SEATTLE — Eddie Francis is an ‘80s child, a product of the Michael Jackson era. As a youngster, Francis was raised on hip-hop and “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” falling in love with music whereas poring by way of copies of Vibe journal.
The Renton child who turned a longtime KUBE 93 character didn’t totally comprehend on the time that the person behind so a lot of these cultural touchstones that set him on a course to chase a profession in music media was hometown hero Quincy Jones — the Seattle trumpeter who reduce his tooth with Ray Charles in Jackson Avenue jazz golf equipment en path to changing into a visionary music producer, composer and leisure mogul.
“You start realizing the impact he had in the culture, before we were saying ‘the culture’ like that,” Francis says.
In some ways, Jones’ boundless pursuits embodied a Seattle spirit rooted within the Central District, the place Jones attended Garfield Excessive Faculty earlier than touring the world with numerous jazz bands. Jones, who died in November at age 91, was a residing hyperlink to a Seattle that now not exists (at the very least not in the identical approach), an emblem of limitless creativity and risk, and a “north star” — as Francis places it — for Seattle’s Black neighborhood.
A 28-time Grammy winner, trailing solely Beyoncé and conductor Georg Solti, Jones can be honored with a tribute separate from the present’s “In Memoriam” section throughout the 67th Annual Grammy Awards on Sunday (5-8:30 p.m. PT CBS/Paramount+), the place a bunch of Washingtonians like Pearl Jam and Benson Boone are up for a few of music’s high honors.
“It was aspirational every time you saw Quincy. It wasn’t just something that you saw on your own, it was the generations before you — there was this sense of pride,” says Francis, now based mostly in Los Angeles the place he co-hosts Apple Music’s “Rap Life Review” present. “I grew up in the ‘90s and, during the grunge scene, there was Seattle representation.” However there wasn’t illustration for Seattle’s Black neighborhood apart from Sir Combine-A-Lot, he stated. “And that mattered. But as this grunge scene becomes the face of Seattle, it wasn’t the face of my community. So, it’s a different level of pride.”
‘The sky’s the restrict’
Jones may be one of the crucial embellished artists in Grammys historical past, however he’s not the one genre-bending Garfield Bulldog to seize the Grammys highlight.
Years earlier than Ishmael Butler and his influential jazz-rap group Digable Planets gained finest new artist in 1994, the revolutionary rapper carried out for the primary time at a college expertise present in Garfield’s Quincy Jones Auditorium. By then, Butler, a highschool sophomore, was nicely conscious of Jones’ lofty resume, having heard his music-loving mother and father and former Garfield jazz band director Clarence Acox converse of the native legends’ achievements. The identical approach an 11-year-old Jones was transfixed when he touched a piano for the primary time, after sneaking into an armory in Bremerton the place his household lived earlier than transferring to the Central District, Butler was hooked that day within the Quincy Jones Auditorium. It’s the place his personal adventurous music profession started in earnest.
“That was the first time I ever discovered that … the pressure that I felt — the anxiety and the nervousness around (performing) was something that I wanted in my life,” Butler says. “I realized I’m in pursuit of this feeling rather than trying to avoid it.”
Butler would go on to assist dissolve the obstacles between jazz and hip-hop with Digable Planets, which rose to fame within the early ‘90s, a few years after Jones made his own foray into hip-hop with 1989’s “Back on the Block,” profitable album of the 12 months on the 1991 Grammys.
Over time, Jones has straight opened doorways for a lot of artists and entertainers, everybody from Will Smith to Jacob Collier, whose “Djesse Vol. 4” is up for album of the 12 months on Sunday. Maybe extra profoundly, his instance opened numerous different inventive minds to a world of risk, as he confidently moved from jazz to producing pop hits like “Thriller” and “We Are the World” — the topic of final 12 months’s documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop,” nominated for finest music movie — to scoring for movie and TV.
“(We) understood through his example that the boundaries didn’t really exist,” says Butler, 55, who’s nonetheless breaking new floor along with his Afrofuturist experimental hip-hop challenge Shabazz Palaces. “Watching him bouncing from these different worlds … definitely helped myself and anybody else that witnessed it realize that the sky’s the limit and that there is no genre. There is no category other than expression, instinct and result. … The reason he’s a legend is because he fostered that in so many people. It allowed us to find our own way through internalizing possibility through his accomplishments.”
Progressive jazz drummer and producer Kassa Total, one other independent-minded Garfield grad on his personal creative aircraft, agrees. Style fluidity is extra commonplace in 2025 than it was in Jones’ heyday and seeing how Jones continually innovated and executed his singular creative visions conjures up Total.
“The thing that he did that gives me power is, I don’t think he was trying to do something that had already been done,” Total says. “Whenever I’m working on a project, that’s part of it. I’m just trying to find something that hasn’t already been perfected.”
Possibly that’s simply the Seattle in them.
Multiracial mingling floor
Jones was born in Chicago earlier than his father, a carpenter initially from South Carolina, moved the household to Bremerton in 1943 and labored in a naval shipyard. When World Battle II ended, they moved to Seattle the place Jones attended Garfield and performed trumpet within the faculty pep band. After a semester at Seattle College, Jones left for the Berklee Faculty of Music in Boston and by 1953 he was touring Europe with Lionel Hampton’s orchestra.
Jones’ time in Washington was a comparatively quick however formative interval of his life. When Butler appears at how Jones navigated his profession with ambition and dedication, he sees a mirrored image of the Seattle neighborhood he grew up in.
“Seattle really cultivates an adventurous, anything-is-possible outlook,” Butler says. “Especially in those years in the Central District.”
Just like the Joneses, Butler’s household moved to Seattle throughout the Nice Migration, when roughly 6 million Black Individuals moved from the South to different elements of the USA between 1910 and 1970 to flee Jim Crow legal guidelines and search higher financial alternatives. Butler’s grandparents relocated to Seattle “sight unseen” from Baton Rouge after Boeing went to rural Louisiana to recruit new staff, promising jobs, housing and an opportunity to make a brand new life.
“A lot of people came up here and moved to the Central District under that plan,” Butler says. “To me, that showed that people were courageous, curious — really frontiersmen and women. Us as their offspring, we had that innately in us as well and that became the culture of the Black community here in Seattle, as people that were down to see what’s up with the world and be curious about it. I think (Jones’) time here cultivated that in him.”
Drummer D’Vonne Lewis’ deeply musical household equally got here to Washington from the South, additionally settling in Bremerton and later the Central District. Lewis’ grandfather Dave Lewis, Sr. was a barber and guitarist, and their house turned “like a hub of music” the place the neighborhood youngsters — together with Jones and Jimi Hendrix — would congregate, Lewis says.
Lewis describes Seattle as one thing of a musical “melting pot” the place artists are adept at taking totally different sounds and making use of their very own spin or pushing it in new instructions — a trait he sees in Jones, who “did a little bit of everything” all through his profession.
“A lot of people moved here from elsewhere … so we got all these different musicians or different ideas,” Lewis says. “It’s like we got a sound that derives from everywhere because all these different people are bringing that here.”
Although some say it’s been overly idealized, the Jackson Avenue jazz scene that after bloomed on the sting of the Central District and the Chinatown Worldwide District, the place a younger Jones acquired his begin, was stated to have been a multiracial mingling floor. Francis sees an identical spirit nonetheless current in elements of Seattle.
“That is something that’s true about Seattle to this day. If you look at the population of Seattle, it’s not a diverse city, if you look at the demographics. But in reality, the cultures do mix a lot in Seattle,” he says. “Even for me, I grew up around Filipino people, Black people, white people … Asians and Samoans. I can probably attest to a little bit of what Quincy went through. It allows you to go into other rooms and be familiar or be understanding, or know how to communicate in those areas.”
The legacy continues
Quincy Jones was certainly a superb communicator. Gregarious and charismatic, Jones was an “old-school superstar,” as Francis places it, with an aura that might gentle up a room. And he was often the final one to go away it. Jones typically made some extent of connecting with each particular person within the room, whether or not regaling John Legend’s household with tales throughout Legend’s marriage ceremony to Snohomish’s Chrissy Teigen, or chatting up the younger lady holding the increase mic when Francis and Dr. Dre interviewed Jones at his Bel-Air house in 2015. (A part of that interview appeared within the Grammy-winning Netflix documentary “Quincy,” co-directed by Jones’ daughter Rashida Jones.)
On the events when Francis and Butler met him, Jones clearly delighted in speaking about his Seattle roots, rattling off avenue names, asking in the event that they’d seen his mural at Garfield and proudly mentioning how his youthful brother Richard A. Jones was a choose.
Assembly Quincy Jones was a “full circle” second for Francis, who used to scrub Decide Jones’ courtroom as a janitor on the King County Courthouse.
“I never really understood how much Quincy felt like he was from Seattle,” Francis says. “So, when he said ‘I’m from Seattle, have you seen my mural?!’ I saw him kind of light up. At one point when we were doing” the interview, “he said he was grateful that he grew up there. Part of it was he doesn’t think he would’ve been as great of a musician or a creator if it wasn’t for the climate in Seattle.”
The gratitude is reciprocated.
With Jones’ dying, Washington misplaced a residing hyperlink to an important a part of our cultural historical past, but his legacy will proceed to be felt. Subtly, by way of artists like Butler and Total, who comply with the spirit of the music with the identical limitlessness that Jones did. Extra tangibly, it lives at any time when Lewis’ band Northwest Deluxe — one among many endeavors from the ace drummer with a robust sense of Seattle heritage — performs traditional songs from Seattle greats like Jones, Ernestine Anderson and Jimi Hendrix.
Carrying that torch is a part of Eugenie Jones’ mission. Eugenie Jones (no relation) is the manager director of the Jackson Avenue Jazz Stroll, a three-day neighborhood pageant that celebrates the historical past of the Central District jazz scene. The Kitsap County jazz singer was additionally the founding board president with the Music Discovery Heart, a Bremerton nonprofit that runs youth music packages, a year-round instrument drive and gives scholarships for music schooling.
The group is teaming up with Olympic Faculty for the inaugural Quincy Sq. Jazz Pageant on Feb. 7, that includes native faculty jazz bands performing on the Roxy Theatre and the Olympic Faculty Performing Arts Heart in Bremerton.
“The Black community across the world is always looking for lights of inspiration because so many of us feel disenfranchised and marginalized and victims of institutional racism,” Eugenie Jones says. “Quincy’s life as a musician and the issues that he did throughout all totally different genres made African Individuals proud that there was any individual on the market saying, sure, we’re particular.
“You always lose something when that light is extinguished because there won’t be anything new added to it. … We lose that presence, but we don’t lose what that presence meant to our lives when they were here — and will continue to mean by the legacy they left behind.”