After news of Quicy Jones’ passing this Sunday came out, comedian Alex Edelman shared a sweet anecdote from a time when the two were seated together at an event.
“Are you Jewish?” Jones asked the comedian, who would go on to win an Emmy for his Jewish comedy special “Just For Us.”
When Edelman responded in the affirmative, the 28-time Grammy winner and music producer responded with, “I produced a couple of Jews.”
“Musicians?” Edelman appropriately asked, to which Jones answered: “Children.”
Jones, who passed away at age 91, clearly got a lot of naches, or pride, from all of his seven children. Two of them are Jewish — actresses Kidada Jones and Rashida Jones — born from his over-decade-long marriage to Jewish actress Peggy Lipton. Lipton, who passed away in 2019 at age 72 from colon cancer, was Jones’ third wife, but their love, as shown in the 2018 Grammy-winning documentary “Quincy,” co-directed by Rashida, was all-consuming.
Jones and Lipton met in 1972 while she starred in “The Mod Squad.” As she once explained, “The chemistry was so strong, I was so drawn to him. He came into my life and I just knew.” They moved in together right away, and Jones called falling in love with her “a breath of fresh air,” describing Lipton, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who was raised in a Jewish home on Long Island, as independent, smart and understanding. In an interview, Rashida shared that her maternal grandparents at first struggled with the relationship, but eventually supported it wholeheartedly: “They loved my dad so much.”
Jones, already a successful producer with plenty of musical hits under his belt, had been married twice before when he met Lipton, first to his high school sweetheart Jeri Caldwell and then to Swedish model Ulla Andersson. At first, Lipton and Jones didn’t talk about marriage, deciding to just do their relationship for “as long as it feels good.” Then, shortly after Kidada was born in 1974, Jones, who was working himself ragged, suffered from a brain aneurism. While waiting for his second brain surgery, Lipton and Jones decided to marry, and in 1976, they welcomed their second daughter, Rashida.
Lipton put her own career on the back burner to raise the girls, also caring for Jones’ other children at times, though she did collaborate with her husband and Jewish songwriters Alan and Marylin Bergman on the song “L.A. Is My Lady.” It was during their marriage that Jones, charged with some of the most iconic movie scores, worked on the score of “The Wiz” and met the person who would change his career forever — Michael Jackson. Jones would go on to produce Jackson’s three most successful albums, working with him on songs like “Bad,” “P.Y.T” and “Thriller,” including the “Thriller” video that changed the way we think about musical videos to this day, as well as on the charity song “We Are the World.”
Meanwhile, Kidada and Rashida were raised with Jewish tradition. “We always celebrated the High Holidays. I did fast in high school for Yom Kippur and attend services. We always went to seder for Passover. I really liked the cultural and the familial side of Judaism. It was always the most comfortable place for me, making time for family and community,” Rashida recalled in 2021.
Sixteen years after they got together, the toll of Jones’ fame and workaholic nature was too hard for Lipton to bear. He was consumed at the time with his work on the score of the Spielberg movie “The Color Purple” — the song “My Kidada” was inspired by the couple’s eldest daughter, whose name means little sister in Swahili. After 14 years of marriage, the two divorced. Losing Lipton shattered Jones’ world, and made him reconsider how he spent his time. Family, he realized, was the most important thing to him. In “Quincy,” we see a home video of young Rashida telling her sister that she spent years without seeing her father much, saying she didn’t always know him that well as a child. But the documentary makes clear that eventually, their love and connection was deep and palpable, the entire film a fond, vibrant portrait of the father that she loved.
And Jones, it seemed, never lost that love for Lipton. He had relationships after her, but never married again, and when she passed away, he shared that “there is absolutely no combination of words that can express the sadness I feel after losing my beloved Peggy Lipton…. My wife of 14 years. We shared many, many beautiful memories, & most importantly, we share two incredible daughters…Pie [his nickname for Kidada] & Doonkie [his nickname for Rashida]. Regardless of the paths that our lives took us on, I can say with the utmost certainty, that love is eternal.”
“The thing about my dad’s life is the people that he’s touched, even when things don’t work out and people are hurt, he does seem to keep those people orbiting around. Like, our Thanksgiving dinners are still the ex-wives and the ex-girlfriends. For the most part, everybody’s kept the peace, because he keeps it about love, you know?” Rashida recalled in an interview.
She would later become not just a dear daughter, but also her father’s collaborator, producing and co-directing “Quincy.” She used that special relationship they had to tell a story that leaves you feeling more of who Jones was as a person and a family man.
Of course, aside from producing Jewish children, Jones, who worked with so many great acts from Ray Charles to Aretha Franklin to Frank Sinatra, did produce quite a few Jewish musicians in his career. In fact, it was a Jewish girl that helped the south-side of Chicago-born musician transition from working on jazz music to pop music. Jones was already a two-time Grammy winner when he decided he wanted to work in the genre, after working with the likes of Nina Simone and Dinah Washington. He thought the transition to the pop world would be easy, but he recalled in “Quincy” having to go through dozens and dozens of tapes that were all duds. Then he heard the voice of a 16-year-old girl from New Jersey, and his career was forever changed.
That girl was Lesley Gore, born Lesley Sue Goldstein, from Tenafly, New Jersey. “We had 18 hits with Lesley,” he recalled in “Quincy.” Those hits include “It’s My Party” and “You Don’t Own Me.”
Gore, who came out as a lesbian later in life, and who passed away in 2016, said that Jones “took a little kid who had a certain modicum amount of talent and made me feel so comfortable that I was able to reach down into myself and come up with something that I didn’t even know I was capable of.”
On what would have been her birthday in 2016, Jones shared on social media, “Miss Lesley Gore…Your legacy lives on and the powerful message you sent through ‘You Don’t Own Me’ is still goin’ strong!”
It was his collaboration with Gore that helped pave the way for his work with the likes of Jackson. And it was his work with another Jewish creator that helped pave his successful career as the producer of movie and TV scores. Jones’ first movie score was for Sidney Lumet’s 1964 “The Pawnbroker,” the tale of a Holocaust survivor who runs a Harlem pawnshop. The movie earned great critical acclaim and was one of the first major American films to depict the horrors of Nazi concentrations camps, long before “Schindler’s List,” directed by Steven Spielberg, whom Jones would also go on to collaborate with. (A song from that movie, “Soul Bossa Nova,” later became iconic when it was incorporated into the “Austin Powers” movie franchise.) And it was Lumet, who grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City immersed in the Yiddish theater that his parents acted in, who directed “The Wiz,” making that life-changing connection between Jackson and Jones.
Quincy Jones changed the face of American music forever, and the Jewish creators and loved ones in his life helped shape his career and story indelibly. May the memory of this incredible creator be for a blessing.
