Of the approximately one hundred million people – the estimate is fluctuating as it should be for a legend, but it is still the best-selling album of all time – who in the last forty years have bought a copy of Thriller of Michael Jackson, few have a clear idea of ​​the role actually played by Quincy Jones, who passed away today at the age of 91. It’s the paradox of those who work behind the scenes: we’re talking about one of the most influential producers ever, a true icon who linked his name to that album, but for those who don’t know the mechanisms of this machine, it might seem irrelevant that he was behind Thriller and not someone else. Yet without his touch, Thriller it wouldn’t be the same masterpiece: it wouldn’t arouse the same emotions, it wouldn’t have the same mysterious charm. Maybe Michael Jackson wouldn’t even have been Michael Jackson. Too? No.

Quincy Jones, legendary producer between Michael Jackson and Sinatra, has died

Quincy Jones invented a genre

Let’s put it this way: the Eighties were one of the last eras in which music could be a vector for changing society and the world, with producers – who are not simply those who put in the money, but real artists with operational tasks, of arrangement first of all – who for the first time became key figures. We think of Rick Rubin in hip hop and rock, first, and in country, then, of Steve Albini in hardcore. People, that is, with a philosophy and a profound approach towards musicians and their auditions, essential for giving a sound, a verse to everything. And in this sense, returning then to the pop of the United States, the game changer it was Jones: in fact he invented the genre of the time, he established its aesthetic and thought coordinates, as well as having raised the bar of the limit to which pop music can go.

For goodness sake, always taking Jackson into account. Born in Chicago in 1933, he trained in jazz, studied composition and worked on his own and others’ records, including an arrangement of Fly me to the Moon by Frank Sinatra (we are in 1964, for everything else there is the Netflix documentary Quincy) but the turning point, paradoxically, came when his health forced him to stop playing the trumpet. Thus he began to move behind the scenes, and during the filming of I’m Magic (The Wiz) – a film about the Wizard of Oz, for which he had edited the original music – he actually meets Jackson, who plays the scarecrow. The talent, of course, is all his, but he is still a twenty year old veteran of the Jackson Five experience, ergo one of many. Jones is decisive in his solo affirmation, first producing him Off the wall (1979), a masterpiece that isn’t talked about enough just because it’s overshadowed by Thrillerand then repeating itself precisely in Thriller (1982), fundamental for both.

The documentary Thriller 40 it’s worth seeing

His work on one of the most monumental pop works of all time is chronicled in the documentary Thriller 40 (2013, on Prime Video): not only does it make Jackson’s auditions “beautiful”, but it broadens the spectrum of colors, for example with rock (Beat it)and deals with the rendering of those legendary songs, transforming them into timeless portals, whose sound, it will be said, seems like that of the universe. And it highlights, above all, the talents of their author and pushing him further and further – as well as playing an important part in the hiring of Paul McCartney in The girl is minein a sort of handover. For those who want, on the web you can find the “decompositions” of the tracks that make up the pieces of the album, in which for example you can see how many times Jackson sang the verses of Thriller with tonality very lightly different: the final result, given by their various overlaps, speaks of a chisel work never done before and never repeated in the history of pop music, at the basis of the success of the album itself.

After Thriller

With Jackson he will also produce the most negligible – but why are we referring to epochal masterpieces –Bad (1987), before relations cooled, but at that point Jones was already the most powerful producer in the world, capable of making record-breaking hauls of Grammys, writing other history-book soundtracks, showing a certain acumen for business and sign, above all, the “musical direction” of We are the world (1985), the symbolic charity piece of the eighties, a brick so large within the wall of shared popular culture and perhaps the greatest legacy (precisely in terms of legacy on the imagination) of that era of music. At the entrance to his studio, where one after the other stars such as Bob Dylan, Ray Chalres, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner and Jackson himself entered to sing their parts, he had left a note that read: “Leave your ego out of it.” Beyond the criticisms that a song like this can bring with it, it was nice to think of a producer as a guru, a psychologist, rather than a technician.