‘Leave your ego at the door’: from Thriller to Sinatra, Quincy Jones collaborators tell the stories behind his songs | Quincy Jones

Herb Alpert: ‘He put tempos in a place where it penetrated your body’

The 89-year-old musician and bandleader was born in the same generation as Quincy Jones, as jazz gave way to pop in the middle of the century. He also co-founded A&M Records, soon home to artists including Burt Bacharach, Joan Baez – and Jones himself

In 1963 he produced It’s My Party by Lesley Gore, which seemed the opposite of Quincy – he was basically a jazz musician and came up through those roots. When I heard that record and found out Quincy had produced it, I was like: that’s interesting, he clearly has a wide range of interests.

When I had my first hit record, The Lonely Bull, he reached out to me and I spent some time with him. He was really an unusual guy – he had an authenticity that was habit-forming. He was real. He had this positive energy about him – it seemed like he was already reaching for something, for the stars.

We signed him at A&M and he did some beautiful albums for us. He had great taste: he was the one who brought Ray Charles into the limelight and they were dear friends till the end of Ray’s life. He was in heaven conducting Frank Sinatra, and Sinatra called him one of the greatest musicians he’s ever worked with; Frank’s personal ring was given to Quincy after Frank passed, which he wore.

He taught me one thing: you can take the best two singers in the world, and if you give them a bad song, it’s going to go nowhere. He was all about making sure the melody, the music, was right. When he did the Michael Jackson albums, he was dogged on wanting to find the right songs, and he would toss out songs that didn’t have a melody that lingered. And one of his true gifts was that he knew a good tempo – he put the tempos in a place where it penetrated your body, you could feel it move.

He did an arrangement for me on Last Tango in Paris in 1973, and then Quincy and I produced a record by Billy Eckstine. Quincy wrote the arrangement, and had made this big elaborate intro to the song. We’re in the studio and Billy has headphones on, standing in front of the microphone, waiting to come in. I remember Billy saying: “Hey baby brother, you could get laid before it’s time to start singing!” Quincy had a sense of humour, and he laughed when Billy said that – he was such a likeble guy, a wonderful human being. Sensitive to others, always helpful; reaching out to young artists who were struggling to find their groove and was always complimentary and uplifting. I loved him – he was lovable.

For We Are the World, recorded in our A&M Studio A, he brought together all those superstars under one roof. And the sign at the studio read: “Leave your ego at the door.” There were a lot of different energies there, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen to Tina Turner, and God love him, Quincy was able to deal with all of them, individually. He could communicate with guys that were hung up on themselves, or artists that were more open and jolly with everyone. And they all listened. Of course, [We Are the World songwriters] Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie knew how to communicate with great artists too, but it was Quincy who pulled it all together. They looked up at him – and that record sold millions. He’s leaving a tremendous legacy as someone who was uniquely special: an honest, good guy who knew what he was doing.

A founding member of the band Toto, Lukather is also an esteemed session guitarist who played on a series of Jones projects, including Michael Jackson’s Thriller

I was 23 years old. My friend, [music producer] David Foster, was working with Quincy and he tells him: ‘Man, you gonna try this kid Lukather.” And he kind of blindly took David’s word for it and hired me to do the album The Dude.

The thing that people never say about Quincy is what a great casting director he was. He had a Rolodex of musicians of all sorts that he could grab at, and when he would get certain material, he’d go: OK, this is the right guy. You never knew who you were gonna get with Quincy. I was trying to play it cool because I was a young fan, up in the room with the greats: “Oh, Stevie Wonder’s playing keyboards today, that’s kind of cool.”

Once he started using me, I did his solo stuff like The Dude and Back on the Block; Michael Jackson, James Ingram, Herbie Hancock. We did a lot of amazing things working with [Cleethorpes-born songwriter] Rod Temperton, who didn’t read or write music but he would sing ideas; he and Quincy just created this style between the two of them, a secret language. And [engineer] Bruce Swedien was very much a part of the production sound of Quincy’s records. That whole team was really magical.

Quincy just creates a vibe in the studio: he orders up great food, makes everybody feel comfortable and happy, and that makes for a great creative experience. He didn’t write out parts for us; he gave us free rein. He’d give us a chord sheet and say: “What do you guys got? Make me look good!” Then once he started to get a feel for everything, he was a great director: “OK, that’s great, I like that, work that.”

Me and Jeff Porcaro got a call from Quincy going: “Hey, we’re doing this new Michael record. I want you guys on it. The first thing we’re gonna do is a duet with Paul McCartney.” This was The Girl Is Mine, for Thriller. We were like, you’re kidding me – Quincy, Michael, and Paul McCartney, you’re not going to get bigger than that in 1982. So we were excited. I mean, granted, the song is a bit silly – let’s all be honest about it. But that was my first encounter with one of the Beatles: a big deal, because they’re the reason why I started playing. Paul and Linda walked in the room, it was like the energy changed, it was very palpable.

We just had a simple song, some chords written on it, and we started a groove and then everybody finds a part. People have a very big misconception of what the studio musician is. There’s the guys who do television and film, who read exactly what the dots are on the paper or the way it’s written by the arranger – every note is written out. [For records], guys get a sketch with some chords on it, maybe some rhythmic notation. We can all read, but that’s not why we got hired. We can hear chords, and a groove, and find a little part in here, the melody, and the next thing you know … all the musicians were so good, by the end of the first take, we’re real close. Third take was probably the magical take. So they weren’t really long gruelling sessions because the songs are great, the players are great and the right kind of thing happens. That’s the one thing you can’t programme into a machine, and that’s why music has kind of gotten a little stale and predictable, because nobody’s throwing a fill you didn’t expect or playing a lick that would inspire another lick – the things you can’t programme, which is human contact. Now I sound like an old bastard. But I was there and I know the difference.

Beat It, we did it backwards: Michael’s lead vocal and the Eddie Van Halen guitar solo were done with a couple of small overdubs but no click track. Jeff made a click track and then a drum part, and I played a bunch of really wild guitar parts, because I knew Eddie’s solo was on it – I was doing real hard rock, a quadruple-track riff. Quincy wasn’t even there, he was at Westlake doing overdubs on Billie Jean while we were fixing Beat It – so we’d be on the phone and he goes: “It’s too metal, you gotta calm down. I gotta get it on pop radio! Use the small amp, not so much distortion.”

Quincy is the only guy that can do a solo album without playing or writing anything. Somehow, no matter what he did, there was a Quincy Jones sound, even if he didn’t play, sing, write or whatever. He was a director.

Terrace Martin: ‘He helped the older community understand hip-hop a little more’

As another producer-musician straddling different genres of Black music, Terrace Martin – known for his work with LA’s finest including Kendrick Lamar, YG and Snoop Dogg – was mentored by Jones and in turn connected him with today’s hip-hop

If Quincy had something to do with anything, it was going to be at the highest level of class and Black art. So growing up, we all followed Quincy. Back on the Block, to me that was the first fusion record that has both hip-hop and jazz at the highest level. It grew me and my parents, and a lot of other kids and their parents, closer together because Quincy had Ice-T, Big Daddy Kane, Kool Moe Dee, all these rappers on Back on the Block – it helped the older community understand hip-hop a little more. Because if Quincy can do it, everybody gotta like it.

For my 21st birthday, Snoop Dogg kindly introduced me to Quincy and that was the start of our working relationship. I was like: man, this is going to be interesting, but there’s no way you could ever know me better than I know you, because I grew up learning you. All I was thinking about was: how can I be of service? What was inspirational to me was that he was artistically fearless, and he never turned his head up or down on any kind of music – he was like, I’m gonna dive in, I love it all! He was a jazz bebopper, straight up, so the fact that he still had the courage to love everything, to learn about everything, to do pop, funk, rap, classical – that’s what I was inspired by, the lack of boundaries.

We start doing records, we talking, we doing festivals, travelling the world. Whenever he wanted to get in contact with a young rapper, he knew I was tapped into that world – he would call me and I would put him in touch with certain high level artists. So we grew a strong bond.

One of my favourite memories is when Quincy, Snoop Dogg and myself all flew out to Arkansas to record an album with [jazz trumpeter] Clark Terry, one of Quincy’s main inspirations and mentors. Quincy approached the sessions with a conversation: about life, and travelling, and the music he’d heard. And this conversation would morph into different things – about the blues and how we should add some blues, some African rhythms … a very organic, conversational and spiritual-based style of producing. I’ve seen him doing various styles – sometimes very hands on, sitting at a piano – but in those sessions it was very environmental, and letting the moment take control. And we just kind of shifted within the moment.

His musical legacy is like an action movie, filled with love, drama … like a Bruce-Willis-in-the-80s type feel. It’s heroic: he broke a lot of barriers. And he taught me that there’s music and the music business, and make sure you take care of your business: your franchise, your brand, make sure everything is passed through how you perceive taste to be. But the main thing that anybody can take from Quincy, God rest his soul, is that the biggest ego in the room should always be the song.

Marc Kinchen, AKA MK: ‘His one regret was not spending enough time with his children’

Kinchen had major success as a producer and DJ in the house scene of the early 90s – and is still notching up Top 10 hits today after returning to dance music. But a meeting with Jones in the mid-1990s helped to put him on a different path for over a decade

When I decided in my teens I wanted to be in music, Quincy was the type of producer I wanted to be. Everything he did was unique; almost no two Quincy songs sound alike, and I admired him for being able to pull that off. He was also a great musician, who understood theory very, very well. A lot of producers go to a studio and say: “That just doesn’t sound right.” But they can’t actually tell you why it doesn’t sound right, and critique it, and tell you what needs to be fixed. And that’s the type of producer I wanted to be. So I taught myself theory – it was fun to me, like a hobby.

In 1996, I’d stopped doing house music for a while, and was just doing R&B and hip-hop. I had a meeting at Motown records, and there was this guy named Jay Brown who happened to be there, and worked with Quincy. He said, do you have any music? And I said, yeah, actually, I have a CD on me. The next day, he called me: “I played Quincy your CD and he wants you to fly to LA to meet him.” I was like, what? The next week I went, met Quincy, and he wanted to sign me into a deal at his publishing company. Then after that, we go to Quincy’s house. You think it’d be a whole team of people, but it was just literally me and Quincy sitting on the couch, just talking – about music, and random stories about women.

He told me one thing there that stuck with me to this day: his one regret was not spending enough time with his children, because he was working so much. And I actually live by that today – I get booked a lot to do shows, but I don’t want to have that regret.

He wanted me to work on Tamia, who he had just signed, and Tevin Campbell. I went in the studio with Quincy for a session for Tevin and he showed me something I’d never seen before – he put a Roland Juno-106 synthesiser in the vocal booth, and then miked the speakers. It was insane. Usually a synthesiser goes straight into the mixing board, but I never thought about using a synthesiser on a guitar amp – and it gives us a totally different sound. It’s the little things like that he would show me.

I worked on another artist he had, and we brought in a whole orchestra to do the live strings on it. Got the track back to Quincy, he’s like: “Yeah, I hate it”. But he knew why he hated it, right? And was able to tell us what needed to be fixed. Another thing he said that stuck out was: it takes 30 songs to make a hit. Don’t expect to make a hit every time – it’s gonna take you around 30 songs. I’m like, all right, I guess I gotta go make 29 more songs!

I was now finished with house – I wrote it off. And being with Quincy, I immediately got access to all the top artists right in the studio – SWV, Jodeci, Mary J Blige, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Will Smith. It was also before Napster, before the internet, before the whole music industry crashed. It was fun. The money was very liquid – the record label didn’t mind paying you before the song made the album. So I made a great living off of songs that never came out. And Quincy was always there if I needed him.

Then, after 9/11 and the whole Napster thing, the industry just changed. To get a song on an album, you had to submit a song, and so it was a rat race; every single producer was trying to get on, say, Usher’s album. You had to go against 200 songs to make it. And you weren’t getting paid until the song got placed, so it just got really not fun any more.

But I learned a lot and took it back into the dance world, where a lot of producers and DJs haven’t been exposed to that kind of production: those big studios, spending 10 grand a day, recording with 48 tracks and having engineers and assistants. And I learned a lot of the actual business part, going into major labels and seeing how the whole company works, from the president down to A&R, how they deal with artists, with songs, and what the label wants from a song to make it successful. Lyrics, demographics, the type of song that does well at a certain time of the year – little things like that. Because I’ve seen a lot of songs get turned down.

You would hear people in a label office walking around: “Oh my God, we just got this new song come in by so and so.” And you hear the song and it’s so unique, so underproduced, but works. That’s another thing I learned in that world: to not be a copycat. I learned a lot through pop and R&B – and from Quincy.