Quincy Jones, the music producer who reigned in the 20th century and had to eat rats as a child

Few people in the world can be known by a single letter.

One of them is Quincy Jones,

Q

, the most powerful music producer of the 20th century, the friend of Martin Luther King, the producer of Michael Jackson, the brother that Frank Sinatra never had, and also the boy who grew up in Kentucky and whom her paternal grandmother, who was a slave, fed with the only thing she had available: fried rats.

Now, at 87 years old, the American composer, director, arranger and producer publishes in Spain an autobiography that has gone on sale this Monday,

Q, an autobiography of Quincy Jones

, in which he talks about his musical adventures but in which he also He reviews his hard childhood and the relationship that has linked him to music myths such as Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson, among others.

Quincy Jones was born in Chicago on March 14, 1933 and what was known until now of his early years was limited to the fact that he was the son of Sarah Frances and the baseball player Quincy Delight Jones, who moved to live in Bremerton, a suburb from Seattle, when he was 14 years old and there he began to play the trumpet in soul clubs.

Now it is also known from what he himself has related that he grew up with his little brother, Lloyd, with his paternal grandmother who was a slave in Louisville and that his first years of life were anything but simple.

The precariousness in which they lived made them eat fried rats when there was nothing else to put into their mouths and that their mother, Sarah, suffered a mental illness that marked the life of the producer.

Before joining her father, she already had three children from a previous relationship and for years she was in and out of psychiatric hospitals due to schizophrenia.

A disease that conditioned the lives of her children, including the famous music producer who, according to her, could not have a close relationship with her until she was an adult.

Despite the harshness of some of the situations he experienced, Jones was a precocious genius who found his greatest skill in music.

He began to take trumpet classes at school and at the age of thirteen, as he explains in his memoirs, he already made arrangements for the trumpeter Clark Terry and two years later he aroused the interest of the pianist Lionel Hampton, a relationship that was cut short because his wife The latter denied him to be part of the orchestra until he finished school.

His natural gifts made him touch the heaven of music and save himself from an uncertain destiny due to a childhood on the edge of the law and the pain caused by his mother's madness.

In his history of creations, well-known names such as Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughman or Count Basie appear and also others related to the cinema, such as those of the director Steven Spielberg or the actor Will Smith, since he has composed the bands soundtracks of films such as

The Moneylender

,

In Cold Blood

,

In the Heat of the Night

or

The Color Purple

and was the producer of the famous series

The Prince of Bel-Air

.

Also musical themes for television titles such as

Ironside

,

Sanford and Son

or

The Bill Cosby Show

.

He has won 27 Grammy Awards and an Oscar among other accolades, but also an unbeaten moment record: being the producer

of Michael Jackson's

best-selling album of all time,

Thiller

.

It is also due to its influence that in 1985 some of the leading American artists of the time agreed to record a song that has become an anthem,

We are the world

, and which then served to raise money for the victims of hunger. in Ethiopia.

He published

Vibe

and

SPIN

magazines

and in 1990 created Quincy Jones Entertainment in an investment with Time Warner.

But regardless of her musical and business achievements, having turned communicator Oprah Winfrey into an actress in the movie

The Color Purple

and having accumulated a fortune estimated at more than 400 million dollars (almost 330 million euros) , the musician confesses in his memoirs that he never tried to pursue fame.

“You run into her, it's that simple.

I enjoyed the same good things as Sinatra or Basie or Smelly (the nickname he uses for Michael Jackson, but without the complications that come with them. When fame catches up with you, you better be prepared. Then when it rains, get wet and that's it. ”, He affirms in the book that now appears in Spain and whose first edition appeared in the United States in 2001.

In his memoirs he dedicates some chapters to Frank Sinatra, for whom the producer was the brother he never had.

The two got on well until the singer's death.

Jones says of Sinatra: “Frank was my style.

He was cool, he was frank and direct and, above all, he was a great musician.

I loved him a lot, I admit it;

I loved him as much as any other musician with whom I have worked in my life, because he was a man without half measures.

Either black or white.

If he loved you, he was capable of doing anything for you;

If he didn't like you, the problem was yours.

I know that he loved me too ”, she says.

He

met

Michael Jackson, whom he calls

Smelly

, when the singer was 12 years old.

He was impressed by his professionalism, that he was "genuinely shy" and that he hid "an amazing existence."

From that union came great successes for both and in the autobiography Jones affirms that “until today, nobody has been as great as Smelly”.

These statements contradict others that became very controversial in which he stated, for example, that Jackson was "greedy, Machiavellian" and that from the musical point of view he had "stolen many things."

He has also gone so far as to say that The Beatles have been "the worst musicians in the world, sons of bitches who couldn't play", or that Paul McCartney was "the worst bassist I've ever heard in my life."

For all these statements, the seven children he has had inside and outside of his three marriages, know him by the nickname of

loose lips

, which could be translated as verbal talk or incontinent in colloquial language.

A defect that has also come to create problems in his most personal opinions, such as when he declared in an interview with

GQ

magazine

when he was 84 years old that he had 22 girlfriends distributed around the world and that he did not like older women.

"Can you imagine me with an 84-year-old woman? Are you crazy?" He told the interviewer.

And he continued: “If I could, I would install some technology that would keep the old women and the fat ones away.

Something like some sensors that will start to vibrate if one is too old ”.

Apparently to this unrepentant braggart, only some of his daughters are capable of hindering him and so that they are not upset because their girlfriends are younger than they are, he should look among those between 28 and 42 years old.

Like so many other internationally famous artists, Quincy Jones has not been spared the scourge of addictions and in his case he confessed in 2019 that he had only been cured of his addiction to alcohol for three years.

Nor has he managed to make his personal life a bed of roses that ran parallel to his professional success, although at least he is able to recognize it since in his memoirs he gives a voice to friends, mentors and family and does not censor criticism.

An example is that of his son Quincy Jones III, who is now 52 years old and who was born from his second marriage to the Swedish model Ulla Andersson, 74. His son tells how despite the millions that his mother manages, he and his mother have lived for years in a suburb of Stockholm in precarious economic conditions.

Quincy Jones' response does not try to balm his mistakes: "I may be an expert in whitening what I have done wrong in my life, but I never forget anything."