Growing up on the South Side of Chicago during the Great Depression, Quincy Jones — the legendary producer who worked with everyone from Ray Charles and Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson — wanted to be a different kind of kingpin.
“I wanted to be a gangster until I was 11,” says Jones in the new Netflix documentary “Quincy,” premiering Friday. “You wanna be what you see, and that’s all we ever saw.”
But after discovering an old, upright piano — the first of multiple instruments he would go on to play — Jones put aside any Al Capone goals and began his journey to becoming one of the biggest bosses in the history of music. The 85-year-old icon’s seven-decade reign in the game is documented by directors Rashida Jones — his 42-year-old actress-daughter — and Alan Hicks in “Quincy.”
From his early days hanging out backstage with Count Basie to ruling the Grammy stage with Jackson’s “Thriller” blockbuster in 1984, the film reveals a man who was driven by music as “his way of breaking through” as a young African-American, Hicks says.
No doubt, Jones was a groundbreaker both musically and racially. “In the ’50s,” says Hicks, “when they would not let African-American arrangers arrange for strings, Quincy said, ‘Well, to hell with that! I’m going to move to Paris, and I’m going to arrange for strings. I’m going to build my skill set and come back.’”
Reflecting on his time studying in Paris with Stravinsky teacher Nadia Boulanger, Jones says in the film, “France made me feel free as an artist and as a black man.”
Jones was also a pioneer composing for movies like “In Cold Blood” and “In the Heat of the Night” in the ’60s, and becoming the first black vice president of a major label at Mercury Records in 1961.
It was there that Jones made his producing breakthrough behind the boards for Lesley Gore’s No. 1 hit, “It’s My Party,” in 1963. Then he arranged and conducted for Sinatra on 1964’s “It Might as Well Be Swing.”
“Between Ray Charles and Sinatra, I learned how to live,” says Jones, whose agreements with both titans were made solely on a handshake.
His most famous musical partnership, though, would come with Jackson. While making their first album together, 1979’s “Off the Wall,” Jones recalls, “[Michael] was so shy, sometimes he’d sit down and sing behind the couch with his back to me.”
But “Quincy” also reveals the man behind all of the music. The film details his struggles with a schizophrenic mother, who was committed to a mental institution when he was 7; his workaholism — which contributed to the breakup of his marriage to “The Mod Squad” actress Peggy Lipton, Rashida’s mother; and health problems, including a brain aneurysm in 1974.
“At this stage of his life, it was important to really give people a chance to hang out with him, to see what his personality is like, because that’s a big part of his success,” Hicks says. “That mixture of his personality and that talent is, I think, the secret sauce.”
Indeed, while producing the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016, Jones is shown getting love from an array of stars, including Oprah Winfrey, whom he discovered while casting 1985’s “The Color Purple,” which he produced, and Will Smith, whose “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” came from Q’s production company.
Jones sums up the philosophy behind his off-the-charts achievements this way: “I’d rather say ‘I’m sorry I did’ rather than ‘I wish I had.’”