Jazz Professional               

QUINCY JONES

A & R work—it’s a dictatorship

Personally speaking
When the going was rough
A & R work - it's a dictatorship
Talking in 1965

When you’re on the other side of the booth, as they say, in a recording studio, you are completely at the mercy of whoever’s in control in the booth. Because the A and R man is actually the boss. He’s the last word, and if there’s a discrepancy he gets the benefit of the doubt as to what’s wrong. Most people go along with this, because you have to have a pilot and a director in a thing like recording. There are problems of musical balance, electronic balance, conception, feel, soundeverything. There’s many things that can go wrong.

Being in a studio hearing the dry sound itself, it’s hard to be objective enough to really be able to judge what’s coming through. The A and R man is in the position of being able to hear the overall thing and so that’s why his judgment has to prevail. But many times we were at the mercy of people who were in this position and who, in many ways, weren’t qualified to judge what the overall sound should be like.

There’s a lot of sacrifices you have to make when you become an A and R man—if you’re a musician, anyway but I think the sacrifice justifies itself insomuch as it gives you a certain freedom to do the type of projects the way you want to do them. It’s selfish, in a way.

I don’t know whether it’s the ego or what—but it gives you a chance to use your imagination completely. If you use your imagination only in the music and don’t think of overall packaging it still isn’t complete. This way we have complete control. It’s a dictatorship. Also your concern is to find talent every way possible. They’re brought to you, you go out and look—everything that’s new on the scene you’re aware of it. And in many ways being in that position does stimulate your awareness, because, naturally, you have to look for all the new things that are happening. You have to be right on top of every thing that’s talked about, or that holds a possibility of becoming the “new thing”. You have to feel the pulse of the whole music world.

One of the most important things I’ve found out is that you must also be aware of the acceptance in the business sense. Because working for a record company makes you very business–conscious. This has led me to come to one conclusion—that you shouldn’t record if you don’t want your records to sell. It’s not a thing that you can afford as a luxury.

And to do this there has to be some commercial element. I don’t mean this in a commercial sense of where it has to go along with every fashionable fad that comes along, be it bossa nova, rock’n’roll, folk, or whatever. I think now the commerciality is sincerity. If you do what you think that you like, and do it well—that’s the most commercial position you can be in. Because the public will back this up. Artists must sound almost like they live and sound like they look. It’s an overall thing of where the image has to project a certain thing.

But I wasn’t aware of all these things before, and I used to come up with the usual stupid complaints like: “Man, I went to the record store in Waukeeshaw, Wisconsin, and my three cousins wanted to buy my record and they didn’t even have it in the store.” It’s an artist’s ego that will cause him to say to himself that if success is attained he attained it completely alone, and if not—with a record company, especially—it’s someone else’s fault. This is very, very untrue—and I’m not trying to sound like a company man now, because I’m not. It’s an awakening that I had, and it taught me a lot about what was really happening.

An artist always talks about promotion. If promotion was the only means to an artist’s success, RCA Victor would have a hit with every record they put out, because they have the most money and they can afford the most promotion. It’s not true. And I’ve seen them whip and kick artists to try and push them through, until the seams break. But if it isn’t in the grooves it isn’t going to happen. And many times a little jack–leg B flat label can have a sound, and they can’t even press up 300 copies. But it’s just the sound everybody wants.