SEATTLE — Music fans across the globe are mourning the death of Quincy Jones.
Icon. Musical genius. Producer-extraordinaire. All of those titles can be used to describe Quincy Jones. The musician and composer died today, November 4, at the age of 91.
His musical roots were planted here in the Emerald City.
Quincy Jones graduated from Garfield in 1950, and he came back when the auditorium at Garfield was named in his honor back in 2008.
The Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center stands as an enduring tribute to a man who influenced music around the world.
Quincy Jones’s musical career started playing jazz trumpet, like fellow Garfield High School Alum Thomas Marriott.
Add to the quintessential Quincy Jones, the more than 40-year-old “Thriller,” an album that helped transform Michael Jackson into the biggest pop star in the world. It cemented Jones’s reputation as a musical genius in whatever genre he chose to work while never truly leaving jazz behind.
“I think his real gift was making things hip, you know,” said Marriott, smiling. “And I think if you listen to those Michael Jackson records there’s a lot of high IQ things happening musically, you know, in addition to being funky, you know. It’s a winning combination.”
And he had the hardware to prove it. Twenty-eight Grammy awards, a Tony, and seven Academy Award nominations before winning the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Quincy Jones, called ‘Q’ by his friend and colleague Frank Sinatra, was born in Chicago. His family moved to Bremerton during World War II and then on to Seattle.
The Emerald City is where his musical talent took root and flourished, eventually taking him all over the world.
In 2021, Jones received the Museum of Pop Culture’s Founders Award, a measure of his influence across musical genres.
“I think that he was able to look at music that wasn’t delineated by genre or by audience or by race,” said Jacob McMurray, MoPop Chief Collections & Exhibition Officer, “but really thinking across all of these different things.”
And his legacy continues. Thomas Marriott is leading the charge with the Seattle Jazz Fellowship to make Jazz an institution here in Seattle, like the ballet, the opera, and the symphony.
I expect Quincy Jones would be proud.