Last post on 1988-99 - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=140142
Refer to my profile for all posts in the series

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The aughts didn’t feature much in the way of new music for Quincy, with the most notable credit I could find being producing two songs for a 2007 Morricone tribute album: Deborah’s Theme from Once Upon A Time In America with new lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and sung by Celine Dion plus the theme from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by Herbie Hancock. He also wrote a theme for the Special Olympics in Shanghai. And the aughts featured his final film score which joined the storied legacy of works like The Anderson Tapes by getting no album release. That’s admittedly understandable as the movie was Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the adaptation of rapper Curtis Jackson’s gangster upbringing and rap breakthrough as 50 Cent that starred Jackson as himself, and thus it had a song soundtrack album worth promoting instead - a soundtrack that hit #2 on the Billboard 200 and went Platinum in the U.S., albeit with no involvement from Quincy. Quincy viewed it as a personal project, later saying he grew up in the same gangster lifestyle but just didn’t get shot as much as Jackson did.

It seems that director Jim Sheridan wanted the guys who scored his last two films (Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer) while Jackson wanted Quincy, so they went with all of them. The credits were a little odd as a result; Quincy was cited as both composer and additional music conductor separate from Bruce Fowler’s conducting credit, three others were credited for additional composing or additional music, and Quincy even had his own credited scoring mixer. Still, Gavin Friday said he had a great time working with Quincy, even later referring to Quincy as a surrogate father as his dad had passed away shortly before the scoring process started, and Quincy shrugged his shoulders when asked who did what, even comparing it to The Color Purple. 'When you've got this kind of time schedule, man, you don't have time to think about that. You just aim at this and hit this and just shoot.”

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The 90s and beyond were very much a celebration of Quincy’s legacy, with a Grammy Legend award in 1992, a humanitarian award from the Academy in 1995, Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, and a formal Congressional arts recognition in 2011 among the honors. ABC broadcast a two-hour, star-studded tribute event in 1998 for his 65th birthday. He introduced a Gershwin segment in Fantasia 2000. He kept being involved in humanitarian causes as well as concerts, of which multiple recordings exist on YouTube.

Fantasia 2000 intro - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6dM_WqJi6o

50 Years in Music concert at the 1996 Montreux Jazz Festival - https://youtu.be/aUvUHlarb_0

He became a kind of musical godfather to the next generation of musicians, mentoring people just as Clark Terry and Count Basie taught him back in the 1950s. And the gifted raconteur was more than willing to talk to anyone about his career in popular music and the famous friendships he’d made along the way. There was a two-hour interview in 2002 with Jon Burlingame about his TV work. He sat for a one-hour interview in 2007 with Gwen Ifill celebrating 60 years in the music business. He appeared on David Letterman’s late night show in 2010 to promote Q: Soul Bossa Nostra, his tepidly received final album with various stars doing their own spins on legacy Quincy songs (Snoop Dogg rapped the Brothers Johnson’s Get the Funk Out of My Face that night).

The Color Purple became a Broadway musical that he and Oprah produced, though others did the music. He worked on producing an animated series for MTV that he called an urban version of The Simpsons, though there’s no evidence The Dude ever aired an episode. His daughter Rashida - whose big break came from joining the cast of The Office - made a marvelous documentary in 2018 about his life, though it arguably was overshadowed by comments he made in interviews that year about the Beatles being overrated, Taylor Swift being overrated, most modern film music being bad, and Marlon Brando having slept with Richard Pryor (though he frustratingly avoided talking about Bill Cosby). And in 2022 he conducted a new recording of Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme for a tribute album celebrating his mentor’s upcoming centennial.

Rashida also gave a beautiful speech during a 2024 ceremony to give her father an honorary Oscar, one he planned to attend before passing away from pancreatic cancer on November 3rd, two weeks before that event. He was 91. The speech - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wqOArTIGGOs

There were a few more tunes along the way though. A shrug-inducing cover of the Stevie Wonder-penned I Can’t Help It from Off the Wall almost escaped notice as it was hidden at the end of jazzman and rapper Terence Martin’s 2013 album 3ChordFold. That would’ve been a terrible coda to his recording career, but thankfully a friend told him about the child prodigy pianist and composer Emily Bear, and Quincy not only reached out to mentor her but also featured her at the 2013 Montreux Jazz Festival and produced an album of her jazz compositions called Diversity, all before she had even turned 12. After decades of increasingly contemporary productions, hearing Quincy return to his jazz roots with an elegant, intimate record like this was a real full circle treat - all the more poignant when you consider it was the last album he worked on and that its last track was a new composition Bear named Q.

And there is something remarkable about how his career in the record business ended almost exactly as it started. Just as he did for Art Farmer and Clark Terry and Helen Merrill and Jimmy Cleveland and Cannonball Adderley back in the mid-50s, Quincy was putting a jazz artist in a great place to succeed on an early album.

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Next time: Score rankings and top albums

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2000-24: Film & TV scores
Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005)


2000-24: The essential albums
Diversity https://open.spotify.com/album/0g1eaojmw58fQQpmfnm7qR


2000-24: Other albums & songs
I Knew I Loved You (for Celine Dion) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62lDv0ZneaY
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (for Herbie Hancock) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm9XrQc2tzw
Q: Soul Bossa Nostra
I Can’t Help It (Terence Martin version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xbc8Ip5rkY

(Message edited on Thursday, March 20, 2025, at 6:38 a.m.)