Soul in Seattle
“Two things you can depend on carrying through life from the ‘hood are attitude and antennae,” Jones writes. When he was ten, Quincy Sr. moved the family to Bremerton, Washington, where he worked as a carpenter at a nearby wartime shipyard. Soon a wicked stepmother named Elvera and her brood came into the Jones family’s life. There was also the constant fear that Sarah, who was now out of the hospital, would find them. Starved and abused by the hated Elvera, Jones, a charming, upbeat ringleader, became an expert at sourcing food.
One day, an eleven-year-old Jones and some friends broke into the neighborhood rec center to feast on soda and ice cream. In a side room, Jones discovered an upright piano. “That’s where I began to find peace,” he writes. “I knew this was it for me. Forever. Each note seemed to fill up another empty space I felt inside.” Every day Jones would climb into a window to play the piano, until a kind superintendent began to leave the door open, so he didn’t have to break in.
In 1947, the family moved to Seattle, and a fearless Jones hung around every jazz and bebop musician he could find passing through: Sammy Davis Jr, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway. A voracious student, he convinced trumpeter Clark Terry to give him lessons at 5 am before school. Soon, Jones was playing trumpet in the Bumps Blackwell Junior Band and backing Billie Holiday. One day while sitting on the porch, Sarah appeared out of nowhere, running towards them, shouting for them. Lloyd and Quincy scampered inside and slammed the door.
When Jones was 14, he met a fellow musical prodigy named Ray Charles. Jones was in awe of Charles, who at 16 had his own apartment, a girlfriend, and gigs.
“I’d watch him cross the street without cane or dog, dodging traffic, shopping, counting his change, scuffing his shoes as he climbed the curb, never missing a step, and I’d say to myself, ‘Damn, if he can do it, I can do it,’” Jones writes. “I would go by his little apartment and find him on the couch taking a radio apart, shocking himself. He’d say, ‘Where you been, Quince? I ain’t seen you in a while, man.’ I’d say to myself, ‘Seen?’ It was like somebody forgot to tell Ray he was blind.”
The two budding geniuses would sit in Charles’ apartment for hours, talking music theory and analyzing records, though Jones’s curiosity occasionally exhausted Charles. “He’d wear me out,” Charles writes in Q. “He’d say, ‘When we played ‘Cherokee’ last week, what were those substitute chord changes you played in the bridge?’ I’d say, ‘Quincy, you know I can’t remember, man. We were just stretchin’ out at the time. I guess that’s why they call it jazz.’”
The Connoisseur
“Puppy love ended with Hamp’s band,” Jones writes. “That’s where my life as a dog really began.”
After a stint at Berklee College of Music, in 1951 Jones joined Lionel Hampton’s legendary band, and learned how to score and scout women from his elder musicians. Despite his marriage to his high school sweetheart Jeri back in New York, Jones prowled the streets with fellow dogs Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando during “nights of laughin’ and low-lifin.” And as the boy-wonder rose from arranger to conductor and bandleader, living in France and touring Europe with Dizzy Gillespie and his own band, he discovered a world where race did not complicate love.
