“Complete Quincy” garners rave reviews
Q’s new book, The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey and Passions, continues to garner rave reviews. Among the latest to weigh in are VIBE, the publication that Q founded in 1993, and The Black World Today website.
The VIBE review, penned by editor-at-large Rob Kenner, begins with some reservations. “At first glance 142 pages might not seem near enough space to do justice to the dude who rose up from the streets of Seattle and Chicago, joined Lionel Hampton’s band as a teenager, collaborated with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Dinah Washington, and Ray Charles, conducted and arranged for Count Basie and Frank Sinatra, scored 36 films including 1967’s In Cold Blood and 1985’s The Color Purple, wrote the theme to Sanford & Son, produced the biggest-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller (Epic, 1982—act like ya know!), as well as a little single called “We Are The World” (Columbia, 1985), launched Will Smith’s acting career, collected more Grammy nominations (79) and awards (27) than any other human being, battled brain cancer (twice), raised seven children, devoted himself to humanitarian causes, and, incidentally, founded VIBE.”
For the record, Q suffered two brain aneurysms in 1974, not cancer, but Kenner is spot on with the rest of his assessment. “But like one of those clown cars in the circus, The Complete Quincy Jones squeezes an impossible amount of material in between its covers,” Keener writes. “There’s something comforting about this glimpse over a genius’s shoulder, a welcome reminder that even living legends must do the little things that make big things possible.”
In the Black World Today review, Eugene Holley, Jr. writes, “the release of this compelling, comprehensive, and lushly illustrated coffee-table book, featuring seven decades of memorabilia from his private archive, is a fitting tribute to the man whose picture would appear in any dictionary under the heading of multitasker.”
He goes on to conclude, “This amazing book is a visual fugue that mirrors the interwoven strands of music, service, and soul that Quincy Jones has masterfully melded all of his life.”
You can read the full VIBE review here, The Black World Today review here, and read an interview with Quincy about his life in Newsweek here.
sir. QUINCY stares at own in the eventful life and music and a human being and the person of the soul, view of God.