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The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.

Quincy Jones

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Quincy Jones
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 14
Actor
Autobiographer
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Film Producer
Humanitarian
Instrumentalist
Jazz Musician
Jazz Trumpeter
Music Arranger
Chicago
Illinois
Q
Quincy
Quincy Delight Jones Jr.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr
Quincy Jones Jr.
Black
Business
People
Atrocious
Performers
Entertainment
Climate

More quotes by Quincy Jones

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My grandmother had this high-tech security system - a rusty nail she used to lock the door.
Quincy Jones
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You want your parents to say, Hey, I'm proud of you. When you don't hear that, you learn to compensate. You say, Hell, I don't need their approval. If I get my music right, I'll have everyone else's approval. I didn't understand it then, but I now know that's what happened to me.
Quincy Jones
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The people who make it to the top - whether they're musicians, or great chefs, or corporate honchos - are addicted to their calling ... [they] are the ones who'd be doing whatever it is they love, even if they weren't being paid.
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I was inspired by a lot of people when I was young, every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. I was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through, because in those days we didn't have MTV, we didn't have television.
Quincy Jones
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A lot of the guys were like that - Oscar Pettiford - they just took me under their wing, and that's why I automatically help young people. I just love it, because they did that for me.
Quincy Jones
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My dream is to put together a performance of the evolution of black music with Cirque du Soleil . I would also like to do street opera and children's books. But even as I work toward these things, I want to simplify my life.
Quincy Jones
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Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.
Quincy Jones
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They say a blind hog will find the acorn one day.
Quincy Jones
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When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.
Quincy Jones
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You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
Quincy Jones
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It's very freaky in Chicago.There's something in the water there, I don't know what it is. But the actual word Chicago means, in the Indian language, garlic. It was just garlic and mosquitoes there. And that is the roughest city on the planet, and I been to every place in the world.
Quincy Jones
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Every day, my daddy told me the same thing. 'Once a task is just begun, never leave it till it's done. Be the labour great or small, do it well or not at all.'
Quincy Jones
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To me it's no accident that all the symphony orchestras around the world tune up to the note A. And A is 440 cycles, except in Germany where it's 444. But the universe is 450 cycles. So what I'm trying to say is, I think it's God's voice, melody especially. Counterpoint, retrograde inversion, harmony... that's the science and the craft.
Quincy Jones
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Eight kids and a stepmother, and I just wanted to be out of there and so when I got a scholarship from Boston to the Schillinger House, which is now the Berklee School of Music, I couldn't wait to get out of there.
Quincy Jones
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I don't deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn't deserve that, either. So I'll keep it.
Quincy Jones
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I used to practice piano for hours, and now, with a synthesizer, you can input the music and the machine perfects the song. That's why we have so many people in the music business who should be plumbers. They don't really understand music because they haven't been trained.
Quincy Jones
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Some summers my father would take us down to visit our grandmother in Louisville, who was an ex-slave, Susan Jones, and she had a shotgun shack they call it, and no electricity, a well in the back, a coal stove, kerosene lamps.
Quincy Jones
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I improvised my life along the way - I just moved step-by-step. And I knew that if I got better, something would happen.
Quincy Jones
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A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.
Quincy Jones
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Im probably the only one in the world you can name thats worked with Billie Holiday, Louie Armstrong, Ella, Duke, Miles, Dizzy, Ray Charles, Aretha, Michael Jackson, rappers. Fly Me to the Moon was played on the moon by Buzz Aldrin. Sinatra. Paul Simon. Tony Bennett. Im the only one.
Quincy Jones