Quincy Jones Should Be Remembered for His Jazz, Not His Jackson

Quincy Jones, who died on November 3 aged 91, was the last major musician whose working life spanned the arc of 20th-century American music. Jones was born in 1933, only six years after Louis Armstrong recorded “Struttin’ With Some Barbeque,” one of the Hot Five sides that crystallized the centrality of the solo instrumentalist in jazz. A child of the age when music ran at 78 r.p.m. or crackled out of analogue tubes, Jones saw out the music’s transition into pure digitality, in which all prior recordings can be broken into their elements and, with pitch-shifting and tempo-tweaking, be infinitely recombined, and its first contacts with artificial intelligence. Throughout, Jones remained a jazz musician.

It is a tragedy that most of us think of three Michael Jackson albums when we hear Jones’s name: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987). Even I think of them, and I think that Bad is very bad indeed. They were part of the aural and visual furniture in the MTV age, so we have no choice. Thriller is said to be the best-selling album of all time. I can believe it. Most of it is synthetic trash. Quincy Jones abused his musical intelligence to create something artificial, a slick Frankenstein’s monster that flatters the listener. As Keith Richards said when someone asked him what he thought of rap: “There’s an enormous market for people who can’t tell one note from another.”

On “Billie Jean,” Jones cunningly recycled the modal groove of an earlier age. The song’s vamp is pretty much that of Miles Davis’s “Milestones” (1958) or, more precisely, Donald Byrd’s “Jeannine” (1960). Jones, in his first musical incarnation, was a handy trumpeter. In his second, he was a killer arranger. By his own admission, he decided that he wanted to make some real money. He got “points” on the royalties for Jackson’s albums. He had suffered for his art, and now it was our turn.

It was Jones’s idea to add Eddie Van Halen’s guitar histrionics to “Beat It.” Perhaps Jones realized that Jackson, who had given a passable impersonation of a normal person on their 1979 collaboration, was in fact not so much mildly off the wall but completely off the reservation, and becoming blatantly ludicrous. You can see Jackson’s deterioration in the video for “Beat It.” Nobody has ever beaten anything after being told to beat it by a sylph sporting wet-look curls and a red leather jacket. The video, West Side Story with mullets, is even more ludicrous than the song.

The original meaning of “ludicrous” was “sportive” or “intended as a jest.” Jones was playing the pop game, and he played it better than anyone. Jones had arranged Count Basie’s charts for the Sinatra at the Sands album in 1966. You have to know what good taste is before you can engineer a full-spectrum failure of taste such as “Beat It.” Like most child stars, Michael Jackson’s talent was that of a performing seal. Jackson became a fake adult, a boy who never grew up: Pedo Pan. Jones made the best of a bad job.

The Bad album is even worse. The video for the title song is much like that of “Beat It,” only more obviously homoerotic and masochistic. Jackson, trussed up in PVC and studs, makes little jerky martial arts movements as though the director has attached electrodes to his royalties. Once again, Jones recycles a groove from his earlier career and not from one of his own compositions either. The “Bad” groove is lifted from Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission Impossible” theme from 1967. The “Billie Jean” vamp could be a homage to two trumpeters who were better than Jones was. The squelchy synth-bass on “Bad” sounds like a revenge on a more talented rival.

Again, Jones devised a flattering setting for Jackson’s deficiencies. Bluebeard’s interior decorator probably did much the same at the castle. Jackson’s once-smooth vocal style was shattering into the affected yelps and squeaks of a crossdresser whose bottom has been pinched. His compulsion to boast of his kinks while hiding them in plain sight was becoming explicit. Only a similarly fractured, distracting, and false assemblage of jerky drums and flashy synths could make it make sense. As the saying goes, you can’t polish a turd. But you can roll it in glitter.

Off the Wall, however, slips easily into the ear. The warmth of its sound marks the album as one of the last glories of the analogue recording age. That age began in 1860, when Scott de Martinville recorded “Au Clair de la Lune,” so the transition to digital really is a late aberration. The arrangements on Off the Wall have an echo of Swing Era romance, too. If Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had hobbled into a disco in 1979, they would dimly have recognized the orchestral swoons of “Rock with You.”

Quincy Jones never made a bad record before he started working with Michael Jackson. He never made a good record after working with Jackson. This isn’t because Jones lost his talent. He was a commercial artist, but the tinny new technology wasn’t yet up to the task, and the harmony-less rise of the rappers, which Jones had the commercial nous to embrace, was shrinking the opportunities for adding a bit of jazzy class. The obituaries have all praised the Jackson albums, as though their quantity of sales is a mark of artistic quality. But Quincy Jones is like Joseph Conrad—it took 20 years of slogging before Conrad made a decent amount of money from his novels with Under Western Eyes (1911), but it wasn’t one of his best. To really appreciate Quincy Jones, listen to his earlier music.

The obituaries tend to overlook that in the late 1950s, Jones studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen, then put together a cutting-edge 18-piece band. It fell apart on the road in Europe due to lack of funds. “We had the best band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving,” Jones later said. “That’s when I discovered that there’s music, and then there’s the music business.” The result, when Jones returned to L.A., was pop hits for Lesley Gore, a job at Mercury Records, the novelty hit “Soul Bossa Nova,” and arranging for Frank Sinatra.

In 1964, Sinatra asked Jones to turn a waltz called “In Other Words” into a swinger. The result was “Fly Me To The Moon” as we know it. The ultimate version is on Sinatra at the Sands. Jones’s template is the Basie band’s 1950s reincarnation with Billy May’s arrangements. He builds through ripples of tenor saxes and trumpets, adds a featherlight ’60s flute counterpoint to Sinatra’s vocal, and then unleashes the elephant charge of the Basie band at full power. We actually hear Sinatra’s delight.

Anything Jones worked on between 1960 and 1980 is worth listening to. There’s so much of it that the best gets overlooked, especially if it didn’t sell well at the time. My nomination for the unfairly neglected Jones job? Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky). Perhaps the cumbrous title helps to explain why it was the first Franklin album not to make the Billboard Top 25, though the single “Angel” reached No. 1 on the R&B chart. It was Franklin’s first Atlantic album without Jerry Wexler in the chair. Jones more than filled Wexler’s spot.

Aretha Franklin and Quincy Jones could each do everything very well. Hey Now Hey has a bit of everything. The complex unfolding of the title track anticipates the gospel-disco stomp of Chaka Khan’s “Love Has Fallen On Me” (1978). The jazz numbers, a discreetly flashy take on Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” and the Bebop standard “Moody’s Mood,” are spacious and sophisticated. “Sister From Texas” goes harder than Otis Redding. The best track, though, is “Mr. Spain.”

Written by Carolyn Plummer, who had written “Road Song” for Wes Montgomery and cowrote “Angel” on this album, “Mr. Spain” is an eerie accounting of a love affair gone wrong. It is too fast for a ballad, too slow for a groove, definitely jazz but also something more: a crossroads of styles and emotions. Jones’s orchestration sets the ambivalence of Plummer’s lyrics and the wry passion of Franklin’s vocal in a gilded swirl of strings. “Mr. Spain” is one of the great recordings of the 1970s. Quincy Jones made it happen.

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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