Brooklyn Choir Project. We'll also hear selections from our recent Get Lit with All Of It BookClub event that featured author Dinaw Mengestu and musician Angelique Kidjo. Right now, we're going to get started. Let's do it. Quincy Jones passed away on Sunday at the age of 91.

The legendary media mogul has been remembered as a pioneering composer and producer and trumpeter, whose career began in jazz in the big bands of the 1950s. His credits ranked from Frank Sinatra classics like this one.

[MUSIC - Frank Sinatra: Fly Me to the Moon]

Fly me to the moon

Let me play among the stars

Tiffany Hansen: Two hits from Michael Jackson, including the bestselling album of all time, Thriller.

[MUSIC - Michael Jackson: Thriller]

'Cause this is thriller, thriller night

And no one's going to save you from the beast about to strike

You know it's thriller, thriller night

Tiffany Hansen: Jones also scored various films throughout his career, earning two Oscar nominations for Best Original Score and one Best Picture nomination as producer on The Color Purple. Jones contributions and creations included the hip-hop, and R&B magazine vibes and production on the song We Are the World. In a tribute to Jones for The New York Times, critic Wesley Morris praised Jones ability to connect.

He wrote his approach, his Jones' approach to music involved not simply the erasure of boundaries, but an emphasis on confluence of putting some of this with some of that and a little bit of this thing over here, bossa nova together with jazz, Donna Summer doing Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Van Halen, Michael Jackson. Wesley Morris joins us in studio now. Welcome, Wesley.

Wesley Morris: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Tiffany Hansen: Glad you're here. All right. Listeners, we want to talk about Quincy Jones with you as well. What is your favorite Quincy Jones credit? What did you hear in his music? Do you have any personal experiences with him that you can share, special connections to his work? You can call us, you can text us at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Of course, we're on Instagram as well @AllOfItWNYC. All right. Wesley, let's just start with this book that you reference in your piece about Quincy Jones.

Wesley Morris: Yes.

Tiffany Hansen: Quincy Jones Orchestrated the Sound of America. That's the title of the book. It's sort of-- I don't know. Would you say it's sort of the definitive book about him?

Wesley Morris: No.

Tiffany Hansen: Okay.

Wesley Morris: The definitive book about Quincy Jones is Q: The Autobiography he wrote several years ago. First of all, it's a coffee table book, right? I weighed it. It weighs 3.9 pounds. 3 pounds and 9 ounces. It's mostly pictures and ephemeral, like there's letters and court cards.

Tiffany Hansen: Journal entries, things like that.

Wesley Morris: No. I mean, there could be some journal-ish things in there, but a lot of it is photos and someone has written through a lot of these things and connected them into these sections that basically lay his life out. The amazing thing about this book is that in every picture, he is with somebody that you would never expect. I mean, I'm going to say some producer, because in a lot of ways, we don't-- A lot of music listeners don't really know what a producer really does. Why is this producer with every single person who meant anything to the 20th century from 1940 something to up?

Pretty much the book came out in 2009, I believe. There's just Hillary Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick. I mean, some of the people are obvious and then some of them aren't. Colin Powell, they're at some function together and they're just talking. It's just this man lived an extraordinary life in addition to being extraordinarily talented.

Tiffany Hansen: Right.

Wesley Morris: This connections thing that I'm talking about is born out in the music, but it also just part of the life he lived.

Tiffany Hansen: Right. All right, so let's be clear. The name, the title of the book is The Complete Quincy Jones.

Wesley Morris: The Complete Quincy Jones.

Tiffany Hansen: You also recommend the book, Q.

Wesley Morris: I do, because it's his-- He gets into all kinds of stories about decisions he made, explaining how Thriller came to happen, how bad came to happen, how Frank Sinatra, how doing Sinatra at the Sands, his great live album from '67, I believe, came to happen, all kinds of stuff. His life.

Tiffany Hansen: You mentioned that it's sort of this book that we're talking about now, The Complete Quincy Jones. You mentioned that in your article. Again, I should get the title of your article correct. Quincy Jones Orchestrated the Sound of America. I tend to agree. This book that we've been talking about, The Complete Quincy Jones, that has this sort of ephemera with its kind of written through. It is still nice to kind of for fans of his, who may not be familiar with every intricate part of his life, to kind of get a little glimpse into.

Wesley Morris: Oh, yes. I mean, it's a big glimpse. Wait, I also would say there's-- you'll never get to the bottom of this man. [laughs]

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, yes.

Wesley Morris: There's so much music. Just the music alone, in just remembering, trying to figure out how to appraise this man's meaning to us over all these centuries. I was like, "Oh, right, he did that. Oh, right, he did that, too."

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, it was funny, I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, and I'm thinking, I cannot imagine someone saying that their musical life has not had some music in it that wasn't touched by him. I mean, it would boggle the mind to find a corner that he hasn't touched.

Wesley Morris: No, there isn't. I mean, and also, I think even if you don't know he's touching it, he's touching it.

Tiffany Hansen: Right.

Wesley Morris: I mean, which is kind of the one of the power aspect--

Tiffany Hansen: Right. It's like eight degrees of separation.

Wesley Morris: Right, exactly.

Tiffany Hansen: You could play the Kevin Bacon game, but with Quincy Jones, and figure out, like, where this piece of music eventually leads back to him.

Wesley Morris: Right, or have you loved this song? Guess who produced it?

Tiffany Hansen: Yes.

Wesley Morris: Or guess what this sample is from. It's from a Quincy Jones. Something Quincy Jones produced.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes. All right. Listeners, we would love your reflections on Quincy Jones as well, of course. Quincy Jones died on Sunday at the age of 91. You have no doubt reflections on his music and what maybe his music meant to your life. You've had connections to his work over the years. Call us. Text us. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also find us on Instagram, @AllOfItWNYC. All right. Wesley, your colleague at The New York Times, Ben Sisario. Did I say that right?

Wesley Morris: Yes, you did.

Tiffany Hansen: Excellent. Put together a list of 14 Essential Songs from Quincy Jones. Seems short.

Wesley Morris: I mean, it's the 14 Essential Songs. I mean, he had to draw the-- He would still be typing.

Tiffany Hansen: He would still be typing.

Wesley Morris: He'd still be typing. I mean, he had to draw the line somewhere. 14 seemed like random enough to make you think, "Oh, well, there's got to be way more than that."

Tiffany Hansen: Well, exactly.

Wesley Morris: There are. [laughs]

Tiffany Hansen: Exactly right. The list includes. We talked about jazz, and I want to get into that a little bit. Let's hear some jazz. It's called Evening in Paris. Jones composed, released this on his 1957 album, This Is How I Feel About Jazz.

[MUSIC - Quincy Jones: Evening in Paris]

Tiffany Hansen: 1957. Wesley, let's talk a little bit about his early life in jazz. Extremely formative years for him.

Wesley Morris: Yes, he plays all, many instruments. I mean, he tried all the brass instruments and settled on the trumpet. He plays the piano. He played the piano very well as well, but then winds up working with, at some point, very early Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, GT Grice. Being part of these big bands gave him a sense of how the bands should play the music according to the people who were leading them. His real gift initially, in addition to being a fine trumpeter, was as an arranger. Figuring out how a piece of music should sound based on the instruments you have at your disposal.

Tiffany Hansen: I do think so-- Back in the day, I played the cello, so I have a little--

Wesley Morris: Oh, okay.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, I have sort of a comparison I draw in my head, and that is of a conductor of an orchestra.

Wesley Morris: That's right.

Tiffany Hansen: Conductors of orchestras who have a working knowledge of an instrument, whether it's a string instrument or a brass instrument or percussion, I feel are able to connect to those performers and to the performance in a way that sort of transcends someone who doesn't have that experience with an instrument. What I hear you saying is that potentially that may have had some influence for Quincy Jones as well, in terms of he has this experience with all of these instruments and he can go, "Oh, yes, I remember. This can do that. This instrument can do that."

Wesley Morris: Yes. Well, you can hear in the productions what his priorities always are. Many of his great songs feature horns. The horn section of some of his great pop songs are great. Really, I think he just had a sense of instrumentation and sound that comes from other places, like the synthesizer, for instance, and all of the temperatures and things the synthesizers can do. To your point about band leadership, one of the things that occurred to me in thinking about him was the ways in which being a producer is simultaneously being a band leader, but also a casting director. Finding out which players make the most sense to play which thing on which song.

Tiffany Hansen: Which other people.

Wesley Morris: Right, but he kept a core of musicians on a lot of the later albums. This is sort of his studio production peak, one of the peaks during the late '70s, early '80s, mid-'80s, had a lot of the same musicians on them. These people are top of their field, people like Greg Filling Gaines, the great keyboardist. They're finding these great sounds to put on these albums, things you've never heard before. I think Michael Jackson's Bad, for instance, from 1987 is-- in addition to being, I think it's still the second highest selling album of all time after Thriller.

Quincy Jones is responsible for those two pieces of music. I also think that Bad has some incredible sounding things on. It does not sound like anything else.

Tiffany Hansen: Well, I want to go back just for a second to-- We were talking about his early roots in jazz. Specifically, where can we hear that influence?

Wesley Morris: I mean, just pick Sinatra at the Sands, the live Sinatra album he did. There's so many things you could choose, but I mean there's a great Art Farmer record that he did that you could hear that on, but something like that Sinatra at the Sands LP from-- I keep saying '67, I think I'm right about that.

Tiffany Hansen: Someone will tell us.

Wesley Morris: It was Sinatra-- he had never swung like that before. What I mean by that was he is finding ways in the arrangements of these songs, songs he has sung many, many, many, many times. There's a pleasure that you can hear in his keeping up with these songs, because at this point, in '67, he's a middle-aged man who is extremely familiar with the live performance experience. I think what Quincy Jones is doing in his arrangement of these standards is, and you can hear this on the album, Frank Sinatra is enlivened by what these, what the horns are doing, for instance, and being able to move in with like surf these sounds in a lot of ways.

I mean, he just never sounded cooler than he does on that album. He never sounded more-- It's crazy to say this about Frank Sinatra, one of the greatest voices of all time, but never sounded more self-possessed, and also, he was having a good time. He was loving singing these songs this way. A lot of that came from Quincy Jones' imagining of how else or how otherly vibrant Frank Sinatra could sound. He just sounded like he'd heard these songs and he'd sung them for the first time that night.

Tiffany Hansen: We have a couple of texts here, Wesley. "I'm dedicated Quincy Jones fan. I love all of his collaborations with Michael Jackson, his symphonic mixes with rock, for me, define his music."

Wesley Morris: Yes, yes.

Tiffany Hansen: Back in the early '90s, I was at a Yankees game on a sunny afternoon, Quincy Jones sang the national anthem in an arrangement that was his own. It made the song unlike any other time I've heard it sung. It brought the entire stadium to a complete silent stand hill, hot dog, and beer vendors stopped in their tracks. That would be something at Yankee Stadium. You could hear a pin drop.

Wesley Morris: It's a real gift what he had, right?

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, I mean, I think he had a command, obviously. We throw around the term mogul, but he really was a singular figure in music for decades.

Wesley Morris: Yes, I mean, I just like just to think about what it was that made him so singular. It really is what that person who texted about the Yankees game is talking about. I mean, the way I envision the difference between him and somebody else is you could give 15 producer arrangers the same sheet music, and obviously, you get 15 different versions of it back.

Tiffany Hansen: Right.

Wesley Morris: But I just feel like Quincy Jones' would be what he would do with the notes on that page or those pages, depending on what we're talking about, would completely transform the meaning of the song while also keeping it recognizable in some way. There'd be subtle changes that would really shift the temperature of the song. They wouldn't be radical rethinkings of the song. He would be bringing out some element that is, to use an engineer's term, like down in the mix somewhere and bullet pulling that up closer to your ear somehow.

Tiffany Hansen: Listeners, Wesley and I would love to have you in this conversation. 212-433-9692. You can call us, you can text us at that number. You can find us on Instagram @AllOfItWNYC. We're talking about Quincy Jones. Wesley, let's bring Peter into the conversation from Park Slope. Good afternoon, Peter.

Peter: Hi. Thanks much for taking my call. I just wanted to plug Ai No Corrida by Quincy Jones and Charles May, off of 1981's The Dude. If soul bossa nova from Austin Powers is enough for you, I know Corrida is just six minutes of absolute great party jam music. I probably listen to it about 200 times in the last year.

Wesley Morris: The last year? Well, damn. Okay.

Peter: I came upon it out of nowhere and then just absolutely, just probably ruined my speakers by listening to it over and over.

Wesley Morris: You could also ruin your voice by trying to get up there with those notes that Patti Austin and Charles May are doing. I mean, it's an impossible song.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, so tell us what that song is about.

Wesley Morris: Do you want to do it, Peter, or is that my job? Who's doing it?

Tiffany Hansen: Go for it.

Wesley Morris: Is Peter going in--? Oh, Peter's here. [laughs] It's basically--

Peter: I think my singing days are long behind me.

Wesley Morris: Oh, we're not singing it. No. That's Patti's job. Basically, it's just this really great high energy song that is a-- I think it's a remake or it's a cover of someone else's song. Somebody else did it. This is a great example. If you listen to the original and you listen to Quincy's, you can hear what the differences are. Quincy loved head singing. He loved a singer who could like-- it's not even-- It's falsetto, but it's also something bigger and brighter than that.

Tiffany Hansen: All right, we're going to listen to some more music coming up. We have to take a break. We're talking with New York Times critic Wesley Morris about Quincy Jones. Stay with us. More is coming up on the way. This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hansen, in for Alison Stewart today, and we are talking about Quincy Jones, who died at the age of 91 this past Sunday. We're talking about this historic figure, this just absolute towering figure in music with New York Times critic Wesley Morris. Wesley, we can't wrap up this conversation without talking about We Are the World, which I'll get to in a second. I do want to bring Maddie in Brooklyn into the conversation really quickly. Good afternoon, Maddie.

Maddie: Hi.

Wesley Morris: Hi.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes. You have a Quincy Jones story for us.

Maddie: Yes. My dad plays saxophone, and I think his biggest performance was at the Garlic Festival in Connecticut in 2001. He was always very into jazz and especially Quincy Jones. My favorite song that he would always play for us is the theme from Ironside, which is kind of obscure maybe, I don't know, but--

Wesley Morris: Not if you had a TV in the '60s or whatever, late '70s.

Maddie: I never saw Ironside. I don't really know what it is either. He would always talk about it, and I just really like that song. I think it's super interesting and very, I don't know, different and unique.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes. Thanks for the perspective there, Maddie. Let's go to Don in Oyster Bay. Hi, Don.

Don: Hello there. I just wanted to mention about the Quincy Jones concert that I saw on PBS last night live in Paris, and with the orchestra that he had. When I tell you that it was beyond amazing, every single person in the audience were dancing, smiles on their face with complete joy. The music was absolutely incredible, a lot of Michael Jackson tunes. Quincy, at the end, he conducted Thriller, and it was just off the charts. It was amazing. That's what I wanted to mention that. Quincy was the maestro of-- He was like the Mozart of our times. That's what I wanted to mention.

Tiffany Hansen: Don, thanks so much for the call. Hey, Wesley, have you seen that PBS?

Wesley Morris: I've never seen that. There's a lot of Quincy Jones in me, but not all of it. You'll never get to the bottom, but I will definitely find that. I also want to see if I can find that Star-Spangled Banner from the Yankees game.

Tiffany Hansen: There's got to be YouTube video of that somewhere, right?

Wesley Morris: I'll see if I can find it.

Tiffany Hansen: We've been talking about Quincy Jones as a connector, someone who brings different styles of music together, someone who brings different people together, different corners of the world. I'm just wondering how you think about him as sort of the great connector musically in terms of bringing us together.

Wesley Morris: Well, I mean, if you think about the idea of something selling 22 million copies of whatever it is, right? If 40, 40 million copies, if we're talking, this is Bad and Thriller alone, right? The idea that he did the music for-- He did the opening credits for Roots, which is still one of the most highly watched television events of all time. I think that there is something about his belief that there are no barriers between us and that they should not stand the ones that have been erected to keep us apart.

You can hear that in the casting of these songs. You can hear it in the sounds on the songs themselves. Him defying what executives-- He was also a record executive, we should say. What other executives wanted to keep separate in music, Quincy Jones was just like, "No, I'm calling Eddie Van Halen, he's going to come in here and he's going to play the guitar on Beat It. Period."

Tiffany Hansen: Right. All right, let's hear a song that I think is fairly ubiquitous for most people, but in case you haven't heard it, here it is.

[MUSIC - U.S.A. for Africa: We Are the World]

There comes a time

When we heed a certain call

When the world must come together as one

There are people dying

Tiffany Hansen: Obviously, that is We Are the World for people who don't know.

Wesley Morris: There are people who don't know.

Tiffany Hansen: There are people who don't know.

Wesley Morris: It's a long time ago. I'm not mad at people who don't know.

Tiffany Hansen: Okay.

Wesley Morris: [laughs] I mean, there's a documentary. You can watch it.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, you can watch the documentary.

Wesley Morris: The Greatest Night in Pop.

Tiffany Hansen: Just one sentence. Quincy Jones brings pretty much everybody together to sing this song.

Wesley Morris: Yes. Well, they get brought together for him, 1985. After the American Music Awards, they bring all these. I think it's 47 performers together, from The Pointer Sisters to Steve Perry, from Journey, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard.

Tiffany Hansen: Did you say Lionel Richie?

Wesley Morris: Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson wrote We Are the World.

Tiffany Hansen: Yep. Lionel Richie, that first voice we heard there.

Wesley Morris: Quincy Jones's job is to figure out how to herd all these cats into something beautiful.

Tiffany Hansen: Talk about bringing people together.

Wesley Morris: Yes. He brought the most of the most.

Tiffany Hansen: All right, last question, and then we're going to beat it out of here. Thank you. Anybody like Quincy Jones today? I'm going to say the person that maybe was the closest Pharrell.

Wesley Morris: Yes, fair, but again, it's not the same. This is not about Pharrell and Chad Hugo, or even Pharrell on his own. I just think there's nobody really comparable. He's got a lot of progeny, is what I would say.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes.

Wesley Morris: Some of them are in trouble right now. Some of his progeny. I won't even say the name, but I think that there's nobody quite like Quincy Jones, because Quincy Jones, the world was different, for one thing. I also think that his interests were different. I mean, jazz, classical, pop, rock, R&B, funk. He liked everything, and he brought everything into the music that he made, which is slightly different from what's happening now with great producers.

Tiffany Hansen: All right, the title of the article by Wesley Morris in The New York Times is Quincy Jones Orchestrated the Sound of America. Wesley, thanks for your time today.

Wesley Morris: Thanks for having me.

Tiffany Hansen: We're going to go out on a song that you have encouraged us to play from someone, I also don't think people would necessarily think, "Ah, Quincy Jones," Donna Summer.

Wesley Morris: Oh, yes.

Tiffany Hansen: All right, let's do it.

Wesley Morris: My favorite Donna Summer album, Donna Summer from 1982, the same year as Thriller. He was working on Thriller this at the same time. Play it, Donna.

[MUSIC - Donna Summer: Love Is in Control]

Hung around with big shots

Never knew love was in the sights

I guess I missed the target

Caught up in a different line of fire

But I know since I've been aiming

For the sweetness in your soul

Your name is on the bullet

And it's getting ready to explode

There's been a change inside my life

And I just want to let you know

I've got my finger on the trigger

Love is in control

I've got my finger on the trigger

I ain't letting go