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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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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.
Else
Music
Orchestration
Everything
Melodies
Come
Melody
Straight
Harmony
Theory
Study

More quotes by Quincy Jones

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I learned real early why God gave us two ears and one mouth, because you're supposed to listen twice as much as you talk.
Quincy Jones
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I got to trumpet, finally. That's why I love to write for brass, and [Count] Basie and [Frank] Sinatra and all that stuff, 'cause that's just like part of my DNA.
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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Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.
Quincy Jones
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I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.
Quincy Jones
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We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.
Quincy Jones
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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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I'm never in my life going to do a record that's a tribute to myself. I don't need it.
Quincy Jones
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Playing the game, and unfortunately, playing the gangster game is very profitable.
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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Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.
Quincy Jones
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Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.
Quincy Jones
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Michael (Jackson) was so shy, he'd sit down and sing behind the couch with his back to me while I sat with my hands over my eyes-and the lights off.
Quincy Jones
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Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.
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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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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I was the most subtle person in the world.
Quincy Jones
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All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls.
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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A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that's the bottom line.
Quincy Jones