Donald Trump could learn a lot from Quincy Jones

With news of the death of November 3 of Quincy Jones at the age of 91 came the obligatory flood of social media clips highlighting a career unparalleled in the history of pop music.

In videos, Jones talked about producing and working with stars like Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra, Queen Latifah, Dizzy Gillespie, Gloria Estefan, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Chaka Khan and of course Michael Jackson. Jones produced the three defining albums that made Jackson an icon – “From the wall,” “Thriller,” And “Bad.”

Long before Jones met Jackson, he was studying in Paris Nadia Boulangerconsidered one of the foremost composition teachers. Jones said the woman who also taught Leonard Bernstein and Philip Glass helped him hone his musical skills and gave him what he called “the best advice I’ve ever received.”

“She said, ‘Your music will never be more or less than you are (as) a human being,’” Jones said in an unidentified clip. “So I started working with humans.” Jones, then 85, said he wanted to “get all the negative thoughts out of my body.” That included his resentment and anger, which he called “a waste of time.”

Jones cited a quote variously attributed to Seneca, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mark Twain, among others, to illustrate his point: “Anger is an acid that does more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is put.” cast.’

In the devastating aftermath of Tuesday’s presidential election, I continue to think of the corrosive impact of anger and of the man who spent years vowing retaliation against his perceived enemies if he were to run for president again.

As Donald Trump prepares for his second term in the White House, he could learn a lot from Jones’ words about letting go of anger to be both a better person and a more compassionate leader.

But that would not be Trump, nor the man who was re-elected by more than 72 million Americans. They know exactly who they voted for.

Less than 24 hours after Trump’s victory, Karoline Leavitt, his national press secretary, said in a Fox News interview that Trump will launch “mass deportationsof undocumented immigrants, which will cause unprecedented chaos nationwide. And that’s just the beginning of the ways in which Trump will deepen divisions and turn this country inside out.

In a wild interview from 2018 with New York magazine finding Jones at his tea-spilling best, he talked about Trump, describing him as “a megalomaniac,” a “narcissist,” and a bunch of other things that can’t be repeated here.

But months later, at the premiere of “Quincy”, a Netflix documentary co-directed by his daughter, actress Rashida Jones, Jones mentioned Trump in a more conciliatory tone.

“You can’t afford to get mad, man.” he told an interviewer. “That’s what I told myself when Donald Trump won. Are you happy with our president? We will survive. We will learn.”

Given Trump’s decisive victory, it appears that this country has learned nothing, and millions of people have adapted to the newly elected president’s indefatigable penchant for division and resentment. I’m not sure many are prepared for what we will likely have to experience over the next four years – and with what.

One thing we can do is find comfort in music. Most know the saying that music is a universal language with an innate ability to bridge our differences. Jones understood this, and he made music the way most people listen to it – without walls. He was genre agnostic and was equally at ease playing trumpet with jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton when he was writing a swinging new arrangement for what would later be ‘Fly me to the moon”, a Sinatra classic.

In 1985, he gathered more than 40 of the world’s biggest artists – including Jackson, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder – to produce the charity single “We are the world”, which raised more than $63 million for famine relief. When artists arrived at the recording studio, they were greeted by a sign: “Check your egos at the door.”

In “Q,” his 2001 autobiography, Jones, who described ego as “overdressed insecurity,” said he wanted the sign to remind artists that “this project was bigger than all of us.”

Come January and for the next four years, this country will have to remind itself again and again that it is bigger than the destructive whims of one man’s anger and exaggerated insecurities.

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Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @reneeygraham.