Honoring Quincy Jones

HONORING QUINCY JONES

    Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, 2003 is the officially designated Year of the Blues. As we now look to music and the arts to guide us through trying times, it is an honor to pay tribute to an international monument to music: Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. and his passion for music education.

    He is a veritable Renaissance Man, an orchestrator, arranger, conductor, composer, magazine publisher, executive, writer—and music, film and television producer. In his far-flung enterprises, he is the very modern model of a major music mogul. It will take another artist decades to approach his record 27 Grammy Awards and Kennedy Center Honors. And it can be said without exaggeration that the music of Quincy Jones is otherworldly: Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin chose the Quincy Jones-Frank Sinatra rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon" as the first song to be played on lunar soil.

    Quincy Jones's own musical odyssey began earnest in Seattle, where his family had moved to seek better job opportunities in the industrial boom of World War II America. Still trapped in poverty, Quincy and his brother broke into a Seattle recreation hall in search of free meal, but stumbled upon an upright piano. Merely riffing on the ivory keys summoned pleasure in an instant. Playing the piano, he wrote later, enabled him to "hope and cope."

    Early on Quincy Jones could straddle styles of music—and the egos of musicians. In Seattle, as a student in integrated schools and a band member with Ray Charles playing gigs at black and white venues, he learned to gracefully balance the cusp between commerce and art. He is, as Duke Ellington would say, "beyond category."

    Quincy, says arranger Bill Mathieu, is "a culminator .    .    . his music contains nearly everything of value that has been done before." He was—and is—an innovator, able as Washington University Professor Gerald Early wrote, to shape the world artistically, breaking down barriers and moving across boundaries. "Jones has become a virtual epoch in American popular cultural history, a person of such importance and achievement that is difficult to imagine the era without him."

    His greatest contribution to our times may be as a passionate proselytizer for music education in the classroom. Half a century ago, in his first forays abroad, Quincy made the startling discovery that people around the globe knew and cherished American music—sometimes more than American themselves did. So in his early twenties, even as he was inventing new music, he made it his mission to teach and preserve the legacy of our musical heritage.

    Music consists of only 12 notes, yet in its infinite varieties it beguiles, bewitches and beckons us. It can, as Leonard Bernstein observed, name the unnamble and communicate the unknowable. Music not only entertains and uplifts—it edifies and empowers. To know the history of American music is to grasp the history of America.

    Duke Ellington divided the entire musical opus into two categories: Good and Bad. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most lyrical of the founding fathers and himself a composer, believed not only in public education, but that music and musical training was an essential component of good citizenship.

    President John F. Kennedy knew that arts were good for the nation, good for the soul. "The life of the arts far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose—and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization."

    Widely lauded children's television programming such as Sesame Street and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood have long discovered that the lessons of learning and of life are best realized when music is attached to them. As the late, beloved Fred Rogers often claimed about his early piano playing, "By the time I was five-years-old, I could laugh or be very angry through the ends of my fingers."

    "If you don't get kids in kindergarten" cautions Fred Anton, the CEO of Warner Bros. Publications, "you won't get them later in high school. If you can reach children when they are young, music will stay with them forever." To that end, Warner Bros. has spent four years bringing together pioneers in music, linguistics, the sciences and fine arts and asked them to reinvigorate music education. Music education, from pre-K through high school, benefits everyone, says Anton, not just future virtuosos: "You are going to develop critical thinking skills and better team players. And this won't be the dreary music programs of 20 or 40 years ago. This is for today's kids."

    A classic musical piece such as "Follow the Drinking Gourd" incorporates the new thinking. Children learn that in the Civil War era slaves sang code songs to each other, passing along messages of where to escape and find safe houses. The Drinking Gourd was the North Star. By teaching the kids the story—the "Behind the Music" vignette—it brings them into the song, while at the same time teaches impart lessons in history, social studies, and even astronomy.

    Whether a genius such as Quincy Jones or an enthusiastic student embracing early violin lessons, artists at all levels savor the undiluted joy of the musical mind. It is the flow experience, where passion and precision unite, and one loses track of time and space. In a musical mode, dreamers dream and the impossible seems possible.

    Music stirs our creative impulses—and it invariably contributes to our math, linguistic and science learning. The most ardent champion of music education today would indubitably be Albert Einstein. When asked about the theory of relativity, he explained, "It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception."

    Harvard University's Dr. Howard Gardner, whose landmark research in Mind Intelligences was first published 20 years ago, asserts that all of us are gifted with music in the brain, an intelligence that when tapped—especially when we are young—generates bountiful lifetime rewards in all of our other academic and social endeavors.

    We have empirical data linking music education to higher test scores, lower school dropout rates, higher cognitive skills and an increased ability for students to analyze and evaluate information. A University of California School for Medicine San Francisco paper concluded that learning to play an instrument "refines the development of the brain and entire neuromuscular system."

    Other brain research contends that music and arts activities develop the intellect, lead to higher test results in mathematics, science and history and strengthens synapses and spatial reasoning in all brain systems.

    Students exposed to music education are more disciplined, dexterous, coordinated, creative and self-assured. They listen better, learn better, write better and speak better. Or as Charlie Parker would have succinctly put it, "They get in the groove."

    Yet despite the overwhelming scientific and anecdotal evidence showcasting the benefits of music, music education programs throughout the country are in peril. Some fine arts education budgets have been drastically cut; others have been eliminated entirely. The consequences will harm both our music industry and concert halls, but even more seriously our nation's youth.

    As Dr. Jean Houston implored 15 years ago, long before the latest rounds in budget cuts, "Children without access to an arts program are actually damaging their brain. They are not being exposed to non-verbal modalities which help them learn skills like reading, writing and math much more easily."

    Which is why Quincy Jones, Warner Bros. Publications, and other titans of the music world are joining the battle. The fight to initiate and restore arts and music education to our schools needs a volunteer army of teachers, researchers, parents, elected officials, school boards and legislators in formation with the arts industries and artists themselves.

    For the Year of the Blues, Seattle's Experience Music Project is partnering with the Blues Foundation in Memphis and PBS for a multi-media project that will include a television series, The Blues, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, a public radio series, a comprehensive Web site and education program, a companion book, DVDS and boxed CD set, and a traveling interactive exhibit.

    Today's advanced multimedia technology will seek to capture the spirit and times of the blues, an era when at myriad clubs jazz greats would come in after working hours and fold into jam sessions. Guests, and the musicians themselves, were treated to wild flights of fantasy and improvisation. On any given night the likes of Sydney Bechet, Jack Teagarden, Louis and Lil Armstrong, and Bud Freeman would sit together and play the music they felt. It was the dawn of great female artists: Dinah Washington, Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith.

    Music in all its incarnations is one of the most eloquent and memorable reflections of our loud and boisterous democracy. Jazz and the blues represented the vibrant merger of African music, plantation songs, ragtime and the plaintive yearnings of what was then known as hillbilly music. It follows that from jazz, the rivers of rock and roll, hip-hop and rap flowed.

    The genuis of Quincy Jones is his ability to siphon off music from all eras and seemingly reinvent it. It is as if he were a scientist, extrapolating findings from all disciplines and effortlessly merging them into brand new medical breakthroughs. The challenge for educators is to build upon existing layers of history, knowledge and research to structure a new paradigm, deftly blending the elements to produce the finest school system in the world.

    Artists such as Quincy Jones have a gift for revering music's past, while keenly anticipating its future. For as Nadia Boulanger, possibly the greatest music teacher of the 20th century said, "A person's music can be no more or less than they are as a human being."·