CINEMUSIC 1997 - Part Two of Three

QUINCY JONES PRESS CONFERENCE

Saturday 15 March 1997, Palace Hotel, Gstaad, Switzerland

Jazz musician, film music composer, conductor and arranger for some of the biggest names in the music industry, Quincy Jones has been rightfully described as a Renaissance Man. Renowned for his contribution to music of all kinds, Jones' achievements are nothing short of astonishing. In addition to being nominated for 76 Grammy Awards, Jones produced Michael Jackson's Thriller (the best-selling album of all time), and the African fund-raising song "We Are the World" (the best-selling single of all time). In the 60s and 70s, he created the scores to over 30 films, including The Pawnbroker and In the Heat of the Night. Today, he is a partner in QDE, which produces Mad TV and is involved in many publishing and multi-media ventures. A legend, and a genuinely nice guy.

Celebrating his 64th birthday at this year's Cinemusic, the International Music and Film Festival, Jones shows no signs of slowing down. The recipient of this year's Cinemusic Award, Jones is one of the hardest-working people in show business -- and one of the busiest: his schedule prevented him from granting individual interviews.

The following is a transcript of a press conference that took place at the Palace Hotel in Gstaad on March 15, 1997. Where possible, reporters have been identified.

JON BURLINGAME: Quincy, when you look back on your film composing career now, what memories come to you? Was it a period of great creativity? Was it bone-crushing deadlines? What do you think about when you look back on that period of the late sixties?

QUINCY JONES: Both. Very creative, bone-crushing deadlines [laughs]. That's the nature of film scores, though. See, the process of scoring is the last element that hits the film. They have built sound by then, they have built sound effects already, and they can't finish the film up until they go into dubbing, and they have to have all of the elements, including dialogue, sound and music before they finish. So there's always the perception of a lot of pressure at that point, because they want to see that film put together.

Most people think that if you have, say, 60 minutes of music to write for film, some guy will say, "Well, you have six weeks, so you can write ten minutes a week." They think it's like delivering some sheets to a room, some pillowslips. Most of the big composers can deliver two, maybe two and a half minutes a day. That's a lot of work, really. To compose and orchestrate two and a half minutes a day is a lot. But mostly they crunch the weeks together because they want to see the film, and music's the last element that is holding everything up.

I felt that I wanted to do films since I was 14 years old. I really loved it, but most of the names on the screen at that time were four-syllable Eastern European names: Miklos Rozsa, Dimitri Tiomkin. [Henry] Mancini kind of changed the landscape a little bit.

I was very lucky I waited until I was 30 years old to do my first film -- I did The Pawnbroker -- and I waited another two years after that. From then on, I must've done some 34 films, some not so great, some very great films. I worked with a lot of great directors on The Pawnbroker, In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night and The Color Purple. Those are some of the finest directors, so I felt very fortunate. My agent would never let me take a "B" film. A lot of offers came in, and he said, "I want you to do great films." It was Percy Faith's son who was my agent, the late Peter Faith. He insisted on that decision, not to do "B" pictures, but good pictures. I was lucky then.

Q: [unknown] On In Cold Blood, Richard Brooks has never been accused of being a man who doesn't have a strong opinion --

A: That's for sure.

Q: [unknown] What was your relationship with him on that score? Did he give you a lot of direction? Did he have any ideas?

A: Absolutely. Richard hired me before he hired the actors. I really admired him for that, because I'd heard how tough he was. He'd come from that Bogart/Katharine Hepburn school, and he was tough, no doubt about it. But he was tough to the point where I'm doing a film that's an all-white film, and in those days you have to imagine how it was -- this was in 1966 or 1967 -- and [Truman] Capote and Columbia Pictures were coming to him saying, "Leonard Bernstein's gonna do this score," and I would agree with him, because he'd just done On the Waterfront, and was one of my favorite musicians on the planet. And Richard said, "I don't care what you say, Quincy's doing this film, and that's all there is to it."

Then he hired Bobby Blake. I'd just finished "In the Heat of the Night", and Scott Wilson... I suggested him, and they used him as the other actor. He let me be a part of the process, going to the Mindriger Clinic, to study the tapes of the killers. We went to the Clutter place in Kansas City.
You get 90 per cent more out of a composer when the composer's sure that he's wanted. They pull you in at the beginning of the process, and not wait until the picture's finished and see what kind of cracks you have to fill up. Usually they'll say "The dialogue's bad, here we have to work a little harder with the music," or you have to say something that's not in the script with the music. This was with Carl Foreman who said, "We have Julie Newmarr playing a part. She's a nymphomaniac, homosexual serial killer, but you have to tell them this with music," and I said, "Why didn't you put it in the script? She's almost like a mute then." [laughs] I think he made that up after they shot the film. I said, "A baritone recorder should be able to suffice for all that," and he said, "Right!" Richard [Brooks] said, "If we get through this film alive, we'll be friends forever." As I said before, he's a tough cookie, and wouldn't let anybody in the cutting room except Peter Zimmer, the assistant, myself and him, because he was very paranoid about people seeing his films. On one occasion, when he was scoring The Professionals, producers walked across the scoring stage, and three months later, Mission: Impossible was on the air. The idea was taken from The Professionals, and so he was very paranoid about others seeing his ideas. He would only give the actors one page of script a day, and it used to drive them crazy. He would never let anybody have the whole script of a screenplay. And at the end he made me take the movieola apart. He said, "You have to learn how to take every screw apart, because there'll be no technicians coming into the room, just the four of us, that's it." And I was very grateful to him years after, because I really felt at home with a movieola, and we ended up friends, and I did two more pictures with him.

[JB] Quincy, I understand there are plans to do something film-wise with "Q's Jook Joint" [most recent album]. Could you tell us a little bit about your plans for that?

A: That's very much a pet project of mine. Musicians always say, 'Let's make a movie out of the music,' and that's just what we're doing. I've thought about a lot of cinematic things that we would conceive in the album originally. And with Paul Hunter, who's done a lot of videos -- a very good director -- and Mark Brown, who just completed a picture called How to Be a Player... they are making this their passion right now. We're talking about different ideas and so forth. It'll be on HBO as a 90 minute film. It'll be totally dramatized. We'll work with the songs, having the songs almost like characters in the picture. We've used the analogy of Casablanca; not stylistically, but because there was a Rick there, who had a club, and they had 11 songs in Casablanca. They had equal parts of humor. There's a comedy line every three pages in that script, and there's a love triangle, a very powerful love triangle, and tension. And so that's what ours will be. It's a totally different genre of story, but that's what it'll be, a totally dramatized picture. It'll have all the tension, and humor and dance and song -- it'll pretty well let you feel what a juke joint's all about. So we plan to do this in about three or four months, and it'll be on as a movie of the week on HBO, and it'll be a theatrical release in Europe, and foreign.

Q: [JB] And you expect this to be on the air before the end of the year?

A: Oh, absolutely.

Q: [Swiss Film Music Society] And how did you choose the artists?

A: Pardon?

Q: [Swiss Film Music society] Phil Collins, for example.

A: You mean, in the album? You just try to cast the songs like you would with a script. And especially with the kinds of things that Phil Collins had never done before, I love to do that, you know. They get into a different arena, and they find some different music, they deal with a different musical solution. They have to stretch a little bit, and they love it. I "think" he loved it.

Claude [Nobs] was there when we did the recording. We recorded a lot with fiber optic, which was great. It's just like they're in the studio. Toots Thielemans was in Belgium and... what was it, Geneva, Claude?

CLAUDE NOBS: Zurich.

A: Zurich. And we recorded Bono in London, and Chaka [Khan] in London. We were sitting in Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. It's great.

Q: [unknown] Did you see the film Kansas City by Robert Altman?

A: Kansas City? Oh, yeah. Well, it's typical Altman. He tried to pull the roots of Kansas City... Kansas City was a very powerful birthplace of some of our best music. You've got Charlie Parker and Leslie Young and [Count] Basie, that's pretty good.

Q: [unknown] Are you at home when you listen to that music?

A: Oh, yeah! I feel at home with all music, though. I really do.

Q: [unknown] And do you feel like music for you is a catharsis, a moving force spreading a message?

A: Yes. Well, that's a double-sided answer there. It dates back to Colman Hawkins, when he recorded "Body and Soul". It was recorded in 1939, and it was a hit until 1953. It's a classic jazz solo, but the medium was not big enough to fill it out to everybody, so it took from 1939 to 1953, by word of mouth or whatever it was -- there was no MTV or anything like that, that's for sure, and I think now it's more powerful than ever. You're talking about satellites... I remember when American records would be released two years after the United States release. Not any more. They come out in Germany and in England before it comes out in the States now, and I think that's good. The media has a huge throw today, it's gigantic. And it can be sent all over the world in a matter of 15 minutes.

Q: [unknown] In the era of Charlie Parker and Theolonius Monk, did you did a dream already then to do film music, or were you totally absorbed in the jazz scene?

A: Both. I don't know why they're not normal bedfellows. I always was attracted by image and sound, writing the music for films. Films force you to compose things you would never attempt under any other normal circumstances, never. Because you're locked in. There's a preconceived dramatic premise that's locked in sprockets. That's not going to change, no matter how much you'd like to have three more bars, that's not going to move, you know, unless they decide to edit it for you.

There are a lot of directors that edit with music. The best directors edit with music, because it gives them pacing and style. Just plain film is a plastic art, it has no rhythm. Even with what they call the temp tracks they like to edit with music. It's very difficult for them to not have music for the edit. But they have to be careful what they use as temp tracks. I know Johnny Williams has a contract with Stephen Spielberg -- he only can use temp tracks of dead composers. [all laugh]

A: It's true! Don't put that heat on him, they fall in love with temp tracks. And the very skilled editors and directors, like Mike Nichols, Stephen Spielberg and Michael Cahn, when they lock it down, you're locked to 6:8, you can't make it 4:4 later, 'cause that rhythm is already established, and you can't transfer it.

Q: [unknown] Quincy, about those bone-crushing deadlines? Which film crushed the most bones?

A: [laughs] Whoo! I'd say The Getaway, The New Centurions and The Color Purple.

Q: [unknown] And how much time did you have on The Getaway?

A: On The Getaway? Ten days [all gasp]. Ten days. And Steve McQueen came to my house early one morning with Ali McGraw. It was First Artists, if you'll remember that, with Streisand, Dustin, the five artists, it was almost like a United Artists situation. He said, "We have this big opening around the world in only a few weeks, and we have a score by another composer here that doesn't work." And Sam Peckinpah had directed the picture. He had already gone to Mexico to direct Billy the Kid, and so he wasn't around. So Steve came by, and he said, "Ten days." I mean, actors, they think you just whistle something. So we had to spot the picture, to compose it, to orchestrate it, record it and dub it in ten days, everything in ten days. And the guys that were producing it said, "If you want a score quick, call Quincy Jones." And I said, I don't want to be known for that! [laughs]. They spread that word around... you can die of trying to keep those kind of deadlines going.

Q: [unknown] Did you ever hear back from Peckinpah, on what he though about the music?

A: No, I think he died a little bit after that. Not "because" of that [laughs]. When we got in the dubbing room, McQueen says, "I don't know what to do, now." I said, "Great, just sit down and have a beer and sit down here." That was great, because I had a chance to dub the picture. If Peckinpah was there, he wouldn't have even let me into the studio. I had a chance to dub the whole movie, with the sound and the music and everything, and it was great. If he was there, I wouldn't have been able to say a word, because directors, they dominate the dubbing process, and they should. It's their vision, you know.

Q: [Belgian reporter] You worked with Toots Thielemans on that movie...

A: Yes, and voices. We overdubbed Don Elliot, and I wrote the instruments, but with human voices, and I don't know why we got that ambitious under the time constraints, but it just seemed to work. Don Elliot could sing, twelve-tone music and sustains and so forth... twelve-tone French horn parts, and it just seemed to fit with Toots.

Q: [Belgian reporter] You seem to have a fantastic working relationship with him.

A: With Toots? Oh yeah.

Q: [Belgian reporter] Because he's a countryman of mine. I'm from Belgium.

A: There's nobody like Toots. I think he's one of the greatest musicians that ever lived.

To be Concluded in the next Lost Issue...

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