Love Is the Labor: What Quincy Jones Teaches Us About Building Legacy Through Chosen Devotion

Quincy Jones

Here's what everyone knows about Quincy Jones: he produced Thriller, the biggest-selling album in human history. He worked with everyone from Count Basie to Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson. He has 79 Grammy nominations and 27 wins. He helped break MTV's color barrier. He organized We Are The World. He's a living legend.

Here's what almost nobody talks about: Quincy Jones built the most sophisticated love-based production system in music history, and he did it because his mother was taken from him in a straitjacket when he was seven years old.

That's not a footnote to his genius. That's the foundation of it.

Because the question Quincy Jones spent 70 years answering—the question that produced Thriller and Fresh Prince and the mentorship lineage that runs from Ray Charles to a 19-year-old kid being told the secrets to everything—wasn't "how do I make hit records?"

The question was: How do you build a legacy when the thing that's supposed to teach you about love is taken from you before you understand what love means?

His answer wasn't philosophical. It was operational. It was alchemical. And it worked so comprehensively that it changed American music, helped topple communism through cultural communication, and created a technology for converting suffering into liberation that anyone can use.

But here's the part that changes everything when you understand it:

Love wasn't something that happened to Quincy Jones. Love was something he chose, systematically, as survival technology.

Let me show you how.

The Wound: When Love Becomes Unreliable

Let me tell you what was taken from Quincy Jones at age seven, because understanding the wound is the only way to understand the work:

His mother had a psychotic breakdown. They came for her. Put her in a straitjacket. Took her away. He watched. He was seven years old.

That same year — or maybe it was the same week, the same day, time collapses under trauma — he went down the wrong street. Wrong gang territory. The Giles AC, the Vagabonds, the Scorpions. They took a switchblade and nailed his hand to a fence. Put an ice pick through his temple.

He carries those scars still. Physical evidence on his body of what seven years old meant in 1940s Chicago, with a father working for the Jones boys (no relation) running the numbers racket that Capone eventually took over, forcing the family to flee to Seattle in the middle of the night.

Fifty years later, making a documentary, Quincy Jones would return to that Chicago apartment. It looked exactly the same. The woman next door, Lucy, now 63 in a wheelchair, helped him upstairs. She pointed to the bed: "That's where they put the straitjacket on your mother."

He'd blocked it out completely. Trauma freezes at the peak. The memory came flooding back: four men holding her down, strapping her, his mother trying to get away. He'd been standing there. Seven years old. Watching the only person who's supposed to teach you that love exists get taken away because her mind broke.

Years later, his brother would die of cancer. Dr. Dean Ornish would explain to Quincy what happened: "Your brother internalized everything that you externalized into your creativity. He took it all into his chest and it turned against him and killed him."

So let me ask you: What do you do when you're seven years old and the person who's supposed to teach you about love is gone, when the streets are teaching you about violence instead, when your own brother will eventually die from internalizing the same pain you're learning to convert?

You choose something else to love. Something that can't be taken away. Something that never breaks. Something reliable.

Quincy Jones chose music.

The Substitution: Music as Chosen Mother

He said it explicitly in an interview at 81: "I said if I don't have a mother, I will let music be my mother. And it never let me down. The harder I worked, it never let me down."

Read that again. "I will LET music be my mother."

Not "music became my mother." Not "music replaced my mother." LET. Active verb.

Conscious choice. Deliberate substitution.

At age eleven, he broke into an armory in Seattle — still doing petty crime, still running with what he knew from Chicago. They ate lemon meringue pie, had pie fights, broke into rooms. He walked into one room in the dark, saw a piano. Started to leave. Something told him to go back. He touched the keys.

"I knew I'd do that the rest of my life."

The next day he stayed after school. Learned sousaphone, tuba, B-flat baritone, E-flat alto, French horn, trombone. Anything with keys or valves or slides. Started hearing not just the instrument he was playing but all the other instruments simultaneously: orchestral sounds while playing single trumpet. Started arranging for four trumpets, four trombones, five saxes.

At fourteen he met Ray Charles, sixteen and blind and already teaching Quincy how to read music in Braille, how to voice brass sections, what notation meant. Ray had his own apartment, three suits, a record player he'd fix himself and get shocked doing it. He was completely independent at sixteen. He taught Quincy everything.

But more than technique, Ray taught him the substitution principle. They were trying to put bebop feeling into a schottische one time, trying to make white country club dance music feel like jazz. Ray stopped him: "No. You just put your soul into the music you're playing and let it be a schottische and it'll be okay."

Put your soul into whatever you're doing. The love is in the devotion, not the category.

This is what having music as your mother teaches you: categories are lies. Love is choosing to go all the way in, whatever the context.

White tennis club at 7 PM playing polkas? Put your soul in.

Black bottle club at 10 PM playing rhythm and blues? Put your soul in.

Elks club at 2 AM playing bebop?

That's what you really wanted to play, so obviously, put your soul in.

By the time he was working with Michael Jackson, spending 12 to 14 months in the studio together, he understood something most producers never learn: You can't be effective without loving the person as a human being.

The Methodology: Love as Production Requirement

Here's where it gets technical, where the wound becomes the work, where choosing music as mother becomes a production philosophy that sells 104 million albums.

Quincy Jones told an interviewer point-blank: "You can't be an effective producer unless it's love. You have to love them enough to give them a thorough examination."

Let me unpack what that means.

When Epic Records told him he was "too jazzy" to produce Michael Jackson's solo debut, when every executive — Black and white — said it wouldn't work, when Michael came back crying because they didn't want Quincy, Jones had a choice. He could have walked away. Saved face. Stuck to jazz and film scores where he was already legendary.

Instead, he saw something in 19-year-old Michael Jackson doing makeup for five hours to play the Scarecrow in The Wiz. Saw him memorizing everyone's dialogue, every song, every dance step. Saw how intuitive he was, how he "didn't miss a thing." Saw what he called "untapped folk equipment": capacity nobody had accessed yet.

And he loved Michael enough to spend three years and three albums creating the container for that capacity to manifest.

Love, in Jones's methodology, means:

1. Thorough examination. You study the artist completely. Their range, their wounds, their hiding places, what makes them cry (Michael cried every time singing "She's Out of My Life"—Jones left it on the record). You go through 800 songs to find nine that make you feel something. Then you look at those nine and ask: what are the four weakest? You replace them. You don't stop until every song gives you goosebumps.

2. Asking them to jump without a net. You put them in situations that could be humiliating, that might be out of their range, that require total vulnerability. You do this because you love them enough to believe they won't fall. And they trust you enough to jump because "I know he won't let me fall."

3. Benevolent authority. You tell them what songs they're going to sing. The producer has to do that. This isn't democratic collaboration: it's loving someone enough to see their potential before they can see it themselves, then using your authority to guide them there. When people asked if the collaboration was challenging, Jones said: "What am I going to learn from Michael? I don't want to be a singer or dancer. But everything else he doesn't have, we had. So I didn't ask him about anything. We told him what songs to sing."

4. 12-14 months of intimate time. You can't love someone in abstract. You have to be with them. In the studio until second engineers are being carried out on stretchers from exhaustion. Sleeping on the couch, waking up to mix, going back to sleep. 18-hour days, sometimes more. You learn how they think, what makes them work, what breaks them.

And critically: You only work with people you love. Jones tried it a couple times without love. "Didn't work at all. It was a disaster." Because production isn't technical; it's relational. You're sculpting, shaping, pushing, pulling. You're in the most intimate relationship two humans can have that isn't sexual. If you don't love them, you can't do the work.

The Transmission: Mentoring as Love in Action

This is where Quincy Jones's legacy becomes a technology anyone can use.

He learned it from Count Basie, who would say "Young blood, step into my office"— that was the slang for "I have a life lesson for you." Basie taught him about hills and valleys: "In Black show business, there's hills and there's valleys — success and failure. When you get in the valleys, that's when you find out who you are and whether you can withstand the pressure."

He learned it from Duke Ellington, who gave him a photograph before he died with an inscription: "May you be the one to decategorize it." That became Quincy's mission: dissolve the boundaries that confine American music. Prove that jazz/pop/R&B/classical/film scores are all the same twelve notes. God gave us twelve notes; until God gives us thirteen, you better know what everybody did with those twelve.

He learned it from Ray Charles: soul over technique, truth over style, putting yourself fully into whatever you're doing.

And then he taught it forward.

The transmission is simple but complete:

Love yourself first. When Quincy was asked when he learned to love himself, he said: "After seven years old. After we don't have a mother. There was nobody else to do it except my daddy and Daddy was busy most of the time. So when you see that there's nobody there you say you better be there for yourself."

Choose what you love. Music as mother. Work as devotion. Finish everything you start because "once the task is begun, never leave it till it's done; be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all." (His father's wisdom.)

Study comprehensively. Twenty-eight years. All instruments. All genres. Every night in Seattle: white tennis club playing schottisches, Black clubs playing R&B, Elks club playing bebop. You don't get to be original until you've copied everyone who came before. Buddy Bolden copied someone, King Oliver copied Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong copied King Oliver, Roy Eldridge copied Louis, Dizzy copied Roy, Charlie Parker copied Dizzy. That's how you get from band music to jazz to bebop: evolution through imitation.

Love who you work with. Can't be effective otherwise. Spend the time. Do the thorough examination. Ask them to jump without a net. Tell them what to do because you see their potential before they can.

Leave your ego at the door. Music comes through you, not from you. You're a channel, not the source. This is how you manage the egos of Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, and the world's best session musicians. When ego enters, God walks out of the room.

The Limits: What Love Couldn't Save

June 1984. People magazine does a cover story on Michael Jackson. No interview — Michael didn't do interviews. The next week, another cover. No interview. The third week, they dedicate the entire issue to Michael Jackson. No interview.

Quincy saw him snap.

"I think Mike kind of snapped in there a little bit. If you're not spiritually grounded, you've got to be ready for success. Because it's a lot. You think you deserve it? All that adulation, all that money? Or you think you don't deserve it and you're fooling everybody?"

Michael had been living with mobs outside his gate since he was five years old. When Quincy asked him "Doesn't that seem strange?", Michael said: "It's normal. It's been like that since I was five."

The only world Michael could relate to was the one he created with his imagination. Quincy didn't think it was weird: he understood it. Michael had never had the private transformation chamber that Quincy found at eleven, the closet with the workbench where you go to convert pain into beauty. Michael's entire life was public from five years old. His imagination was his only controllable space.

Quincy watched him get chemical peels, go through plastic surgery, transform his face. "I used to give him a hard time about it. He'd always tell me things like 'I have a blister on my lungs' and 'I've got this disease' to get chemical peels. In a way, he was in denial; he wanted to look different."

"Was he comfortable in his own skin? I'm not sure. At times I didn't think so."

And then Michael died. June 25, 2009. Quincy was coming back from China, in Luxembourg, when they told him: "By the way, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson just died."

"I freaked out. I couldn't believe it. I never thought he'd leave before me. It's very hard to accept. I know I'm in a big state of denial because I can't believe it. I'm 76 years old and he's 50 and he's not with me anymore. Our souls had to be connected to do what we did in the 80s: a divinity involved there. I miss my little brother, really do. I still cannot process the fact that he's no longer with us. I love him."

Here's what I need you to understand: Quincy Jones built the most sophisticated love-based production system in music history. He saw untapped capacity in a 19-year-old, created the container for it to manifest, spent 12-14 months in the studio across three albums, produced 100 million sales, broke the color barrier on MTV, established the music video as art form, built a friendship.

And he still couldn't save Michael.

Because the limits of love are this: it can actualize artistic potential, but it cannot repair childhood trauma that predates the relationship. It can create safety for vulnerability, but it cannot undo the damage of fame from age five when there was no private transformation space. It can produce Thriller, but it cannot produce the spiritual grounding required to survive the success of Thriller.

Michael's "normal" was already pathological before Quincy arrived. And love — even the most sophisticated, methodological, comprehensive love — has limits.

The Legacy

The legacy is the methodology for choosing what to love when love is taken from you, then loving it so completely it teaches you how to love everything else.

That's what Quincy Jones built. That's what he transmitted. That's what's still hanging in the air, untouchable and unavoidable, waiting for the next person who needs to learn that music and water will be the last things to leave this earth because we can't live without them.

So let me ask you: What are you choosing to love? And are you loving it methodologically, comprehensively, with the devotion that converts wounds into work?

Because that's the only question that matters when you're building legacy.

Once the task is begun, never leave it till it's done.

Be the labor great or small.

Do it well or not at all.

Until next time,

Tricky Sol