Quincy Jones’s Middle Name Was ‘Delight,’ And That’s the Point

“I saw a little piano in the room and I closed the door. Something said to me, ‘Idiot, go back in that room!’ I went back in the room and touched the piano…and every drop of blood in my body said, ‘This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.’”

As readers can likely guess, those are the words of the late, great Quincy Jones. They made it into the various tributes to Jones that followed his death at 91. Jones and friends were hungry, and looking for food. In their pursuit Jones spied a piano which plainly changed his life.

It turns out Jones - like Paul McCartney and so many of the great musicians – quite simply had it. He could just look at an instrument and get it. Seeing the piano put him on a musical path that led to him performing around the world, scoring movies and plays, and becoming one of the all-time great record producers, including his production of Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad, easily Michael Jackson’s most consequential and best-selling albums.

In reading about Jones laying eyes on the little piano, it’s easy to forget or take for granted how such a scenario wouldn’t have revealed itself just anywhere, or at just any time. To see why, consider something as ubiquitous as the Bible. Visit any hotel or motel room, and there’s one to be read.

What’s important about that is that it wasn’t always the case. There was a time when there were more priests and pastors than there were bibles, so expensive were books in general. The ubiquity of the Bible is a beautiful effect of an age of work divided and the mass production that follows an explosion of hands and machines working together to produce so much. Considering something like a piano with 88 keys and all manner of inputs, it’s no reach to say that probably ten or twenty years earlier Jones wouldn’t have found a piano in the same room, or even a rec center to plunder.

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The good news for the rest of us is that Jones did happen on a piano, and reached adulthood at a time of soaring post-WWII abundance. With the killing, maiming and wealth destruction that defines war (and that braindead economists near monolithically view as economically stimulating) over with, Americans could get back to work producing with each other, for each other, and increasingly for the world.

Consumption of music with disposable income that grew and continues to grow was part of the post-War boom, and Jones took part in it brilliantly. That he did so many amazing things in his career has found its way into all sorts of obituaries this past week, not to mention documentaries that featured him (or him with others) over the years. To write more about all of Jones’s career achievements would waste words.

Instead, it’s useful to focus on what Wesley Morris wrote about in his thoroughly excellent remembrance of Jones in the New York Times. It turns out Jones’s middle name was “Delight.” How appropriate considering the world Jones thrived in. Jones was born in 1933, but what if he’d been born in 1833? Regardless of color or background, Jones’s genius would likely have been suffocated (or totally unseen) if he’d been born a century earlier. In 1833 just about everyone farmed just to survive, and then it’s safe to say that pianos for public use were a non-starter. Which is just a comment that if born in 1833, the delight that defined Jones’s adult life whereby he thrived in a career perfectly tailored to his genius wouldn’t have been possible.

Whether or not Morris would agree with this argument is difficult to say. Opinion pieces are just that. Morris also references a 2008 coffee-table book that he owns (The Complete Quincy Jones), and he noted how happy Jones looked in all of the book’s photos. My own speculation is that Jones was happy because he was doing for a living what he couldn’t not do.

By extension, the view here is that Morris’s piece encapsulates the genius of economic growth. The abundance that is both a cause and effect of prosperity frees people of increasingly varied talents to showcase them. It’s a reminder that if we continue to remove the barriers to production that powers growth, the number of people smiling as Jones seemingly always did will grow and grow.