Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.
QUINCY JONESAll the jazz guys had interracial relationships, and even the ladies did. Over the years, interracial relationships have been a hip, almost defiant thing, a way of saying “Nobody can put a boundary around me.”
More Quincy Jones Quotes
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They say a blind hog will find the acorn one day.
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It’s easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.
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If I don’t have a mother, I’ll let music be my mother.
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When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.
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I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.
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Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.
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All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls.
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A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.
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A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer – you put a great song on top of that, you’re really in great shape!
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I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.
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It’s amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don’t have anything else to do.
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I’m just a musician and a record producer.
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Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.
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You cannot get an A if you’re afraid of getting an F.
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After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it’s worse than ever.
QUINCY JONES