QUINCY JONES
By 1959, Little Richard was starting to make gospel recordings and had minor sales success with some of them; “He Got What He Wanted” made the Top 40 in the U.K. His childhood hero Mahalia Jackson acknowledged his gospel efforts positively; after working with Little Richard on his 1962 album King of the Gospel Singers, Quincy Jones said in 1984 that he was more impressed with those performances than those of anyone he had worked with.
(June 2013/1) * * * Lesley Gore’s first two albums, I’ll Cry If I Want To and Lesley Gore Sings of Mixed-Up Hearts were produced by Quincy Jones, one of the best in the business – Michael Jackson’s Thriller is only the best-known of his production efforts – and a talented jazz artist and bandleader in his own right with a Renaissance-man career that dates back to the early 1950’s.
(January 2014)
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Her work for Quincy Jones so impressed him that, in his 2001 autobiography Q, he wrote (as quoted in Wikipedia): “. . . women like . . . Fender bass player Carol Kaye . . . could do anything and leave men in the dust.”
(February 2015)
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One of their finest and best known songs is the proto-feminist anthem by Lesley Gore called “You Don’t Own Me”, a #2 hit in December 1963 that was kept from the top of the charts only by the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. The song was written by David White and John Madara; Quincy Jones was the record producer, and Jones later produced a 2015 remake of “You Don’t Own Me” by Australian artist Grace featuring G-Eazy. (August 2015) |