Love Is Just A Breath Away - Remembering Quincy Jones ❤️

Hey guys, musical genius and one of the best music producers of all time (if not the best) Quincy Jones passed away yesterday. And I thought I would share this rare item in my vault with you so you can see the influence his work has had on me.

And I am not going to get into his work with Frank Sinatra here, although I think that would be my favorite thing he did.

One of the best ways to learn anything is through imitation. Painting is an interpretation of reality. Music would be an interpretation of emotion.

I always admired Quincy Jones' taste in repertoire. He knew how important it was for a song to be well crafted and written to build an album. His highly anticipated album with Donna Summer was basically a flop when it was released, but I always found it exciting what he was trying to do there. I'll try to be brief.

Donna was a complicated woman, let's face it. I've known my share of these kinds of artists in our industry. They start their careers with tremendous talent, but sometimes get caught in the clutches of abusive producers or music executives. It turns them into scared but aggressive people who always expect the worst from those who want to work with them. Donna didn't like disco music as a genre. She understood it perfectly and knew how to make it work, but she longed for a career more along the lines of what became Tina Turner's.

That's why you find such an interesting variety of songwriters on the album, from Vangelis and John Anderson to Bruce Springsteen (she was supposed to do a duet with him on "Protection" but it didn't work out - creative differences again), Michael Sembello, Rod Temperton or David Foster. Somehow I think Quincy was trying to mimic life and give Donna many opportunities to make her own way (through the hand of great talent). But she was fallible, and the album ended up being more Quincy's than hers.

Speaking of the last two writers, there's a little song in the middle of the album called "Love Is Just a Breath Away". I always pair it with "Mystery Of Love" and to me they are two hidden gems. I have always been fascinated by them. Now about me and how I learned to produce and arrange music.

I quit my DJ career in 1990 to concentrate on learning how to make my own music. So the first thing I bought was a keyboard. Actually, as I recall, the first keyboard I had was a rudimentary sample keyboard that a cousin gave me. He had a lot of faith in me (still does haha). Then I got mine, a Yamaha V50, then I got some rhythm machines, a Roland sampler (it could play 4 samples at once! LOL), then I think it was in 1992 I got a Yamaha SY77 and an Emulator II... my equipment kept growing, looking for a sound that would make me stand out. That's why I moved away from the more commercial options like the Roland M1 workstation that was so present in 90's productions.

One of the things I started doing with my SY77 (since it had a built-in sequencer) was trying to imitate songs and arrangements that I liked. The challenge was to build the sounds from scratch on the synthesizer and then play all the tracks into the sequencer, trying to get close to the original sound.

I did this several times until I started adding my own stuff to these demos and trying to achieve more than just the mimic, I wanted to capture some of the original emotion that was at the core of these songs. This demo is one of the first times I accomplished that. I'm pretty sure I did this in 1994 using some of my hardware keyboards. You can tell I was deriving from the original (the original production was as expensive as you can imagine, I guess the original song cost about $1 million to produce at the time), I couldn't get sounds like the Synclavier, but I was starting to understand what made a song work. The only thing I don't like is that it's faster than the original, but I guess that's what you get when you're a twenty-something impatient to have a career in music production.

Rest in peace Quincy Jones and all my love to you all ❤️