Interview with Quincy Jones

GATES: But do you worry, man? Do you worry about the fate of our people? About your own obligation? I spend a lot of time thinking about that. What are my obligations to people in Roxbury? In Compton?

JONES: Man, I do everything that twenty people could do. I don’t worry about anything. I’ll be concerned about stuff. There’s not time to worry because I have to work 18 hour days and I’m 63 and we must do 60 or 70 what we call B flat gigs a year, everything from AIDS to young children’s centers, north side to children’s centers to all over the country, all over the world. So I don’t even think about that because it’s natural, it’s automatic. I’m going in to do five next week in New York.

So that’s all you can do. They getting all I’ve got. And everybody else does too and I’ve got to say this, that entertainers have more empathy with that than anybody. They are there for everything. Everything. They get put down too and it upsets me because it’s not true. Always there. I mean people that are making not even a lot of money are always there for whatever cause it is. Musicians or singers or actors or whatever. I mean Danny Glover and Alfre Woodard and we’ve been involved in the Mandela thing. They’re everywhere, doing as much as they can between their schedules, breaking their neck to try to squeeze that in to get this done. Cosby, and right now Cosby be trying to go over and do something for Mandela, this guy Ralph Gathrada, who was in prison with him? We met with them and there’s 550 prisoners that got out with him and 500 of them are really destitute in Capetown and we’re trying to raise some money for them.

GATES: Do we have a crisis of leadership in the black community?

JONES: Yeah. I think so. It’s a big one. I really do. I don’t think it’s just the black community. It’s in the white community too. Maybe more so in the white community. It affects the mores of any civilization. Everybody’s hustling and stealing and scheming and the kids are seeing that that’s the way you do it, that’s what we have to do too. I mean our leaders are doing it.

But you know what? There’s something I’m sure in you too that believes in the best of. I really do. Something happens. You’ve got the minds here that have to be fed properly, that have to be nurtured. I didn’t know what nurturing meant until the last 10 or 15 years. Like Maya Angelou says if you don’t get a hug, you don’t recognize a hug, and it’s true. But I thought if you had shelter over your kids head, they go to school and they eat, man, you are doing great. Wrong. Because it all is formed by nine years old and we had this session with John Bradshaw about the inner child at Oprah’s house. Oprah gave it to me as a present and she had him there for three days and said I could bring seven people and he said you have to have a male and female caretaker, not necessarily mother and father, that really are on your case from nine to 18 months, that’s the whole thing. You get it all done in ten months.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *