Quincy Jones Should Be Remembered Jazz

Quincy Jones, who died on November 3 aged 91, was the last major musician whose working life spanned the arc of 20th-century American music. Jones was born in 1933, only six years after Louis Armstrong recorded "Struttin’ With Some Barbeque," one of the Hot Five sides that crystallized the centrality of the solo instrumentalist in jazz. A child of the age when music ran at 78 r.p.m. or crackled out of analogue tubes, Jones saw out the music’s transition into pure digitality, in which all prior recordings can be broken into their elements and, with pitch-shifting and tempo-tweaking, be infinitely recombined, and its first contacts with artificial intelligence. Throughout, Jones remained a jazz musician.