Quincy Jones knew who killed JFK,
Quincy Jones (March 14, 1933 – November 3, 2024) was one of the world’s great musicians, producer and arranger. Best known for his smash hits with Michael Jackson, notable on the singer’s Thriller album, Jones won 28 Grammys in a career that saw him work with jazz stars such as Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Tommy Dorsey, illy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan, become firm friends and Frank Sinatra, and compose and produce music for many TV shows and films. He won the Emmy for the soundtrack to Roots and the Tony for the revival of the musical The Color Purple.
In 1951 he scored his first professional job in music touring with the bandleader Lionel Hampton. “You couldn’t stay in white hotels, and to me, coming from Seattle, a lot of this stuff was like a slap in the face,” he said. “Back then, all the black bands had white bus drivers so they could eat, ’cos you couldn’t go into white restaurants. Even in Philadelphia, they had segregated hotels.”
In 1964, Jones won his first Grammy award, for his arrangement of Basie’s song I Can’t Stop Loving You. He also produced four million-selling singles for Lesley Gore, including It’s My Party.
Quincy Jones Remembers (and alleges)
His busy career was part of a no less productive private life. In his memoir Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (2001), Jones described how at one point he was dating five women at the same time. In 2018, that number was up to 22.
Before we get to find out who killed JFK, here are a few more of memories Jones shared in two interviews he gave in 2018, to GQ and Vulture.
On Miles Davis, the musician who painted. Quincy explains one of the artworks (you can see some here):
“Let me show you that big one, because you can’t notice the nasty on this right away. He even got the trumpets in the booty. Crazy motherfucker, but he was a talented man.”
On Steven Spielberg, who showed Jones the first prototype for E.T.:
“They made that little monster, and he looked too much like a brother. That’s why the second one had blue eyes.”
On Elon Musk:
“Elon Musk was my neighbor for ten years. Great guy, man. He’s a fearless motherfucker. Every week we’d have two or three dinners with Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and all those cats. Jeffrey Bezos…. Bezos – the richest motherfucker in the world now.”
On Bono and a meeting with the Pope:
“All the guys in the Vatican had these Vatican black shoes,” Jones recalls, but not the Pope. “He had on some burgundy wingtips, man, with thin tan rib socks, man. We had to go and kiss his hand before we left. And when I kissed his hand, I looked down and saw those shoes and it just fell out of my mouth. I said, ‘Oh, my man’s got some pimp shoes on.’ And he heard me.”
On Bono:
“[Bono]’s a great guy. I stay at his castle in Dublin, because Ireland and Scotland are so racist it’s frightening. He said, ‘Trying, Quincy, to assimilate, but it’s not coming easy.’ So I stay in his castle.”
On Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder:
Jones says [Ray] Charles was “the most independent blind man you could ever witness—he’d go cross the lights, go to the supermarket, shop, count his change no help. No goddamn canes and no cups, nothing like that—his mother wouldn’t let him do it. And the only time he got blind was when the girls were around, and he’d start walking into the walls and shit so they’d feel sorry for him and help him.” (Jones adds that Stevie Wonder also uses this technique.)
So who did kill JFK?
“[Chicago mobster Sam] Giancana. The connection was there between Sinatra and the Mafia and Kennedy. Joe Kennedy — he was a bad man — he came to Frank to have him talk to Giancana about getting votes….
“We shouldn’t talk about this publicly.”
Jones would later say on twitter:
“When you’ve been fortunate enough to have lived such a long & crazy life (and you’ve recently stopped drinking—three years ago!), certain details about specific events (which do NOT paint the full picture of my intentions nor experiences) come flooding back all at once, & even at 85, it’s apparent that ‘wordvomit’ & bad-mouthing is inexcusable,” he wrote, and published in a screenshot to Twitter. “One of the hardest things about this situation is that, this bad-mouthing has contradicted the very real messages I tried to relay about racism, inequality, homophobia, poverty . . . you name it. And of course I don’t want that. I have already reached out to my friends privately, but when you live a public life, you have a responsibility to be an example, & since I do lead a public life, I wanted to make a public apology.”
Lead Image: Quincy Jones conducting in 1960. Born in 1933, in south Chicago, he won music scholarships and first rose to prominence as a trumpet player in Lionel Hampton’s jazz band
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