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Oct. 18, 2018 - Dr. Oz Podcast
42:03
Music Legend Quincy Jones Reveals His Health Battle, and What Really Saved His Life

He’s one of the greatest music legends of our time - Quincy Jones sat down with Dr. Oz to reveal how he survived a near-fatal brain aneurysm, and how music has always saved his life. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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If you hadn't been a musician, what would you have been?
I don't know.
I was a dog.
That's what Chicago trained you to be.
All we ever saw were machine guns and stogies and money and gangsters all our life in Chicago.
White and black, that's all anybody ever saw.
I don't know how, but thank God when I touched that piano, I knew that's where I lived and that's what God wanted me to do.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Yes. - Yes.
He is one of the greatest music legends of all time.
Quincy Jones spoke with me to reveal how he survived a near-fatal brain aneurysm and how music has always saved his life.
He's the most nominated Grammy artist of all time, with 76 nominations.
And he's won a third of those.
He's composed over 50 major motion picture and television scores, the We Are the World recording, and just about everything else from Michael Jackson's thriller to the score for The Color Purple.
If you sort of put it all together into your life, and you've been through a lot, what have been your keys of success, of longevity, for your health?
Because if you're not healthy, you can't produce.
It's loving what you're doing.
It's just really loving what you're involved in.
I think it has a lot to do with your health.
And what do you do when there are times when it's just not fun?
There must be times when you're writing music where it's just not as upbeat.
Or do you just make it fun?
It is fun.
It's always fun.
Are you kidding?
Anytime you have a chance to create, it's fun.
Always fun.
You know, a couple years ago, we were at a meeting, and I saw you, and I said, Winston, you look completely different than you did a year ago.
And you said you'd been dragged over to Europe by your loving family.
That's right.
And they'd fixed you up.
What did you do?
Well, I received a gift from the country of Sweden, which I've been...
I've been traveling two foot years since 1953, and I received a gift from the country of Sweden of six days at the Karolinski Hospital with the Nobel Prize doctors.
And it was one of the most unforgettable times of my life, you know.
What specifically did they do with you?
Did you do a couple of days of tests first?
Well, the first thing they said is that you have to understand that you are a self-contained emotional machine.
And I understood that perfectly.
And I've been in Sweden for years, you know.
Ruder King, Gustaf, and Queen Sylvia.
My kids, two of my kids, I have Swedish.
I've been going there since 1953. It was an amazing experience.
It was a life-changing experience.
What were the big mistakes you were making before you went that you're not making anymore?
Of not being concerned about what it takes to be in good health.
What it takes to make your life last a long time.
We can have a productive, healthy body.
It's very important.
I can hear you stretching it.
Are there specific things you're doing differently now than you did five years ago?
I mean, do you walk more?
Do you pump iron?
Everything.
You know, it's a question of understanding what you eat, you know, because they made it very clear, the Nobel doctor from Karolinsky Hospital up there, is that you are a Self-contained emotional machine is true.
And your mind rules the body.
If your heart and your mind is in good shape, you know, the rest they can fix.
But your heart and your mind rules the body.
I understand it very clearly.
But if you try to reduce that to practice, for the average listener who says, heck, I've known Quincy for decades, if he's doing super well, I've got to copy what he's doing.
I mean, do you have a routine?
Do you get up in the morning and go walk in?
Is there something you use to get to sleep at night?
I mean, how do you actually put it all together?
Well, you know, there are lots of details there, and I don't think it's very complex at all.
You know, it's a very simple thing.
Right now, I have to be very careful because I had a fall in February, and I have to be careful because I strain some of the muscles in my back and so forth.
I'm taking care of it now, and you have to be on top of every inch of your body's existence, and I really understand that now.
Because I want to be here a long time, because between the genome breakthrough, which is color-coded, and they're breaking down into protein and genes now, and biotechnology and nanotechnology, which is carbon and hydrogen atoms, the technology is going to be so advanced, you know, that it's going to shock us, really, because our health is going to be in the hands of a very advanced technology.
But a lot of the things that you're doing differently have more to do with the lifestyle changes you made.
I mean, better sleep patterns, exercising more wisely, more strict on the food you're putting in your body.
Absolutely.
The way you eat is very important.
So, are you going out there and telling your friends, hey, cut that out, that's got trans fats in it?
No, I'm not a preacher, but I hear a lot, very loud and clear what they're telling me, you know, deal with alkalines versus foods that give you acidity, deal with alkalines and so forth.
How to deal with Not as much sugar, and deal with stevia, which is a root, you know, and it replaces the sugar.
It's sweet, but it's a root.
It doesn't have the carbohydrates or the sweets that even Splenda has, you know.
And understand the chemical balance of what a human body is about, you know.
It's powerful stuff.
It really is.
Well, I'm here with Mike Roizen, this is Mehmet Oz, talking with Quincy Jones, someone who's changed the world for a lot of people, not just in the music we hear, but the way we perceive our own bodies.
And one of the things that I remember talking to you about early in our dialogue was about your brain aneurysm.
Yes.
Yeah, you actually perhaps appreciate life a little more than the average person because you were...
Absolutely.
Tell me what happened then.
Well, you know, I had a congenital weakness in the main artery of the brain, you know, which is from a congenitalness of charge.
It's probably a DNA, you know.
And in 1974, The weakness in the main artist's brain erupted, you know, in the form of an aneurysm, which is equivalent to 16 strokes, you know.
And it's pretty dramatic.
It's very dramatic, and I've suffered the consequences.
There's one in a hundred that lived through very aneurysm, which happened to me.
They said the good news is you live through the operation.
When the call went, as I said, this equivalent to 16 strokes.
And they said the good news is you live through it.
The bad news is you have another one there, and we have to go in two weeks or two months later.
And take out the other one and prevent you from having an eruption in the second one.
And two times I made it, and that's one out of 100, two times, that's two out of 200.
I just feel very blessed that I'm still here. - About three to five million people who have aneurysms in the United States, and most folks don't have any symptoms.
In your case, one of your aneurysms ruptured in your brain.
- Exactly.
- Which is a lethal condition for a lot of folks, and you went through it twice.
I heard that there was actually a funeral planned for you.
- Exactly, in Europe and everywhere, So did they have the funeral?
I don't know if they had it or not.
I didn't show up.
That's some scary stuff, man.
Well, actually, someone who was at the party told me that they had planned this big New Orleans-style funeral for you.
They had all these artists coming, a big party.
And when you heard that they were having the party, you didn't want to cancel it.
Give me a break, you know.
It was very dramatic.
It really was.
I just thank God that...
I was able to combat both attacks and come through it.
It makes you appreciate your life more.
Quincy, when you were a child, you had to deal with the painful realization that your mom was having some emotional challenges.
And you described this very nicely in your autobiography, which I think is a must-read for folks who want to understand what you're all about and what you came through.
Depression is a big problem, especially in minority communities.
It's stigmatized.
People don't deal with it in an upfront way.
How did that experience change you?
Well, you know, living in Chicago, you know, I experienced, you know, having a switchblade through my hand at the age of seven, you know, to pin me to an offense.
My father came up to save me.
You know, a lot of gangs.
We lived in the biggest ghetto in Chicago during the Depression.
It's a rough time, you know.
There'd be four automatic weapons, but they didn't need automatic weapons because we had slingshots made from clothespins and inner tube rubber and the red from a shoe and steel Aggies and so forth.
I mean, it was a tough neighborhood, man.
Give me a break, you know.
Chicago didn't play, man.
It was during the Depression and so forth.
They didn't even need automatic weapons.
It makes you very aware of what survival is about.
There must have been times growing up in Chicago and subsequently in Seattle where you thought you weren't going to make it either.
Of course you didn't.
Of course not.
You're absolutely right.
The time and everything else, it didn't seem like the future was in your favor.
But that's when in your own mind you have to develop a philosophy and I was talking about that today because Ray Charles and I were raised after I left Chicago after the age of 10 years old.
My father worked for the Jones boys in Chicago as a carpenter and everything else now.
And after they would run out of Chicago we went to the Northwest during the war.
And you had to develop a philosophy of survival.
You had to.
You didn't have any choice, you know.
So, that's the time, the way it was.
Ray Charles had just come from Florida.
I met him at the age of 14. He was 16. And we didn't have the idols.
You have now role models that serve Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey and so forth, you know.
So we had to develop a philosophy of how to survive.
We're only just scratching the surface here.
We've got a whole lot more to discuss after the break.
I've got to say, having spent a lot of long nights with Quincy, I don't know where you get your stamina from, but I'm a heart surgeon.
I'm used to staying up all night long.
I start passing out at dawn, and Quincy just stays up.
You just stay up all night too?
I have to.
It's part of my day job.
I understand.
Mine too.
You know, when we were trying to schedule this interview, everyone was saying, we're going to get Quincy at dawn in Los Angeles.
And I said, you know, I've known Quincy for a long time.
I don't think anyone knows Quincy getting up at dawn.
And everyone sort of gave me that wry smile and said, he's not going to bed.
He said he's going to stay up all night.
Exactly right.
That's true.
Were you up all night?
Maybe I had to.
What were you doing to keep it up on that long?
A lot of things.
Last night we went to the launching of a Ray Charles and Count Basie record.
They technologically recreated the Basie band background for a new Ray Charles record with Norman Lear's house.
It was very fascinating.
Also, Jack Nicholson had a screening of his movie.
I used to give Jack Hamburgers and wine before he was a star.
He's an old friend of mine.
Have you ever diagnosed Jack Nicholson?
Diagnosed him?
Yes.
I wouldn't even know how.
He's as wild as I am.
He's a great guy.
He's a great man.
He really is.
I knew him way before he was a writer.
We'll just hang out together with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and Bob Town and all the people when we first started, Marlon Brando, all of them.
Well, just about everyone that you mentioned had to find their own path to keep on the top of their game to succeed.
And people find their own little tricks and little nuances.
I know just before the break you were telling us about how difficult it was growing up in Chicago and then when you moved out to Seattle.
What were the things you noticed in that dangerous environment that seemed to work?
And I think there are a lot of folks we know and share in common that somewhere along the line had the epiphany.
They finally realized, hey, this is what I've got to do so I can function at full speed.
Well, there was one code of ethics we had to use.
You know what I mean?
I know Ray Childs thought the same way during those times because she's talking about the 40s now.
Yeah.
America was a different place.
It's a tough situation, though.
And we had to develop a philosophy that inside of us we had to understand that not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance to me.
You could not afford the luxury or luxury or whatever, the weakness, you know, to have the external force to determine what your identity was about.
Because from you in the Northwest, after leaving the biggest black ghetto in the world, during the worst depression in America, and we were just, these two black kids, I was 14 and Ray Charles was 16, And we did not have the Michael Jordan's and Oprah Winfrey's and all these people who'd be role models in those days.
We had Joe Lewis.
I didn't want to be a fighter.
Outside of Duke Elton, basically those were our idols.
We had to just have a whole different philosophy about living, you know?
And then being positive because in the Northwest we weren't in the books.
There was no TV. It was like it didn't exist, you know?
So you had to have a very internal Is there a song that you wrote in those years that sort of captured that?
Or Ray Charles or anybody else for that matter?
Was there sort of an anthem that you held dear to your heart?
Because that's pretty provocative, that not one drop of your self-worth would depend on your acceptance of me.
Yeah, well, it was about that.
It was about not ever accepting an external Evaluation of who you were, what your identity was about.
You couldn't afford that because it would tend to demean you as a human being.
I mean, the armed forces weren't even integrated in those days, you know, so you had to get your focus together really tight, you know, to exist as a young black person in America.
Ray was the same way too.
We did it together, you know.
Now, I know of the story of the two of you, and you've told them to me.
It's incredible.
It actually brings the issue up of how many in that culture, not surprisingly, would use drugs, alcohol, and others to hide.
How would you deal with that?
Well, you just had to deal with it.
Well, one of the problems was that all of our idols were all on drugs.
You know, from Charlie Parker.
All of our idols were on drugs now, back then.
And it was just because the essence of black music is very sociological, you know.
And the musicology has to stand aside, you know, because it is sociological.
And the signs of the times at that time that the musicians wanted to be, at one point, the difference between the big band musicians and the Louis Armstrong era was that the musicians that followed them coming out of the big bands, you know, Charlie Parker out of Jay McShann's band, Izzy Kadesby out of Calaway's band, etc., and Earl Hines and Billy Eckstein's band, whatever.
They were aiming towards becoming artists that didn't have to sing and roll their eyes and entertain people when they performed.
That was the struggle.
They wanted to just be artists.
They had heard about Stravinsky and all of these serious artists around the world.
I used to watch Sally Parker at Charlie's Tavern in New York and listen to Stravinsky and all of the classical musicians.
I said they did not want to be entertainers.
They had to dance and sing and so forth and entertain an audience when they did their music.
The music was very revolutionary.
The consequences of being very revolutionary were very dangerous because they played the music that was so advanced, you know, they were alienated by an audience.
It was too progressive, you know, the modern jazz was too progressive, and the audience couldn't follow it, and the alienation caused The musicians to sustain themselves, you know, all of them.
That's not a justification, but it's a reality.
They all got into dope, you know, to hopefully keep themselves away from the alienation that they experienced, you know, dealing with very revolutionary music.
Because it's for sure that Miles Dizzy and Max Roach, etc., etc., etc., etc., Charlie Parker, The most revolutionary music in the history of American music, you know.
And it changed the music all over the world.
And that's what we were about.
I was in between big bands and bebop.
And that's what my influences were.
You know, it was like...
And Ray Charles, too.
Ray Charles played alto sax like Charlie Parker.
He sang like Matt Cole and Charles Brown at the time.
And then he eventually went into doing gospel music to make it popular music.
And he was criticized for it.
But he was a revolutionary musician, you know.
He was heartily criticized, I guess, because they thought it was blasphemous.
Quincy, you were speaking a little bit about how much the drug culture influenced or maybe allowed some of the music that was created in the 40s in this country, especially in black America.
Did you ever work with friends who were drugged up, Ray Charles as an example, and try to help them through these crises?
Or do they have to figure it out themselves?
It was a way of life.
You know, it was nothing discussed, and at that time everybody was doing it, you know.
And especially the revolutionary musicians, you know, I guess they fell into that as a crutch, you know, to try to combat, you know, racism and all the other things and so forth, but also to...
You can tell the difference in the titles of the songs, you know, and you...
You can go from Cement Mixer, Putty Putty, you know, to Open the Door, Richard, and all those kinds of things, titles like that, you know.
A-bop-a-ree-bop, all that stuff, to the titles of the bebop people, which were epistrophe and ornithology, and so forth and so forth.
And they were seeking a whole different intellectual kind of outlet, you know.
And I remember reading the Koran at 13 years old.
I remember reading about Dymetics when I was 13 years old.
And Raikin therapy, and so forth.
I don't know how we got into that.
The life and teachings of the masses from the Far East and all that stuff when we were 13 years old.
I don't know how it happened, but that's what it was like in the Northwest for black musicians.
Their curiosity was on a world basis.
I'm happy about it because it opened my mind up and I was fortunate enough to follow through by the age of 18 and 19 to go to Europe with Lionel Hampton.
That turned my life around.
Totally around.
We went to Oslo in 1953. On a truck plane, 27 hours from New York to Oslo.
And we experienced a whole other way of life, you know.
It took us out of just the black and white conflict of America to Armenians and Turks and the other part of the world.
Cypriots and Greeks, the Finns and the Swedes and so forth, and the Koreans and the Japanese.
I mean, they took us out of just one dynamic of black versus white in America.
And living in Paris, you know, where they had tremendous respect for what our music was about.
It was an amazing revelation for a lot of us, you know.
We had a lot of expatriates over there, you know, 10 o'clock and Don Bias.
Amazing.
Quincy, let me ask you a question about something we've discussed earlier, which is about the role of music around the world.
In particular, you've been an ambassador for peace in many ways through your music, but in many cultures, music is an important part of healing, of staying well.
I'm a Turk, as you know, and in Turkey, music was used even before Islam was there as a tradition that would allow the shamans to heal the sick.
As you travel around the world, you must see the healing side of music as well.
Oh, are you kidding?
Of course I do.
I mean, right now, I've never traveled more in my life, you know.
In the last six months, I've been around the world three times, you know, from Cambodia to Vietnam to Korea to Beijing to Xinjiang, Hong Kong to Shanghai, St. Petersburg to Brazil.
To South Africa.
To Rwanda.
We were there for the anniversary of the genocide.
To Cairo, Egypt.
To Abu Dhabi.
To Dubai.
To Greece.
To Spain.
And that's been my life the last 52 years.
And I ran into some very wise musicians when I was young.
Like Ben Webster that said, Young Rod, when you go to each country, listen to the music that people listen to.
Eat the food that people listen to and learn 30 or 40 words in every language.
And I took that very seriously since I was 19. And I learned how to speak Serbo-Croatian, how to speak Turkish, how to speak Greek, how to speak French, Swedish.
Well, Quincy, just to give us an idea, for the listeners out there, since you've tasted so many different cultures, what are the types of music that you find most provocative from these cultures?
Which are the ones you think might be clued into healing?
Are you kidding?
Okay, let's start with the Roots of Africa.
The African roots, which spawned our music here, to Brazil, which is still Africa.
It's Angolan influences and so forth from slavery.
There's an old joke called, some stopped off on the way.
In the Middle Passage, you know, from West Africa, Angolan stopped off in Salvador and Bahia in Africa, Portuguese.
And it's very, very complex, you know.
I've always felt that there's a very thin line between racism and slavery and economics.
Very thin line, you know, because it was about money first, you know.
Got a lot more questions to go, but first, let's take a quick break.
Quincy, you're telling us about this wonderful story of music and how it's been a foundation of so many cultures.
And in fact, the key to healing in a lot of these cultures.
So let's take African music in particular.
There are probably healing traditions in Africa that have touched on music.
Do you ever sort of dabble with those and figure out what made it fun for the people listening to that and how it got to Brazil and Indo-America and all that?
Well, it's very simple.
The music from Africa is about Life force and the music of Europe was about artistry and virtuosity and concert music and all that stuff.
In Africa, it's a life force, fertility rights, circumcision rights, elephant hunts.
It was to facilitate the activities of life.
It wasn't about any kind of a concert hall stuff.
It was a very functional music that was based and imitated nature, animals, all nature, and so forth.
That's why it's so powerful.
That's why it's so strong.
You know, because it did.
It imitated animals, everything.
And that's where the function of African music and blues and jazz and all those things came from.
It was the imitation of life.
And in Europe it got to be a very concert music, you know, and virtuosity and all of that stuff.
It was a total antithesis of that.
We used it in field horrors and slavery and so forth, for work songs and so forth.
It was a functional music to get through life every day.
When you first started to play music in the 40s, was your music more of the life force?
No, it had been reinvented then by that time.
It had gone through a lot of changes, you know, of invention.
Because, okay, let's assume the bottom line was that blues and jazz was the greatest cultural contribution that America's ever made to the entire world.
Take that for granted, and that's the truth.
I mean, the greatest contribution in the world, improvised music.
It never happened in the world before.
That's why it was so appreciated and revered and emulated by Composers like Debussy, Stravinsky, all those people, you know, they were influenced by jazz, ragtime, you know, Debussy, because it was a music they'd never heard before.
It never existed before where you could have to improvise and have the freedom of the chain of association, you know, and just whatever you feel at the time.
That never existed before.
Never.
And was it an accident that it happened?
A bunch of very creative minds started taking some of this life force music, it would seem, from Africa?
Or did it just happen organically?
Did it just re-arise from nothing?
Well, it happened for many reasons, because you take 22 million people away from the country, And take them to another country for economic reasons, really.
I don't even know if it was racial or not, because there's a thin blur between racism and economics.
You know, a very thin line there.
It was about money at first.
And the Africans, and the Dutch, and the Portuguese, and all the people involved in that, you know.
I think in the 15th century, the Spanish and Portuguese went to the Pope.
And the Pope declared American Native Indians to be two-penths of a human being, you know?
So they could find a justification to annihilate the people, you know?
Because the concept of we discovered America is a joke, you know?
I mean, it kills me, the whole idea of that, you know, that you can go tell the people that they would...
Missionaries, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which happen all over the world.
These people are not civilized, and we're going to show them and teach them how to be civilized, which is another economic decision, you know, if it's a joke.
Quincy, let me take you back to your earlier childhood, way before we figured out what you were going to do with your life.
Your mom had a mental illness, and she was actually taken away from the home, and you didn't really have a lot of insight on what was going on with that.
How did you cope with that?
She was a very brilliant lady.
She knew 12 languages.
She could speak and write 12 different languages.
She went to Boston University in her 20s, which was unheard of for Black woman in the United States and all.
So she's way ahead of her time, and she had dementia praecox, you know, which could have been cured by vitamin B or something like that, but she didn't know that at the time, and she was committed to an institution when I was seven years old, a Mantina State Hospital in Illinois.
And so we came up without the benefit of having a mother.
In the black community today, and it's true for whites and blacks and Asians, every denomination of humanity, we still don't deal with depression very well.
And especially back then, I think there was a sort of a shame associated with it, which was unfortunate.
Did you know when she was sick that she was sick?
Oh, sure.
I mean, you can't identify it, but you knew something was wrong.
Of course you did, you know.
Because of her actions and so forth.
She was dealing with a very high intellect, with the illness and so forth, in a very racist society.
We didn't understand that then.
We had no clue because we were born in the biggest black ghetto on the planet during the biggest economic depression in the world, which is in Chicago.
That's the biggest black ghetto that exists in America.
I mean, they made Harlem and every place else look like Boys Town.
And that's the way it was.
There was a gang on every block, you know?
They were Jews and African calls.
It's an amazing society there.
I remember it very, very well.
And eventually, you know, maybe going to the Northwest was the best thing that ever happened to me because it opened up a society for me.
We were coming out of the biggest all-black ghetto in America to the only black kids in the Northwest, you know, where we were not in the books.
It was as though we didn't exist.
They didn't have television then.
Radio, you had Beulah, you had Rochester, you had Amos Nandy.
We knew we were white.
And so forth.
And it was like you didn't exist.
You know, you were the invisible man.
In the words of Ralph Ellison, you know, you were an invisible man or woman.
And you had to figure it out.
Ray Charles and I used to talk about that all the time.
And we said, we have to find a way so we could survive in a society like that.
I don't know if that's a clear word, so not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance.
I mean, no external definitions of what your identity was about.
You couldn't accept that or you'd die.
You really would.
It made you very strong.
Ray was very strong, too.
Although, despite saying that not one drop of your self-worth would depend on your acceptance of me, people still use drugs quite frequently.
In fact, for a large number of the people who use drugs, depression was probably an underlying issue.
I mean, one quarter of all human beings, of Americans, who are adult age, have some issues with depression.
Have you ever been depressed?
No.
No, no.
Never.
Was music your salvation on that?
Absolutely.
Because music gave you hope.
And it gave you all of the hope you needed, you know, and it was uplifting and inspirational and gave you a self-worth, a feeling of self-worth and everything else that transcended everything.
And we were just lucky to find out.
I didn't find it until I was 11. So we were basically raised to be thugs in Chicago because that's what The spawning ground of the gangsters in America, white or black, was all in Chicago.
Capone, Dillinger, you name it, man.
So how'd you get hooked in the music?
Well, I came back when I went to Seattle, or to Bremerton, we broke in an armory as part of us being thugs.
And breaking in stores and stealing and all this stuff.
And we broke into the armory.
We heard they had lemon-wearing pie and ice cream, and we ate it up, and we had food fights and so forth, and then we individually ran around the armory and broke in the rest of the rooms.
And I broke into one of the supervisor's rooms, Mrs. Ayres, who I knew.
It was right near Army Camp, too, because that was during World War II. I saw a spinet piano and I almost closed the door and something told me to go back in there where the spinet piano was in that room.
And I went over and touched the keys there.
When I touched those keys, every cell in my body reacted to it.
And I knew for the rest of my life that's what I would be doing.
As an orchestrator, as an arranger, as a musician, everything.
I don't know how, but thank God when I touched that piano, I knew that's where I lived and that's what God wanted me to do.
When was the first time that you began to compose music that you thought you actually were pretty good at it?
That was starting at 11. Then I went to school and started to play every instrument in the brass section.
I tried clarinet and violin.
That didn't work.
Then I started the percussion and the sousaphone and tuba, B-flat, baritone, horn, French horn, E-flat, alto, trombone, so we could, in the marching band, we could be near the girls and the majorettes, and then finally the trumpet, you know.
And I knew that that's where my life was.
And I said, thank God every day.
I said, thank you, because this is where I belonged in life.
If you hadn't been a musician, what would you have been?
I don't know.
I was a thug.
That's what we were.
That's what Chicago trained you to be.
All we ever saw were machine guns and stogies and money and gangsters all our life in Chicago.
White and black.
That's all anybody ever saw.
Switchblade and knives in my hand, you know, pin to the wall, ice pick in my temple, please.
It was just no joke, man.
They didn't need automatic weapons.
We had slingshots made out of clothespins and inner tubes and the leather from a shoe and a steel aggie that could mess you up as much as an automatic weapon.
Come on.
Chris, you said that blues and jazz was the single biggest contribution to the world that we've made.
Is the modern music that you hear and you've been involved in creating as therapeutic, do you think, as jazz and blues was in your era?
It's another genre.
L.L. Kuhl told me in 1985, he said, Mr. Jones, what do the musicians and singers think about us?
I never put it like that before because the hip-hoppers are basically...
And intrinsically connected to the griots, which are oral historians.
And I have a lot of respect for that.
I've worked with about four or five dozen rappers, and they're a powerful, powerful tradition.
A lot of them don't know where they come from.
Quincy, what's your legacy?
What are you going to remember for?
Pardon?
A quarter century from now, what's Quincy Jones going to be remembered for?
I don't know, man.
I have a musical legacy.
I understand the politics of the world.
I'm just as passionate about my music as I am about my foundation.
We joined up with Colin Powell, with America's Promise, with mentoring.
Mine is about children of conflict.
I've been involved in that all my life and Harvard.
With Jay Winston and Squashit and so forth, we're starting a prize for the best individual in an institution that does the most of peace.
I know the world backwards.
I feel at home every place on this planet.
Well, maybe that's what you may be remembered as our ambassador of peace, bringing music to all of us.
I don't think about that aspect of it.
I just feel it.
I'm glad that I know Mandela for 34 years.
I've been working with him, doing everything I can to support what they're about.
Before, during, and after the struggle, up to Air Force One, to his inauguration.
I just left Rwanda at the anniversary of the genocide with Paul Kagame and Janetta.
Oprah and I gave a reception for...
President of Rwanda in my home with Don Cheadle.
Supplied him with high tech and money people and everything else in order to help them get on their feet, you know.
And I feel it, man, from the bottom of my soul.
You know, I don't have to push myself.
It's all just natural.
I took five gangbangers from South Africa, from Los Angeles to South Africa when Mandela asked me to co-host an HIV visit to the Northwest Provence.
And they got turned around.
They became leaders and so forth.
And you sit piece by piece, you try to figure it out.
And say, well, what can I do?
I mean, you're one person.
And you say, what can you do?
No one person can figure it all out.
But I've been exposed to it all my life.
All my life.
I go to Orange Farm and I make the gangbangers and Habitat for Humanity.
We build 100 homes.
And I don't know, you just go do what you feel, you know, step by step, step by step, you know, and you learn.
When we were doing We Are The World, we found out that it's not just the money, you have to find out how to get the money so it's dispersed to the people that really need it, you know.
And it's a serious process, you know.
There's a bureaucracy and a corruption of governments all over the world, including this one, you know.
Well, you are making a difference, and Quincy Jones, you're an inspiration to all of us.
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