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Quincy Jones Produced Classics in the Late ’70s and Early ’80s — Even When He Wasn’t Working With Michael Jackson

Everyone knows Jones helped Jackson. He also made great records for Chaka Khan, George Benson, Donna Summer, the Brothers Johnson, and more

If there was a downside to helping Jackson become an icon and sell enough albums to populate a small planet, it’s that this achievement often obscures the breadth of Jones’ own accomplishments, reducing his career in the late 1970s and 1980s to a single sidekick role. There is a lot of great disco, yet there are just a handful of songs from this period able to conjure the feeling that Jones reliably created: His productions seem to glide, reveling in the heady momentum of liftoff, cheerfully spurning the ground that the rest of us must rely on to generate forward movement. When preparing to work with Jackson, the producer rounded up what he called his “killer Q posse,” a group of musicians where “every one was a black-belt master in his own category:” the songwriter Rod Temperton, the engineer Bruce Swedien, the keyboard player Greg Phillinganes, the trumpeter/arranger Jerry Hey, the bassist Louis Johnson, the drummer John Robinson, and the percussionist Paulinho da Costa.

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