Music

Michael Jackson needed some guidance. “The first time he came to my home he said to me, ‘I’m getting ready to do my first solo record for Epic Records,’” Quincy Jones recalled in Q, his 2001 autobiography. “‘Do you think you can help me find a producer?’”
Jones, a musician of unparalleled range and talent who had already overseen or arranged records for Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and Aretha Franklin, ended up filling the role himself — over the objections of Jackson’s record label, who deemed the producer “too jazzy.” Thanks to Jackson’s collaborations with Jones on Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad, the two men are inextricably linked. 

If there was a downside to helping Jackson become an icon and sell enough albums to populate a small planet, it’s that this achievement often obscures the breadth of Jones’ own accomplishments, reducing his career in the late 1970s and 1980s to a single sidekick role. Jackson did need Jones at his side to make the best music of his most classic period. But this dependency was not mutual: Jones’ productions during this era — for the Johnson Brothers, George Benson, Chaka Khan, and Donna Summer, among others — can hold their own against Jackson’s finest singles.

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Jones’ dance music is propulsive, but more than that, it levitates. It makes sense that when Jackson appeared to defy the laws of physics by moonwalking on national television in 1983, he did so to one of Jones’ productions. There is a lot of great disco, yet there are just a handful of songs from this period able to conjure the feeling that Jones reliably created: His productions seem to glide, reveling in the heady momentum of liftoff, cheerfully spurning the ground that the rest of us must rely on to generate forward movement. 

Jones made this look easy. For him, producing was always a group effort. When preparing to work with Jackson, the producer rounded up what he called his “killer Q posse,” a group of musicians where “every one was a black-belt master in his own category:” the songwriter Rod Temperton, the engineer Bruce Swedien, the keyboard player Greg Phillinganes, the trumpeter/arranger Jerry Hey, the bassist Louis Johnson, the drummer John Robinson, and the percussionist Paulinho da Costa. 

This group worked on Off the Wall, released in the summer of 1979, and most of them also contributed to Rufus & Chaka Khan’s Masterjam, which came out later that year. All Jones’ powers are on display in “Any Love,” the latter album’s second track, an indictment of a playboy — “You don’t really love from deep within,” Khan sneers — that’s as savage as it is danceable. In the first verse, the drums march stiffly, while the bass is excitable like the cad Khan targets, popping rudely and bounding showily into the chorus. Jones gradually ratchets up power, adding jolting brass and a string section that zigs and zags dramatically. This clears the way for a jaw-dropping eruption from Khan, the sort of vocal bulldozing that Jackson, with his more delicate register, couldn’t match. 

The following year, the “killer Q posse” returned on a pair of albums produced by Jones, both of which aimed to conquer the nocturnal hours — the Brothers Johnson’s Light Up the Night and George Benson’s Give Me the Night. “Closer to the One That You Love,” from the former, is an intricate, slinky miracle, with a sudden, vertigo-inducing vocal climb from lead singer George Johnson. And on Give Me the Night, both the title track — which hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and “Love X Love” are frisky and strutting, with guitar figures that skim across the brisk beats like smooth pebbles skipping across a pond.

Summer turned to Jones and his posse for their wizardry in 1982, managing to bottle lightning with “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger).” The soaring harmonies on the chorus, the nasty edge to the bass line, the way the horns add sizzle to an already piping-hot track; these are all the indelible hallmarks of Jones’ work. 

“Love Is in Control” only made it to No. 10 on the Hot 100, which would surely have been a disappointment for its producer. “Number 1 is euphoric and addictive,” he wrote in Q. “Numbers 2, 6, and 11 are my least-favorite chart positions.” Of course, Jones enjoyed plenty of that “euphoric and addictive” feeling after Thriller came out in November 1982. 

If Q is any indication, Jones didn’t seem to care much about his work with Summer and Benson and Khan — or even his longer association with the Brothers Johnson, for whom he produced four albums. Jackson, of course, looms large in the book. And Jones is proud of his work in jazz and film scoring. But vital albums he helmed in the 1970s and 1980s barely even merit a mention in his autobiography. Jones passes over these remarkable songs, which can still reliably light up the night, as if they were just another humdrum day in the office.

Play “Love Is In Control” for a casual listener, though. They’ll probably say, “that sounds like Michael Jackson!” In truth, it sounds like Quincy Jones.