https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/arts/music/quincy-jones-dead.html

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2024-11-04/quincy-jones-dead

From the LA Times’ obituary:
“Harvard historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said he viewed Jones’ influence and career milestones as being on par with American innovators and big thinkers like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Bill Gates.”
The article then quoted Gates from an earlier interview: “We’re talking about the people who define an era in the broadest possible way,” Gates told Smithsonian Magazine in 2008. “Quincy has a lifeline into the collective consciousness of the American public.”

I would, of course, concur with Gates. Perhaps it’s time for yet further institutional recognition. There should be such a think as Quincy Jones Studies, an area of academic inquiry built completely around Jones’s accomplishments. The obvious noteworthy instances don’t need me to repeat them here. Instead, I would like to emphasize that it’s the “small things” in which a man’s life ends up making an enormous difference and revealing its significance. Let’s remember Issac Hayes’s experience with the Academy Awards, which initially attempted to deny Hayes a chance to win Best Song (which it did go on to garner) and Best Soundtrack. According to Hayes, it was only the adamant intervention of Quincy Jones that made the Academy acknowledge Hayes’s skill as a composer. “Quincy Jones got in there and argued my case, saying that, even if I didn’t physically write it down, they were my ideas.” It takes vehemence in the trenches to carry the day sometimes, and Mr. Jones was one of the fifty most important cultural workers of the past one hundred years, and that includes every field of artistic endeavor. I look forward to the biopic.

SHAFT

RIP Richard Roundtree (July 9, 1942 – October 24, 2023), aged 81
RIP Isaac Hayes (August 20, 1942 – August 10, 2008), aged 65
RIP Quincy Jones (March 14, 1933 – November 3, 2024)