Seen and Unseen

Some of you say you don’t want to wait until I finally write about Quincy Jones. Actually, he will be in Chapter 1, “Mom,” coming next month. But until then, here is another vignette, featuring Q:

Words and Music

Quincy Jones liked to tell the story of how he moved from being a jazz record executive in the early 1960s to the much more lucrative world of pop. In front of senior company managers, he said he would reach into the barrel of audition tapes sent by aspiring singers, pull one out at random, and make it the number one song in America.

So he walked over to the barrel, reached inside and pulled one out. It was from “a sad little girl on Long Island,” Q later told me, but it had a decent melody and some catchy lyrics. So he changed the tempo, created a pop orchestration and punched in a few earworms. That “sad little girl” was Lesley Gore, and the song was “It’s My Party” – which became the number one song in America.

Three decades later, while we were driving in L.A., I finally had the courage to ask Q how he did it: What were his inspirations, his models, for “It’s My Party.” Without missing a beat, he replied, “The B Minor Mass.” Say what? “The Bach B Minor Mass. It’s the best. And the Oratorio, and the Passion.”

Q had studied with Nadia Boulanger - her other students included Aaron Copland, Daniel Barenboim, John Eliot Gardiner and Philip Glass - so he knew Bach’s work in detail, backward and forward. (And some of Bach’s music is the same upside down and backward, an interesting puzzle.) But then we reached our destination, and we never continued that conversation.

Could it be that Q=JSB? (You will know in a few minutes.)

Now consider this: A few years later, I asked Dizzy Gillespie who his favorite composers were. Expecting Ellington or Strayhorn, Diz surprised me: “Ohhh, Debussy, Ravel, the colorists.” Say what? I had to go back to listen to some of Dizzy’s music again. Okay, maybe, but I didn’t get to ask him more about it before I couldn’t.

One final related note: Harry Lennix, the gifted actor who played the lead in the movie about my father, “Keep the Faith Baby,” spent hours in his dressing room watching news footage of my father speaking, so he could match the tone, cadence and pronunciation.

“You’re too close,” Harry told me one day, “you can’t hear it. Olivier said the closer you are, the harder it is to play the character.”

Harry also described the time he saw Anthony Hopkins in a Hollywood studio cafeteria, and walked over asking the master for any notes he could share with a youngster. He said Hopkins told him his secret was that he never played the character: He always played another actor playing the character, and he gave him a few examples. But which actor’s portrayal was he playing when he was Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs”?

“Ah, that was Katherine Hepburn.”

Go watch the movie again. It’s Hopkins playing Hepburn.

Which brings me around to the newsrooms where I have worked. At CBS News, you are in a writer’s shop. The line was, “If you can write as well as Charles Kuralt, you’re hired.” But for the news writers, that meant writing in the style of the person who would be saying your words on the air. Writing for Kuralt was very different from writing for Cronkite. So I treated it as if I were orchestrating music: Quincy’s orchestration of “It’s My Party” was totally different from his work with Sinatra.

One example: In the early 1970s, I was a local news anchor in morning drive in New York radio, so I wrote for myself. Later, at all-news WINS, before I was promoted to news director, I was an editor and writer. One afternoon, Stan Bernard, who anchored the 5-6 pm hour on WINS in the heart of drive time, asked me if I could write a “side” for him. Just like a side of fish or beef, a “side” meant half of an hour. He would write the “A” side – 5-5:30 - and he trusted me to write the second “side,” 5:30-6.

Oh, writing an entire half-hour! Frabjous!! But – it had to be for Stan, not for me. I tried to “inhabit” Stan: How he walked, how he used space. Then it came to me: Whether serious or telling a joke, he used variations of the same rhythm, a three-sentence structure used by many characters in literature. So that’s how I wrote the 5:30-6 half-hour. Lead sentence, second sentence ends slightly up, then the third sentence knocks you downstairs. The AP copy gave me the melody; now I knew how to arrange it.

At 6:00, he emerged from the studio, held up the script I had written, and announced loudly to the newsroom, “This is some of the best copy I have read in my life!”

Two other quick examples: Early one morning several years later, I was in my office just off the main CBS newsroom, writing a memo about the 1980 presidential campaign. But how to get this memo read by correspondents and editors who have piles of paper on their desks? Aha: Through my open door I could see Charles Osgood writing his 7 a.m. newscast. I will write it as Charles Osgood.

Quickly I dashed off the memo, made copies and carried it around. To my surprise, a few minutes later, Osgood walked into my office. Uh oh. Was he insulted that I had used his style? Well, no…

“This is pretty good,” he said. “Can I use it?” “It would be an honor,” I replied. (It was also a violation of the Writers Guild contract, which we both knew.) And an hour later, out of my office speaker, I heard,

“Newsbreak. Charles Osgood on the CBS Radio Network…” and he read my memo, which he edited and, of course, improved.

And at the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit, writing another political memo, this one about odd convention sidelights, I used Andy Rooney’s style, because I thought it was appropriate. And an hour later, who should walk up to me in the control room….

“Hey, this is funny stuff. Can I have it?”

It was all taking a melody – the story - and adding rhythm and orchestration.

Now, as promised, back to the music master, Quincy Jones – and Bach.

The key for me came decades later, in a lecture by Michael Marissen, who comes to Washington four times a year to give short talks about Bach. Over the past ten years I have missed only a few; they are that good.

In one lecture he played a recording of a Lutheran hymn, followed by a recording of how Bach had orchestrated it for an Oratorio. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Yes, it was all in German, played on medieval instruments, but I suddenly I heard what Quincy was trying to tell me. Right there, in front of me, was…

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to,

Cry if I want to,

Cry if I want to,

You would cry too if it happened to you.