Quincy Jones Film Reflection

In the documentary, Jones talks through it at points narrating his life and giving nostalgic stories of his beginnings  He says that “if you know your past it’s easier to get where you’re going”. Quincy Jones was born and spent his early childhood in the South side of Chicago from 1933 to 1940 when his father moved he and his brother to Seattle, Washington. While Quincy was still young, his mother was taken away to an insane asylum after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. His father worked for the Jones Boys, a local black gang who controlled that area at the time. After realising that he couldn’t handle balancing raising his sons while working for the gang, Jones’s father moved them to Seattle.

By the time Jones was 14 years old, he was playing jazz trumpet in clubs, speakeasies, and juke-joints. He says that “music was the one thing that offered me  my freedom.” When he was done, he would mess around with his friends playing bebop. In 1957, he learned more about classical music and orchestration while studying in Paris, France. By 1969 Jones was one of the first black people nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song (“The Eyes of Love”). In 1971, he was the first black man to be the musical director/conductor of an Academy Awards  Ceremony and in 1995 he was the first black man to receive the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. In January of 2015, he had a stroke which put him in a diabetic coma due to excessive drinking.

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