(Credits: Canadian Film Centre)
Tue 21 April 2026 22:00, UK
Anyone who even thought about working with Quincy Jones needed to know what they were walking into.
Some of the biggest names in pop history have been personal friends with him, and even if he wasn’t always the one in front of the microphone, he had the sixth sense of where a song was going to go, usually before the rest of the band did, whenever he was in the studio. He was the orchestrator behind some of the greatest pop tunes of all time, but that didn’t mean that everything that arrived on the charts got his seal of approval.
There are plenty of times where Jones disagreed with what the rest of the artists in the room wanted, but it’s not like he was wrong in many of his decisions. Michael Jackson was the one who felt like it was distracting to hear the descending strings at the very beginning of ‘Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough’, but if you listen to the rest of the track in context, those strings are the entire hook of the song.
That’s the reason why Jones was always good at capturing those individual moments whenever he played. He was arranging for people like Frank Sinatra years before he had started embracing the sounds of pop music, and even though there were many songs that would have been considered cheesy today, there’s hardly a note out of place when looking at many of his arrangements.
But the spaces between the notes meant a lot more to classic rock fans. Nothing in rock and roll was supposed to be nice and sophisticated, and sometimes the greatest songs of all time get that way because of the subtle blemishes that are happening every single time that someone hits a wrong note or ends up being slightly out of tune when coming out of the chorus of one of their songs.
In terms of vocal precision, though, Elvis Presley was the model that every single rock and roll frontman followed. No one had seen a showman like that before, and while James Brown had incredible moves every single time he performed, Presley had some dance steps that even the greatest dancers of all time probably wouldn’t have pulled off, especially when he started shaking his ass during ‘Jailhouse Rock’.
For someone who was as focused on the details as Jones was, he wasn’t exactly in love with the idea of Presley leading a recording session, saying, “I was with Tommy Dorsey when [Elvis] Presley showed up at 17 years old…. And Dorsey said, ‘Fuck him – I won’t play with him.’ He wouldn’t let his band play with him. Yeah, motherfucker couldn’t sing.” But singing was only one piece of the puzzle when it came to Presley.
There are many artists who have tried to reinterpret the blues and turn it into rock and roll, but Presley was the epitome of what a great rock and roll musician should have been. Aside from having a lot of gusto in his voice, Presley’s true masterwork was whenever he performed, and even when he was playing Vegas during his more rotund period, you could feel that he was giving everything he had to make sure that ‘An American Trilogy’ sounded as close to perfect as he could.
And while Jackson had a bit more precision in his voice, there’s something to be said for someone who could make a crowd move like Presley could. There was no real precedent for a musician like this, and even if someone from Jones’s generation didn’t understand it, that didn’t make him any less of a legend in his own right.
