The TV was on, and “The Ed Sullivan Show” was the reason everyone was watching. Michael Jackson was 12. Quincy Jones was a grown man with a famous name, and he was in the same house that night.
It was the early 1970s. The Jackson 5 had just had four No. 1 singles in a row, starting with “I Want You Back,” and Michael was the little lead singer half of America was talking about. Quincy was already one of the busiest men in music. He’d arranged for Frank Sinatra and Count Basie and written the music for Hollywood films like “In the Heat of the Night.”
Quincy never made that first meeting sound bigger than it was. Speaking at Loyola Marymount University in 2015, he said it happened “just ’cause he was on the Ed Sullivan show,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote. He said he only really “got to know him when we did ‘The Wiz.'”
That came in 1977. Sidney Lumet was filming “The Wiz” in New York, with Diana Ross as Dorothy and a 19-year-old Michael as the Scarecrow. Quincy was in charge of the music. He liked what he saw in his young Scarecrow. “I saw a depth while watching him when we did ‘The Wiz,'” he told NPR’s Michele Norris in 2008.
Michael had something on his mind too. He was about to make his first adult solo album for Epic Records, and he didn’t have anyone to produce it. So he asked the man running the music on his movie.
“I need you to help me find a producer,” Michael told him, as Quincy recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. In the NPR interview, Quincy remembered it as, “Could you help me find a producer?”
Now back to that night with the TV on. In the same 2021 interview, Quincy named the house. He’d first met Michael “when he was 12 at Sammy Davis’ house,” he said. Sammy Davis Jr., the singer, dancer and Rat Pack star, was the host.
Quincy had told it the same way before. In a 2017 Facebook post for Michael’s 59th birthday, he wrote that they first met at Sammy Davis’ house in LA “as we watched the Ed Sullivan show with the Jackson 5.” The next time they really spent time together, he wrote, was on “The Wiz.”
As for the producer Michael asked him to find, Quincy didn’t look very far. “I said, I’d like to take a shot on your album,” he told NPR.
That album was “Off the Wall,” released in August 1979. It made Michael the first solo artist to land four Top 10 hits from one album, and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Rock with You” both went to No. 1. Quincy stayed on for “Thriller” in 1982 and “Bad” in 1987.
Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones accept Album of the Year for “Thriller” at the 1984 Grammys
This is the Recording Academy’s own GRAMMY Rewind upload. It shows Michael and Quincy on stage together at the 1984 Grammy Awards, taking Album of the Year for “Thriller.” It doesn’t include Quincy telling the Sammy Davis story.
By that night in February 1984, the boy Quincy had watched TV with at Sammy’s place was 25 and holding a Grammy next to him. Quincy told the story of where they met again and again: to a college audience in 2015, to Michael’s fans in 2017 and to The Hollywood Reporter in 2021.