Michael Jackson with Paul McCartney
Written and composed by Michael Jackson
Produced by Quincy Jones & Michael Jackson
Featured on Thriller

Released as a single Oct. 18, 1982.
Chart info: No. 2, Hot 100
No. 1, Soul Singles

In his storied career, Quincy Jones has worked with plenty of dynamic duos. In 1953, ace trumpeters Clifford Brown and Art Farmer joined forces on the Quincy-penned, arranged and conducted “Stockholm Sweetnin’.” A decade later, he conducted the velvety tones of Ella Fitzgerald with the big band sounds of Count Basie on “I’m Begging to See the Light.” A year later, Quincy arranged and conducted Basie and his orchestra, this time backing the unforgettable voice of Frank Sinatra on “Fly Me to the Moon.” And then there was the pairing of legendary Motown diva Diana Ross with star-on-the-rise Michael Jackson on “Ease on Down the Road” for film version of The Wiz in 1978.

Yet one of Quincy’s most famous pairings occurred four years later when he matched Jackson with Paul McCartney on the Jackson-penned tune “The Girl is Mine.” It was the first song recorded for the landmark Thriller album and helped grease the wheels that would drive Jackson to a new level of superstardom.

Prior to the collaboration, Quincy had some connection to the Beatles. He was friends with longtime Beatles producer George Martin and worked as an arranger on Ringo Starr’s 1970 solo debut Sentimental Journey. In 1971, when he was serving as the musical director of the Academy Awards, Q leapt out of the orchestra pit and bounded on stage to accept the Best Original Song Score for “Let It Be” on behalf of the Fab Four, who were not in attendance that evening.

Years later, Quincy had helped launch Michael Jackson to a new level of stardom with his stellar production of 1979’s Off the Wall. That album featured such hits as “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” “Rock with You” and the title track. The album’s final single, “Girlfriend,” was written by Paul McCartney, who also recorded a version of the song with his band Wings, but he did not appear on Jackson’s recorded version. While “Girlfriend” failed to become a hit, it paved the way for another Jackson-McCartney collaboration, “The Girl is Mine.” We’ll let Quincy pick up the story in his own words.

“Before we started on Thriller, I was working on Donna Summer’s second Geffen album. I thought it would take four months, but it went seven,” Quincy recalls. “In the middle of it, we took a break and Michael and I went to Tucson to Paul McCartney’s house to do ‘The Girl Is Mine’ because that was the only time he was in town. We only had three days. No matter what we were doing, we had to stop to get that record because it was import.”

The song, a light breezy number featuring Jackson’s playful verbal sparing with McCartney, concludes with a spoken exchange between the two singers, with Jackson famously declaring, “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” Released on Oct. 18, 1982, it reached number one Billboard’s Soul Singles chart and peaked at number two on the Hot 100.

Its success was welcomed, but it did create a minor problem. Quincy and Bruce Swedien were still mixing Thriller as the album’s first single was climbing the charts. “The made us a little nervous,” Quincy admits.

As everyone knows, Thriller ended up coming out just fine and went on to become the best-selling album of all time. Jackson returned the favor to McCartney a year later, guesting on his chart-topping single “Say Say Say,” produced by George Martin.

Below you can listen our “The Girl is Mine” playlist, featuring Michael Jackson’s “Girlfriend,” “The Girl is Mine,” “Say Say Say,” and Jackson’s “The Girl is Mine 2008″ with will.i.am from the 25th anniversary edition of Thriller.

Quincy Jones & His Orchestra
Written, arranged, conducted and produced by Quincy Jones

From the album Big Band Bossa Nova
Released in 1962

“Soul Bossa Nova” is one of Quincy’s best-known and most enduring composition. After its initial release on Big Band Bossa Nova in 1962, it went on to serve as the theme for a Canadian game show, was sampled in two different hip-hop hits and served as the theme song of the Austin Powers film trilogy.

The song’s inspiration dates back to late ‘50s, when Quincy was part of Dizzy Gillespie’s USO touring band. While in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Quincy and Dizzy met a young piano player by the name of Lalo Schifrin. “He told us once you get to Brazil you’re going to see some new music that they’re experimenting with. They call it New Wave, which is what Bossa Nova means in Portuguese,” Quincy recalls. “In the beginning they called it Jazz and Samba.”

Quincy, Mike Myers as Austin Powers and film composer George S. Clinton. (Photo courtesy of George S. Clinton).

Once in Rio, Brazil, Quincy saw the music evolve before his eyes. “So one afternoon on Copacabana beach, Dizzy asked me to go to the Gloria Hotel,” Quincy remembers. “Dizzy sat in with the house band, a Samba band playing Bebop. In the front seats in the audience were Astrud and Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim, they were very young.” When Jobim later recorded the landmark Bossa Nova song “Desafinado,” you could hear the influence of Gillespie’s trumpet in the mix.

Later, Quincy and several Brazilian musicians including Sergio Mendes and Gilberto Gil, played a special midnight show at Carnegie Hall in New York City focusing on Bossa Nova. Shortly thereafter, Quincy recorded Big Band Bossa Nova. It featured his rendition of “Desafinado” and songs penned by Jobim, Schifrin, and Charles Mingus, but it was Quincy’s own composition, “Soul Bossa Nova,” the album’s lead track featuring a show-stopping Rahsaan Roland Kirk flute solo, that had the most impact.

Long before Austin Powers, the song was heard in movie theaters, first in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker in 1964, which Quincy scored, and later in Woody Allen’s 1969 film Take the Money and Run. It also served as the theme of the ‘70s Canadian game show Definition. That in turn inspired Mike Myers to use the track in Austin Powers as well as the Canadian hop-hop duo Dream Warriors, which sampled the song in “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style.”

“I’d done Saturday Night Live a couple of times with Mike Myers,” Quincy explains. “Sean Perry, head of Endeavor [talent agency] told me about his father, Jim, who was one of the biggest game show hosts in Canada. He hosted Definition, which used my record for its theme song, and Jim Perry was Mike Myers’ idol when he was growing up, so that’s how Mike Myers’ got the idea to use ‘Soul Bossa Nova’ in Austin Powers, not once, but in all three films. And in the third one, the director even put me in the film making a cameo along with Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. That same year, Ludacris recorded ‘Number One Spot,’ which samples my song, and the video won a VMA. It’s kooky, man, but that’s how it happened.”