Clive Davis once wrote that the secret of success in the record business is not to know what's coming but to know what's arrived, and the clearest imprimatur of having arrived is working with Quincy Jones. Jones has arranged, produced, composed, played trumpet and run record companies, but his greatest talent is as a collector, adopting and packaging the inspirations of others, legitimizing – and occasionally sanitizing – them in the process.
Jones's major accomplishment has been the records he produced for Michael Jackson: Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad, three of the most successful solo albums in the history of popular music. His genius was to preserve all of
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Jackson's most bizarre impulses; at the same time he counterpointed them with a studio craftiness that would have rendered less aberrational talents bland. To guard an artist's rough edges while sharpening the dull ones can often be an achievement of astonishing subtlety.
Astonishment is clearly the response that Back on the Block – Quincy Jones's stone-washed wardrobe of African American song styles – desires to evoke, and it often succeeds. But his sense of scale and relentless good taste guarantee that the astonishment one experiences is generally of the Epcot variety.
Back on the Block, Jones's first album since The Dude, in 1981, is an extravagant musical theme park, and its best numbers work better as rides than as records. Had this project been executed as a television special, there would be no room for carping. It offers three jaw-dropping set pieces, featuring rap, jazz and a cappella montages. In each, numerous giants of the forms contribute beautifully integrated performances. But on the rapping title cut – featuring Ice-T, Melle Mel, Big Daddy Kane and Kool Moe Dee – there are no samples, no scratches, no sexual brags. In short, "Back on the Block" is an abstraction, "the Rap Experience": big taste, no calories, none of the physical rub of a music that's all rub. You can believe that L.L. Cool J isn't on the scene to tell you about Tina Turner's "Big Ole Butt" – not at these prices.
"Jazz Corner of the World" juxtaposes more rap over a brilliant Bill Summers percussion groove and introduces licks from Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, et al. But it leads into a rendition of Joe Zawinul's "Birdland" that is a brassy pop instrumental with all the authenticity of a Trader Vic's mai tai. Most modest and bracing in its premise, and most successful, is "Wee B. Dooinit," the funkappella tapestry in which body sounds – tongue clucks, chest slaps and other noises, courtesy of Bobby McFerrin and others – and a snatch of vocoder are all the Master needs to assemble a persuasive dance hit.
Almost as good, but for the fact that it is not an A-plus song, is "The Secret Garden," Jones's aphrodisiac ballad featuring Al B. Sure!, El DeBarge, Barry Wh
