From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Wednesday, November six. Results will start flowing in tonight from the US election, and subscribers to The Australian will be the first to know whether the next President of the US will be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Join us now at the Australian dot com dot au to make sure you don't miss a thing. The former police officer accused of murdering two men in Sydney has not ended a plea to the charges against him. Bo Lamar.
Condon's lawyer has withdrawn from the case and he'll now be represented by legal aid. The matter returns to court at the end of the month. Quincy Jones, the most influential musical figure of our age, has died at ninety one. Amid a world's worth of tributes. Our own Jasper League, who composed the Front's theme and edited this episode, reflects on his own moment learning at the feet of the Master.
I would like to have you meet one of the finest musicians that I've ever known, mister Quincy Jones.
That was Frank Sinatra in the sixties, introducing someone whose imprint on American music and therefore the music of the entire world, is indelible. Quincy Jones has died at the age of ninety one, leaving a musical legacy that spans the story of this century and the last, from the legends of jazz to the titans of popular music the blossoming of hip hop.
Quincy had about ten careers in his lifetime.
This is Jasper Leak. He's part of our team here at the front, but Jasper is also an incredibly accomplished musician and producer in his own right. In the naughties, Jasper moved from Sydney to New York as a jazz obsessed twenty something with dreams of being where the magic happened. He toured with some of the world's biggest acts. He also weighted plenty of tables, and then he found himself
in the orbit of Quincy Jones. Jasper was music consultant and supervisor on Netflix's twenty eighteen documentary Quincy, for which Jasper received an Emmy nomination.
It started with a phone call from my friend Alan Hicks, another Australian who already spent a year working as a co director on the documentary with Quincy's daughter, Rashida Jones Al called me with an idea to score the documentary, but only using music from Quincy's pre existing catalog. I love the idea, and I'd been secretly hoping for this to happen, but it was one of those situations where my immediate response was sheer terror.
How was I going to.
Capture the career of music's most legendary figure over it two hour documentary.
Jasper said about listening to everything Jones had ever recorded.
I was handed a hard drive with Quincy's full discography on it, and I knew the only way I'd get comfortable with this huge task was to listen to everything front to back.
It was the best job I've ever had.
I'd wake up in the morning and for eight hours a day, I'd listen to Quincy's discography in chronological order, which was an incredible education in itself, and as I listened, I made the whole thing searchable. I set up a spreadsheet and identified little snippets from all these tracks that I imagined would come in handy during the editing process, and I'd tag them all according to era, mood, style, and genre. It was more than three thousand and songs
across about three hundred albums. So eventually, if al or Rashida needed music for a scene and asked me for something that was introspective and bluesy from the fifties recorded by a small ensemble, I could find it straight away. With the exception of Quincy himself, I'm probably the only person who's listened to his full discography. So I was learning at the feet of the master. I knew who he was, of course, but I became overwhelmed at the
volume of work that he produced in his lifetime. Not just the volume, but how ambitious a lot of it was too, and the genres he spanned. There were film scores with full orchestration, records that were quite experimental. He did one gospel album with little Richard. Michael Jackson's Thriller is a great example of Quincy's ambition. It was a lot more than Taylor to write a great song and recorded in a studio with a great band like Artistically,
it was really ambitious. The music video that was the longest music video ever at the time. Quincy had the vision to bring that team together, Rod Tempert and the songwriter with the director John Landis who directed The Blues Brothers, and choreographer Michael Peters. Quincy achieved so much in his lifetime that you can draw inspiration from him, but it'd be impossible to try and model your career after his.
He was beyond prolific.
I was trying to carve out this career for myself as a musician, as a songwriter and a producer, but when you see what he did with those elements, it was beyond humbling.
While this was going on, Jasper's father, Bill Leak, died. Bill was the Australian's legendary cartoonist and a celebrated artist in his own right.
I spent a lot of time thinking about my dad during work on the documentary, and something I loved about the project was that it was Rashida's tend to tribute to her father.
To have somebody who's created music that breast a certain emotion and then to be able to pair it out with an emotional moment in his life as a real huge blessing.
Here's Rashida Jones talking to the Hollywood Reporter about the documentary.
That being said, it's spanned so many decades and there's so many different types of genres, and so that music selection became essential to the storytelling.
Coming up how Jones helped Jasper find his own roots. Join b ET for one of the most memorable nights of the year as we honored the icon hitmaker and musical legend Quincy Jones. This was no ordinary eighty fifth birthday party. It was a musical tribute to Jones at a theater in downtown, LA with American Musical Royalty playing in his honor, John Legend, ll Cool, j Gladays Knight, Gloria Estefan.
There was an after party at a Hollywood bar, and there was this extended jam session with people like Usher was singing in the band and Herbie Hancock was playing keyboards. Dave Chappelle got up and spoke. I mean, it was the who's who of American culture in this little bar. But Quincy was the last man standing. He always was by that stage of his life. He'd given up drinking, but he was nocturnal. He'd spend the night doing puzzles. He never switched off.
Born in nineteen thirty three in Chicago, Quincy Jones was directly descended from enslaved people.
One of the first times I met him, he asked me about my own racial background. He said, I look like a Richie, one of Lionel Richie's kids. He said, you got some gumber going on, by which he meant I looked like a mixture of a few different heritages. Quincy was really into genealogy and ludoting his own family story. I told him I didn't know a huge amount about my mum's heritage. She's German, but she grew up in children's homes and never found out who her biological father was.
Quincy leaned over and said, look into your roots, man. I got my mum a DNA kit for a next birthday, and it came back with the results that her genes were seventy five percent Western European twenty five percent West African, which suggests her father was half West African. Our family's theory is that maybe her father was an ex American military person in Germany after the war.
Jones's mum was a talented singer who taught him her love of music, and in his teens he was in a band with a young friend, Ray Charles. By his early twenties, Jones was a gifted young trumpet player and an arranger with the Lionel Hampton Big Band, playing alongside artists like Tommy Dorsey, Elvis Presley, and Dinah Washington.
That could have been it for him.
He was at the top of his craft, but before long, Quincy became one of the world's most in demand rangers. He got a call out of the blue one day from Frank Sinatra, which led to work with Sinatra and the Count Bass Orchestra.
From that moment on, Quincy Jones was at the center of whatever was happening in music. He won twenty eight Grammys from the et soundtrack with Michael Jackson to Harry Stiles's Album of the Year in twenty twenty three for a baseline sample on the track Daydreaming. One of Jones' last Grammys was in twenty nineteen, You Guys Are Ready for That documentary Jasper worked on with his friend Alan, The Grammy Goes.
To Quincy Jones.
Alan collected the award with Quincy's daughter, Rashida.
When my dad first watched the film, he said, I wish I could live forever, and if anyone is going to be able to be the first to do that, I believe it's going to be hims So Dad, I hope you live forever. Thank you so much, thank.
You, thanks for joining us on the front. Election results from the US we'll start flowing from eleven am Australian Eastern daylight time on Wednesday. Join us live at Beaustralian dot com dot au