Remembering Quincy Jones
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.

Today, we remember Quincy Jones. He died Sunday at the age of 91. In his New York Times obit, music critic Ben Ratliff described Jones as one of the most powerful forces in American popular music for more than a century.

Jones started his career as a trumpeter in Lionel Hampton's big band in the early 50s, but he never became a noted instrumentalist. What made him famous and wealthy was his work as an arranger, composer, and record producer, work that spans from the big bands through bebop, pop, movie soundtracks, TV themes, and hip-hop.

He arranged or produced recordings for Sinatra, Ray Charles, Aretha, Dinah Washington, George Benson, and Ice-T, and he produced the Michael Jackson albums Off the Wall, Bad, and the best-selling album of all time, Thriller. His music has been sampled in many hip-hop recordings, and his 1962 recording, Soul Bossa Nova, was used as the theme to the Austin Powers films.

The multimedia company Quincy Jones Entertainment produced the sitcoms The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, In the House, and the sketch show Mad TV. I spoke with him in 2001 after the release of his memoir Q and a four CD box set by the same name of music featuring him as a trumpeter, arranger, composer, or producer. We started with a sampling of tracks from that collection. Another bride, another June, and...

Another sunny honey another season another reason for making whoopee Look at me I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree And I feel like I'm clinging to a cloud I can't understand

Fly me to the moon

Let me play among the stars Let me see what spring is like On Jupiter and Mars In other words, hold my hand In other words, baby, kiss me ♪

Ice-T, let me kick my credentials, a young player bred in South Central.

That's a sampling of music from the four-CT box set Q that was released at the same time as his memoir Q. That was back in 2001, when I spoke with him. One of the first musicians he became good friends with was Ray Charles. They met when Charles was 16 and Jones was 14. I asked Quincy Jones how they met.

I think it was at the Elks Club, Terry, where we used to, after we played two jobs, we'd work from 7 to 10 in the white tennis clubs where we'd play cup music of the popular music of the day, To Each His Own and Room Full of Roses. And then at 10 o'clock, we'd go play the black clubs, the Black and Tan, the Rock and Chair, and the Washington Educational and Social Club.

And we played for strippers, and we sang. Oh, really? We had choreography. We had everything. As kids, we were pretty cocky because we had a great band. We could read music very well. And we did everything. It was a show band, too. So we got most of the jobs that came around. It was nice. We played with Billie Holiday when we were in 48, behind her and then

In '49, we played with Billy Eckstine and Cab Calloway and all the bands that came through. So we were pretty confident in those days. And the band just kept getting tidy because we rehearsed a lot.

You said that you admired Ray Charles' independence. He was 16 years old. He was blind, but he had his own apartment. He got around town himself. He had a girlfriend. I mean, he had a lot of things that you wanted. Yes, he did. He had his own apartment, too, and two suits.

It was amazing. But I guess what impressed me the most with Ray is that he was so independent, and his sightlessness did not hinder him at all. It's one of the cherished friendships that I really have because as kids, we used to talk about everything. He'd show me how to write music in Braille.

Dizzy Gillespie songs like Eminem and Bebop, etc. And we used to dream about the future. Like, wouldn't it be great to work with a symphony orchestra? One day we're going to do that. One day we're going to have three girlfriends each, you know. One day we're going to do movies together. We're going to do all of that stuff. And we did it. That's what's amazing. We did, you know, In the Heat of the Night together. And we did With the World, all of those things. Everything.

the girls. So it's amazing to dream and have your dreams executed like that. Well, I thought I'd play a 1959 recording that you arranged for Ray Charles. And this is from the Genius of Ray Charles album, which was recorded in 1959. We're going to hear Let the Good Times Roll. Would you like to say anything about this track?

I would just like to add that we had half of Count Basie's band on that session and half of Duke Ellington's band on that session. And in those days, that's when I first started to work with Phil Ramone, the engineer, who's now a producer. And Ahmet Ertegun, Neshewe Ertegun, and Jerry Wexler came by because in those days, what you heard was what you got. It wasn't about fixing in the mix. There was nothing to mix.

This is Ray Charles, arrangement by Quincy Jones, Let the Good Times Roll. Let the good times roll. I say let the good times roll. I don't care if you're young or old. You ought to get together and let the good times roll.

Your first important music job was with the Lionel Hampton Band.

Big Band. You got that job while you were still in high school. How did he hire you when you were still in school? I had written a suite that I'd been working on for a long time called From the Four Winds, and it was almost a descriptive piece. And I didn't understand theory too well then, but I just went straight in. It didn't stop me from writing. I didn't understand key signatures or anything, and I would say silly things on the top of a trumpet part like...

A note, when you play B naturals, make the B naturals a half step lower because they sound funny if they're B naturals. And some guy said, idiot, just put a flat on the third line and it's a key signature. You know?

And so I did, because it didn't, it didn't bother me that I didn't understand it because I knew eventually I'd learn it. And so I gave this arrangement to, submitted this to Lionel Hampton. And he said, you wrote this, huh? I said, yeah. He played trumpet too. He said, yeah. Well, he said, how'd you like to join my band, please? He says, yeah.

Are you kidding? And so they had little brown leather bags for your trumpet then. I had that and just very few toilet articles and so forth. And I went and sat on that bus so nobody would change their mind. And I wouldn't have to ask the people at home whether I could go or not. And sure enough, everybody got on one by one. Hamp said hi, and I felt secure. Then Gladys Hampton got on the bus and said, uh-uh.

What is that child doing on this bus? And she said, no, son, you get off the bus. And so we'll try to talk later, but you go to school. And I was destroyed. And so I got a scholarship to Boston to the Berklee College of Music. And I got the call. A friend named Janet Turlow was singing with the band. And she reminded them. And they called and said, we'd like you to be with the band. I was 18 then, and I was ready.

I was told at school I'd be back with, I guess, down inside. You know when you go with a band like that, you never go back.

Now, you said that you were afraid that when you were playing with Hampton that Parker or Thelonious Monk might show up in the audience and you were worried they'd laugh at what you had to wear in the band. What did you have to wear in the Hampton band? Well, that incident happened when we were playing at a place on Broadway called Right Next Door to Birdland. I mean, totally adjacent. And both places were downstairs. And we had to wear Tyrolean hats...

shot

Shawl, Carlet, Coates, and Bermuda Shorts. Bermuda Shorts? Why? Oh, my God, the whole band. Why did you have to wear shorts? Oh, I don't know. That's just Hamp's idea. Hamp was like a rock and roll band, and he was the first rock and roll band because he attacked an audience like a rock and roll band. No prisoners, and he knew how to get them to. Well, some of the tenor solos were almost like a rock and roll band, too. Yes, and they'd walk in the theaters. They'd walk. They had thin-soled shoes. They'd walk over the audience's heads with...

with these thin-soled shoes on top of their chairs, you know. It was absolutely incredible. He had this sense of show business, but he had a lot of music in the band because, you know, they had people like Wes Montgomery and Charlie Mingus and Fats Navarro, some Clifford Brown, amazing musicians in the band. And I loved Hampton for having that ambidexterity because he liked great music, but he also liked to level his audience and take no prisoners. Until they were wrung out, he was not satisfied.

So did any of your bebop friends end up seeing you in that band that night? Well, that particular night, he had this favorite thing he'd like to do. He'd have everybody, he'd get his drumsticks and start a whole line, almost like a conga line. The saxophone section would follow him around the audience. He'd go around and beat the drumsticks on everybody's table. The trumpets and trombones were right behind him playing Flying Home.

Then he'd go upstairs. I said, oh, my God. Clifford Brown and I said, if he goes upstairs, we may run into Charlie Parker and Bud Powell and all these great musicians. And we went upstairs and he's playing his drumsticks all over the awnings. And the guys are saying, what is going on here?

He'd even go so far as to get in a taxi cab with a saxophone section and go to another club maybe three blocks away and play with the saxophone section of a band back at the ranch we're still playing.

So it was quite an experience. He had no shame, and he was a great musician. One of the great times of my life. So did Parker see you in your Bermuda shorts? Oh, yes. But on top of that, Parker would come next door. Bird would come next door. He loved to read music, and he was starring next door like the best.

52nd Street All-Stars, Bebop All-Stars. And they were looking for him next door. It was time for him to play a set. And he's sitting over there in our band playing second tenor because he loved to read music. And he's sitting for an hour while people are next door waiting to hear him as this genius of the 20th century. And he's over there playing second tenor parts to practice his reading. Because all the musicians read music back then.

So playing with the Hampton Band, did you get an appreciation of the value of show business in music? Or did you come to hate it and want something that threw that out the window, kind of like Parker threw show business values out the window? No, no, no, no. Because we were weaned and trained in Seattle.

That's the way we had to do in Seattle, too. We had to play shottishes. We had to play rhythm and blues. We had to play stripper music. We played comedy. I mean, the trombone player and myself had a comedy team called Dexedrine and Benzedrine.

Major Pickford. We used to steal all of the comedy lines from the older guys and wear hats and wine bottles in our pockets. It was insane. But no, not at all. We were used to that. He'd have gloves for the whole trumpet section. It would shine in the dark and you'd do kind of hand choreography and so forth. People could forget that those bands back there

well, basically to a dance band, to just make people want to feel good dancing. And,

And coincidentally, great innovation crawled through that platform, like Charlie Parker and the Billy Eckstein Band, the people in Miles Davis and so forth. Dizzy Gillespie from Cab Calloway. But these monsters, major, major musicians, happened to be in bands who were basically there for people to have a good time and dance. And it was about entertainment. And it was ironic because the...

underlying attitude with all of the bebop musicians is that we have heard Stravinsky now, we've done this, and we want to be pure artists. We don't want to entertain anymore. We don't want to sing. We don't want to have to dance or move or entertain an audience. Well, you know, one of the things you say about the Lionel Hampton band bus, and this might have something to do with why Gladys Hampton wanted you off the bus, was that there were four different sections of guys on the bus. Why don't you describe how that broke down?

Well, they had up front were the Holy Rollers, I guess, and then they had the Drinkers, and then they had the guys that indulged in sweet wheat, Giggle Grass, and they had the guys that were the hardcore, you know, like mainliners, really. Which section did you sit in? The sweet wheat. We were very young then, and I was 18 when I went with that band.

and you'd bounce back between that or trying to figure out how to make that work with Mogan David Wine or Manischewitz. It was ridiculous. Well, the first recording that you made was with the Lionel Hampton Band. This was in 1952. It's also your first recorded composition and first recorded arrangement. It's called Kingfish. Why don't you say something about what you think of this musically now? I...

Look at the whole book and the whole life, I guess, it's like somebody else. I don't know where I had the spirit or the stick-to-itiveness to write something like that then. Because, you know, number one, I knew that music was my ticket out of this...

other life that I had, you know, the thug life and dysfunctional family life. And it was like a wonderland to arrange and the idea of orchestration and arrangements and composition. And that to this day is what my core skill is as an arranger and orchestrator and composer. I was just so...

to have a surrounding, an environment where that was spawned, that was encouraged all the time. Okay, so here it is, 1952, Quincy Jones with the Lionel Hampton band, Kingfish. ¦

From the early 1950s, that was Quincy Jones' first recording with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra. It's called Kingfish. Terry, by the way, I think that's the first recorded solo I ever had on record. The first record I was ever involved with, and I think it's one of the only solos I have on record. Why didn't you solo more often?

I don't know. I was getting more and more pulled into the quicksand of writing. And then about a year or so later, after we begged Hamp to get Gigi Grice and Benny Goldson and Clifford Brown in the band, sitting next to Art Farmer and Clifford Brown and Benny Bailey helped me get into writing quickly. Because Clifford Brown was probably one of the greatest trumpet players that ever lived. Unbelievable.

We're listening to my 2001 interview with Quincy Jones. He died Sunday at the age of 91. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This is Lionel Hampton speaking, and welcome to our bandstand here. And this tune we're playing now is called Broadway. ¦

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. We're remembering composer, arranger, and producer Quincy Jones. He died Sunday at the age of 91. His work spanned from the big bands through bebop, pop, movie soundtracks, TV themes, and hip-hop. He arranged or produced recordings for Sinatra, Ray Charles, Aretha, Dinah Washington, and Ice-T, and he produced the Michael Jackson albums Off the Wall, Bad, and Thriller.

His music has been sampled in many hip-hop recordings, and his 1962 recording, Sol Bossa Nova, was used as the theme for the Austin Powers films. His multimedia company produced the TV shows The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, In the House, and Mad TV.

Now I've got to move to a 1962 recording. This is The Soul Bossa Nova, which became the theme for Austin Powers, the movie. Yes, it did. Which just goes to show how this epitomizes a certain 60s sound. What was the occasion for writing this originally? We had just come back from two State Department tours with Dizzy Gillespie. The first was in the Middle East, a place in Pakistan, right there in Ramadan, and Iran and Syria.

And we came back to the White House Correspondents Ball in Washington. They liked what we had done. And so they sent us off to South America after that.

And naturally, it was a black man's going to play all these kamikaze places. They'd have the Cypriots stoning the embassy in Athens, and they'd rush us over from Ankara, Turkey. Get in there quick, you know, almost like ground troops. And send a black man over there. And so the same students that stoned the embassy were all down front in the front row and everything else. It was pretty scary, really, because we didn't know what their conflict was all about, really. And

after the concert, the same students started crawling over the top of the stage and like straight towards the band. I said, this is it now. We're in big trouble here. The same ones who were stoning the embassy. And they grabbed Dizzy...

We had no idea what was on their mind. And they put him on their shoulders and they were walking around saying, DZ, DZ, DZ. I was so relieved, you know, because it was terrifying to watch them come towards the band, especially with the reputation they had in the papers the day before. And so we went down to getting back to Latin America. We went down to Argentina first and Buenos Aires first.

And after our first concert, we met a beautiful young musician named Lalo Schiffrin. He was a teenager then, too.

And he had told me all about, he'd studied with Olivia Messiaen, and that's where I first heard the name Nadia Boulanger, and it just sent electricity through me. We also recorded down there with Asta Piazzolla, who was like a very experimental composer working on what they call a modern city tango. And then he warned us about the new movement that was coming out of Brazil,

We were very excited about hearing this new music. It was Bossa Nova. And when we got to Brazil, Dizzy played with the rhythm section, summer rhythm section at the Gloria Hotel one afternoon, and sitting in the front row were three teenagers, a married couple, Astrid and Joao Gilberto, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, who started a whole Bossa Nova movement. And ironically, the first record that came out in the United States was Desafinado.

And the melody on the first, just the first opening string was just almost pure Dizzy Gillespie. That's why they referred to it at that time as jazz and samba before they even called it bossa nova. And so we came home all excited about this new music. They had moved the clave beat, which is really like the foundation of Latin music, straight up and down Latin America. That's the foundation of the clave beat. It's the guiding force. And I wanted to record some of this stuff.

And so I made a thing called Big Band Bossa Nova, and I wrote into about 20 minutes, this was 1962, a tune called Soul Bossa Nova. And we had the Brazilian rhythm section and everything else, and I guess 38 years passed. And so now...

Austin Powers is this huge star, and he's stuck with this thing. This is his theme forever. And it's amazing because they did two movies with the theme, and he opened it with a marching band playing it on the first time. Now he wants me to be in the next film. So were you flattered when you found out that Mike Myers wanted to use your soul bossa nova as the theme for

for Austin Powers? Or did you think, oh, now it's going to be camp. Now it's going to be seen as camp. Well, it was camp, but it doesn't matter, though, because a tune like that was kind of a campy tune anyway. So I loved it. I was very happy that he found a whole new

for this, you know, in this generation. Well, let's hear your 1962 recording of Sol Bossa Nova, which later became the theme for Austin Powers. Sagadelic. Behave. He is so funny. ¶¶

♪♪

That's Quincy Jones' 1962 recording of his composition Sol Bossa Nova, also known now as the theme for Austin Powers. Other music you were doing in the 1960s, you also had a pop music career. One of your biggest successes was Leslie Gore. You produced her first big hit, It's My Party, and produced other records of hers as well. Tell us how you discovered Leslie Gore.

Well, I got kind of, it was sort of a challenge, really, because I had come back from Europe and I had lost a lot of money. And I had to say, Irving Green, the president of Mercury, said, come over here as an A&R man, because you are an artist on Mercury anyway, an artist in repertoire. He hired me and then he promoted me to vice president. And

During that time, I was recording all the divas and, you know, Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Horn, Donnie Washington. We were doing things with Robert Farnes, big string, expensive dates and so forth. And they were beautiful musical albums, but...

Irving said to me one time, he says, you know, all the pop guys are saying you and Hal Mooney, who are the arrangers, are budget busters because you do all this big music. But we need some more help with the bottom line with hit records. And I was a little presumptuous and said, well, I don't think it's such a big deal to make a pop hit. And he says, well, why don't you start making something then?

And we were at a meeting at the Oxford House where we had A&R meetings regularly in Chicago. And he said, here's a tape that Joe Glazer sent me and his friend, the fight manager, somebody has a niece that sang something. Just say you listen to it and we'll send it back. I grabbed it and I said, I'd like to try this because she had a great sound as far as rock singing in those days. She could sing really in tune. She was 16 years old.

And we went back to New York and talked to Joe Glazer. He said, make her a star and all of that Hollywood stuff. And we went in on a Saturday and we recorded two songs, It's My Party, and with a B-side written by Paul Anka, young Paul Anka called Danny. And on the way to Carnegie Hall,

I saw Phil Spector. Phil Spector said, I just cut a smash, man, with the crystals. Called this my party. I said, what? I had never experienced that kind of competition before. Went back to the studio with the engineer and we mastered 100 acetates to send out to the radio. And

And the rest, you know, I had to go to Japan right after that. And I told Leslie, we've got the great record and everything. All we need to do is fix that name because I don't think this name is going to work with a pop record, you know. You didn't like the name Gore? No, I didn't like it. I won't tell Al Gore about that. Antipode.

And so I went to Japan to do a television show, and we did a little acting and scoring it. And so I got a call from Irving Green later, and he said, did anybody call you yet? I said, no. I said, did she get that name together yet? Did she come up with any suggestions? And she said, the record's number one. Do you really care? I said, no.

It sounds just fine. It's amazing. It's a big lesson. Whatever happened to the Crystals recording of It's My Party that Phil Spector was producing? I don't think it came out. I don't think it came out. Leslie's thing had such impact on him.

I don't know. I may be wrong, but I don't think it came out. Well, I thought I'd play You Don't Own Me. That's the Leslie Gore track that's featured on your 4CD box set. I also think it's just a particularly good recording and also a kind of proto-feminist anthem. And a long time ago, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With a lot of strings. You were talking about how you were using strings with jazz singers you were working with. I know this is Klaus Ogerman's arrangement and not yours, but still it's a very string-oriented arrangement. He's an amazing musician.

Okay, well this is You Don't Own Me, produced by my guest Quincy Jones, sung by Leslie Gore. You don't own me. I'm not just one of your many toys. You don't own me. Don't say I can't go with other girls. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to say. Please, when I don't put me on pause. You don't own me.

Don't try to change me in any way. You don't own. Don't tie me down cause I'd never stay. Don't tell you what to say. I don't. So just live. I love to be young. I love to be free. To live. I want to say.

That's Leslie Gore, a recording produced by Quincy Jones in 1963. We're remembering Quincy Jones on today's show. He died Sunday at the age of 91. We'll hear more of my 2001 interview with him after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. We're remembering Quincy Jones. He died Sunday. Let's get back to the interview we recorded in 2001. Let's talk about your childhood. Your early years were spent on the south side of Chicago. Your father was a carpenter, and you say that he worked for the guys who ran the rackets on the south side. How did he end up being their carpenter? Well, you know, that was Chicago during the Depression in the ghetto. Ha ha ha.

Nobody asked any questions. You know, Chicago also was the spotting ground of every, probably the headquarters spotting ground of every gangster in America, black or white. Roger Tooley, Dillinger, Capone, everybody. So the Jones boys were just, they were one of the first black gangsters. They started the policy rackets.

And they also had a five-and-dime store, a chain, the Jones Five and Dime, which they used to call the V's and X's. So someone was making a trip over to the V's and X's today. So these were the Jones boys your father worked for. This isn't the Quincy Jones family you're talking about. No, no, no, no, no. They were the gangsters back in the day. Your mother was a Christian scientist. Did she bring you up in your early years as a Christian scientist?

I think so, if I can remember. She went to Boston University probably in the 20s, which was very unusual, you know, for African-American females in those days. And she was a very smart lady. She spoke and wrote like 12 languages, including Hebrew.

everything. And she'd type 100 words a minute. And so she was like kind of the administrator, superintendent of one of the places we lived in, like the Rosenwald, before we got into a house. Your mother was later diagnosed as schizophrenic, and she was institutionalized for a while. What were some of her problems at home before she was actually diagnosed, problems that you found disturbing? Well, it's dementia praecox, which is schizophrenia. Um,

She was obsessed with religion. She would stare out of the window and she would sing spirituals, she'd play spirituals, and was just erratic at times. And I remember when I was about five years old, my birthday party, she threw my coconut cake

out in the back, off the back porch. And it was really a big deal to me. I don't know why I remember that so much, but it was really something I couldn't understand because the cake was supposed to be like the symbol or the metaphor for the joy of the birthday party. And she threw it out and it just really shocked me. And it was a very traumatic moment. I know it sounds like it's nothing. No, it doesn't sound like it's nothing. At five years old, it freaked me out.

And I realized, my brother and I both realized something was wrong. I mean, every day we realized something was wrong because it just wasn't like other people's parents. Even the bad parents, it wasn't the same as that because she was very smart. And so finally she was committed, and I didn't know or kind of blanked out what the process was until I went back there like 50 years later when I did listen up.

All of it came back, and I guess that's the part of the book that was cathartic. There were missing pieces in my memory, and it got clarified. After she was committed, she escaped from the hospital three times, and then when she was released from the hospital, you say she followed you around from town to town for the rest of your life, and sometimes showing up at the oddest times. Apparently, I guess you needed more distance from her than she wanted.

Oh, absolutely. Well, we had a very hard time communicating. We couldn't have a conversation without it being turning into a big argument. And I didn't know... I guess Lloyd and I both were so hungry for... Lloyd's your brother. Lloyd's my brother. He's my younger brother. We were so hungry for the mother stuff and just to be patted on the back of a head or something that we...

We just never could communicate. We didn't know how to connect, you know. At that time, I guess you need validation and guidance and love and nurturing and those words that weren't around in the ghetto during the Depression. Nurturing never came up very often. It was like cholesterol. Please, cholesterol sounds like something to drink, you know. Well,

One of the strangest places your mother showed up, one of the most surprising times was at Birdland when you were performing. Tell us what happened. Oh, my God. I couldn't believe it. That was the first time I ever played Birdland with my own band, and I was really proud because I'd seen all my idols there, Charlie Parker and Dizzy, Duke, Basie, everybody. And lo and behold...

Here come, I see her at the, you know, it's a huge entrance there that comes downstairs. And the regular host there was named Pee Wee Marquette, who was really a character. He had four watches on and about three coats of powder on his face and

a couple of jackets on and a vest and everything else. A real character with a lot of attitude. And you'd see like parting of the crowd, you know, as he's walking through because he was so short. And he'd walk through and she said, no, come on, lady, you know, you can't come in. And she said, shut up, you know, if you didn't drink so much, you wouldn't be so short. And she had a tongue like a laser beam. She turned the place out for about an hour. You knew she was down there. And she took nothing from anybody.

I was reading the obituary for your mother. She died in 1999 at the age of 94. And one of the things that mentioned about her was that she was a master typist and that she once typed the New Testament as a gift to her children. Yes, she did. Do you remember getting that as a gift? Absolutely. And I said to her, I said, this is, I'm very touched, you know, but you can buy this for like $3 or $4 or something like that.

And she, you know, but she meant it as something that she was really trying to give. And more and more, Lloyd started to realize, you know, that the things that she did, she couldn't help it. And in the final analysis, she probably went through more hell than anybody, all of us combined, because having kids, I know how that must have felt, regardless of how difficult she made it for herself and for us. We didn't know how to be children. She didn't know how to be a mother. And...

It was very painful. We're listening to my 2001 interview with Quincy Jones. We'll hear more of it after a break. This is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. We're remembering composer, arranger, and producer Quincy Jones. He died Sunday at the age of 91. Here's the final part of my interview with him, which we recorded in 2001. I want to get back to your music and to get to the most colossal success that you had, and that was the album Thriller with Michael Jackson. You first met him in 1972 at Sammy Davis' house. You worked together on The Wiz album.

What was his or yours or, you know, the both of yours original concept for Thriller? Well, it starts before that. It starts during the movie, you know, of when we first met after I was initially at 12 years old. I was about 19, about 77 or so. And he came over to the house. That's the first time we really met on a professional basis. He was growing up then.

And he said, pleased to meet you, etc. And it was very sweet. And said, I'm doing a, we have a new contract with Epic Records and the Jackson 5. I'm still working with them. But I'm going to do a solo album. And I was wondering if you could help me find a producer. I said, great, Michael. But right now we've got a mammoth job here to pre-record all the songs with you and Nipsey Russell and Richard Pryor and Lena Horne and Dinah Ross and everybody else. Uh,

to pre-record the songs before you make a film. That's just the nature of what films are about. You pre-record the voice, everything, and you have to really guess right about the dramatic context of how a song starts and stops, how long it is, because it's all going to be film, and that's what the film's going to be. It's a slave to that track. So you really have to concentrate. And so I said, "If you'll be patient and just wait until we get through this, maybe we can talk about the producer."

So we finished the pre-records. We start getting ready, preparing for the film. Sidney Lumet is at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn one day, and he's blocking out a scene with the four principals. And Michael's the scarecrow, and he had pulled out of his straw chest, he'd pull out little quotes from books,

Yada, dada, dada, dada, Confucius, dada, dada, dada, Aristotle, dada, dada, dada, Socrates. And he kept saying Socrates. And about the third day, I just took him aside and said, Michael, the word is Socrates. And he said, really? And he was really surprised, you know, because he's been a star since he was five, you know, so he's been on the road since then. So he's like an old man in one sense, like a baby in another sense.

And, uh,

There was something about the look in his eye, and I'd been watching him, the discipline he had. He'd get up at 5 in the morning for his makeup test and everything. He was a very, very conscientious and disciplined young person. I mean, one of the most I'd ever seen. He knew everybody's lines, everybody's songs, everybody's lyrics, everybody's dance steps, everybody's movement, everything. And the most amazing and absorbing and involved person I'd ever, artist I'd ever seen before. And

I love the records they made on Motown, you know, the bubblegum things, you know, dance machine, those things. But after seeing this other side of him, I felt that there was much more inside of Michael that hadn't been touched because you look at Michael at first, you say there's nothing else to do with him. He's done everything, and he did it at nine. You know, he's singing love song to a rat, you know, Ben, and everything. And he was fearless and sincere about it. He had...

He had a very strong sense of maturity. What was your approach to producing Thriller? What do you think of as your major contributions to the sound of that record? Thriller was a combination of all my experience as an orchestrator and picking the songs, and Michael's, all the talents he has as a dancer, as a singer, as an amazing entertainer. It was like us throwing everything we accumulated experience, putting it all together.

Well, let's hear Billie Jean. I really regret we're out of time. I wish we could talk some more. I want to thank you so much for talking with us. It's a pleasure, Terry. My interview with Quincy Jones was recorded in 2001. He died Sunday at the age of 91.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. She has two new films in theaters, The Outrun, about a young alcoholic trying to get sober, and Blitz, about a mother in London during the World War II German bombardment trying to find her lost son. Her other films include Little Women, Lady Bird, Brooklyn, and Atonement. I hope you'll join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. ♪ She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene ♪ ♪ I said don't mind but what do you mean I am the one ♪ ♪ Who dances on the floor and around ♪

She said I am the one Who would dance on the floor and get around She told me her name was Billie Jean And she cost a scene Then her heavy hair turned with the ice And dreamed of being the one Who would dance on the floor and get around Always told me be careful what you do

She's a girl.

As Election Day approaches, NPR's Consider This podcast is zooming in on six states that could determine who wins the White House. Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. We'll ask voters in these swing states what matters to them and which way they want the country to go. Follow along with new episodes this week on the Consider This podcast from NPR.

We finally made it, election week. It's what this whole never-ending election cycle has been building up to. And what happens now will dictate the future of the country. Keep up with election news when it matters most with NPR's Consider This podcast. All this week, we are taking major stories from the election to help you make sense of them and what they mean for you in under 15 minutes. Listen now to the Consider This podcast from NPR.