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Quincy felt immense pressure in creating a follow-up to Bad. He had to prove he could make a hit without Michael (Michael seemingly felt the same, collapsing from a possible panic attack during the extended development process for what became 1991’s Dangerous). And he hadn’t headlined an album since 1981’s The Dude. Yet Quincy ended up with his most audacious collection of talent yet, a multigenerational album uniting the jazz stars of his origins and the R&B stars of his recent past with several stars of the present and future. If I told you to imagine a record that had Ella Fitzgerald, Luther Vandross, and Ice-T on it - or maybe one that had Miles Davis, Barry White, and Big Daddy Kane - or maybe one that had Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan, Chaka Khan, and Tevin Campbell - you’d say I was crazy to even dream of one of those. Well, all three are real, and they are also the same album. Behold, the Album of the Year from 1989 (and winner of six other Grammy awards): Back on the Block.
For what could’ve just been a victory lap for Quincy’s 1980s accomplishments, Back on the Block is surprisingly audacious, with Quincy blending his 1970s mix of jazz, R&B, funk, and soul with world music elements, 80s pop, hip-hop, and new jack swing. Nowhere are these collisions more fascinating than on The Places You Love, a fusion of rock power ballad, synths, and African spiritual all united by the powerful voices of Chaka Khan and Siedah Garrett. Quincy’s new instrumental cover of the Weather Report’s jazz fusion piece Birdland was almost as sensational a reinvention as Tell Me a Bedtime Story was back in 1978. And you had to love the braggadocio of having a track like Back on the Block, not only because Quincy sampled his own Ironside Moog wail on it but because he took a page out of rap by toasting his superproducer abilities and track record - with those aforementioned rappers dropping verses in it! Its conclusive dialogue snippet “I would contend that rap is here to stay” was almost assuredly a veiled shot at Michael Jackson for telling him rap was dead only two years earlier (Michael supposedly said he might’ve sang on the album but the president of his record company said no, which Quincy never believed).
Back on the Block is so consistently entertaining that - more strongly than any album of his save for Thriller and maybe Big Band Bossa Nova - it almost compels you to listen to it again as soon as it ends. And even if you didn’t like it more than you did Bad, it was undeniably a more consistent listening experience, maybe not creating a hit as enduring as The Way You Make Me Feel but definitely having fewer weak spots (a somnambulant instrumental cover of Ivan Lins’ Setembro the only one in my book). It’s a goshdarn masterpiece.
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Quincy only had an active hand in four albums released in the 1990s, with his pursuits becoming more varied after the success of Back on the Block. He co-founded the music magazine Vibe in 1993. He created a production company that launched the sketch comedy show Mad TV and put rappers in leading roles on sitcoms (Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and LL Cool J in In the House). He got involved in a number of charitable and humanitarian causes ranging from treating Down syndrome to preserving the homes of elderly jazz musicians to supporting underprivileged children in South Africa. When asked by Jon Burlingame in 2002 why he pivoted, Quincy responded that he felt his accomplishments in the 1980s had more than earned him the right to try other things. “I remember [Time Warner CEO] Steve Ross was saying why don’t you just stay in music. Hey, we [had] just sold 50 million albums! These other things I think are valid too if you feel it. If you pay your dues with your core skill - I paid those three times on that - it opens up your mind to be able to deal with [other things].”
His first album of the 90s was a spotlight for his new protege Tevin Campbell, a teenage singer with a four-octave range who’d been featured on Back on the Block. Quincy only directly produced two songs for T.E.V.I.N. though: an inferior new jack swing / hip-hop revision of Strawberry Letter 23, previously a hit for him with the Brothers Johnson, and the powerful optimistic ballad One Song by Alan and Marilyn Bergman (who helped write In the Heat of the Night) and Marvin Hamlisch (now having climbed far beyond just being the nephew of Quincy’s dentist). Otherwise, the songs were produced by the likes of Prince and Michael Walden. Quincy was even more hands off with Campbell’s second album, another critical and commercial success, but while Campbell continued to have success throughout the 90s with a third album produced by Diddy, his career collapsed by the end of the decade thanks to a mix of the pressure of trying to live up to the expectations of being called the next Michael Jackson, the pressure of either hiding his homosexuality or not being fully aware of it at the time, and getting busted in a prostitution sting in 1999.
Quincy’s second album of the 90s was a miracle: a concert recording of legendary trumpeter Miles Davis (Quincy’s “idol since I could pick up my horn”) playing his older hits. Quincy conceived of it for the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival and conducted two jazz orchestras; Miles, long resistant to revisiting the past and also in ill health at the time, only said yes thanks to advice from a psychic. If the night wasn’t quite a resurrection of Miles’ work from the 50s and 60s, it was still a brilliantly-performed event - and a fortuitously timed one since, just as Duke Ellington passed away not long after Quincy produced a TV special for him, Miles died only three months after the concert. The album recording came out in 1993 and was justifiably acclaimed.
If Back on the Block was a test of how far Quincy could push himself into newer music styles, its 1995 sequel Q’s Jook Joint was a test of how far he could pull contemporary musicians back to jazz. How about Tone Lōc and Queen Latifah singing on a reworking of Benny Golson’s Killer Joe? Or Heavy D rapping over Brandy’s singing on a barely recognizable Rock with You? Maybe Brian McKnight singing on a James Moody piece, or Phil Collins on a Duke Ellington one? But audacity wasn’t enough this time. There were no knockout new tracks, an issue when the album felt so stylistically akin to its 1989 predecessor. The list of contributors felt like a parody of We Are The World; there’s Gloria Estefan, Ray Charles, and Barry White, but there’s also Shaq, Coolio, Bono, and even some brief dialogue from Marlon Brando. And while Back on the Block played like a tightly curated mixtape that transcended its myriad influences, Q’s Jook Joint sounds today like someone with extremely varied musical interests left Spotify on shuffle for too long. Clocking in at a bloated 69 minutes, the album went Platinum within a year but was largely ignored by awards entities save for a deserved Grammy win for Bruce Swedien’s mixing. It has its partisans, with a recent New Yorker remembrance by cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib citing it as a sentimental favorite, but for me it was the weakest album Quincy had headlined since 1976’s I Heard That!!. Perhaps score fans will get a kick out of one aspect of Q’s Jook Joint though: a credited synthesizer programmer on most of the tracks was Simon Franglen.
Quincy had heard the Ontario-born teenage singer Tamia Washington sing at a 1994 concert for Luther Vandross put on by Lionel Richie’s wife and recorded her on several tracks for Q’s Jook Joint. He later produced her 1998 record Tamia, which is worth exploring if you like the easy-on-the-ears R&B albums Quincy did for James Ingram and Patti Austin in the prior decade, though be advised it is on the long side (the pivot from LPs and tapes to CDs in the 90s driving up album lengths industry-wide). Like Lesley Gore, Tamia broke from Quincy after a few years (only two years after that album and a year after marrying basketball star Grant Hill), in Tamia’s case due to frustration over her belief that Qwest Records had her on a slow track, though unlike Gore she actually reached higher heights in her career after moving on.
There really should have been a fifth album that decade though.
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Back in 1971, for an event celebrating Ray Charles’ 20th anniversary in show business, Quincy eschewed the expected big band sound and devised a massive symphony concert piece blending orchestral, jazz, harmonica, electric keyboard, a large Black choir, and Ray functioning as performer, narrator, orator, and preacher throughout the 40-minute runtime. Intended to trace the American Black experience from slavery to modern times, A Black Requiem an understandably scattershot work at times (Alex North’s opening fanfare from Spartacus pops up at one point for unexplained reasons) but also an incredibly impressive one, plus it was rather entertaining hearing the composer rework an interstitial part of his Ironside main title into an explosive choral idea. The night was considered a triumph and a national tour was planned for the following year, but then the defining attribute of this work reared its head: Quincy and Ray wanted to keep tinkering with it.
Flash forward to 1988 and the conductor of the Roanoke Symphony wanted to perform the piece, which to her surprise required her to reconstruct it from the mess that was Quincy’s disorganized piles of sheet music. Thankfully a recording of the 1971 performance was available for reference. That night was also considered a triumph, the group overcoming some frustrations with Quincy trying to improvise during orchestra rehearsals and change some of the parts he wrote over a decade earlier. And in 1992 Ray returned to the area to record an album version, supposedly with 300 people involved. Everyone thought it was great, and at first Ray said all that was left to do was record his parts back in Los Angeles, but - depending on who’s telling the story - either Ray and/or Quincy thought further changes were required (Ray was known to be even more of a perfectionist than Quincy was, “ruthless in his criticism” in the latter’s telling). They never got around to formally revisiting it over the next dozen years, and Ray’s passing in 2004 likely shut the door on any record coming out, though thankfully video of the 1988 Roanoke performance survives.
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Next time: Fiddy? Fiddy’s here?
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1989-99: Film & TV scores
N/A
1989-99: The essential albums
Back on the Block https://open.spotify.com/album/5DR4gcd3fj3E6XhbPTaF82
Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux https://open.spotify.com/album/2uhZ5Lazl1Wyzdxa7LvMkn
1989-99: The essential concerts
A Black Requiem in Roanoke https://youtu.be/z1D0oPXG7IY?si=SNCrUY90uL9XZRZP
1989-99: Other albums
T.E.V.I.N. https://open.spotify.com/album/7Hucjo5Y8VSidz9dKnBf6q
Q’s Jook Joint https://open.spotify.com/album/5zq1m9RP5iwHBRQlgbROx1
Tamia https://open.spotify.com/album/3PFEg7sWLEMuS3nyTIguEV
(Message edited on Tuesday, March 18, 2025, at 5:49 a.m.)
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