Even in 2024, long after he last produced a hit, we live in a Quincy Jones continuum, and not just because he died on Nov. 3 at the age of 91. He carved out his legend by commanding the biggest projects, knowing seemingly everyone, and remaining fearless through it all.

To wit: In January, Netflix debuted a documentary about a Quincy Jones project—The Greatest Night in Pop, the Bao Nguyen-directed look at the making of USA for Africa’s “We Are the World.” (The Grammy Awards just nominated it for Best Music Film.) And 2024 comes to an end with another documentary about an earlier Quincy Jones project—the long-unavailable Save the Children. The 1973 concert film, directed by Stan Lathan, chronicles the performances from Jesse Jackson’s 1972 Operation PUSH exposition in Chicago. Save the Children features, among others, the Jackson 5, the Staple Singers, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, and Quincy Jones, conducting his orchestra. Quincy also helped clean up the film’s soundtrack, which had disappeared from the public for more than 50 years prior to what Variety calls its “re-premiere” at the Chicago Film Festival earlier this month. (Like Greatest Night, Save the Children is also available on Netflix.)

Those two films, of course, represent only a sliver of Jones’s achievements. Also on Netflix is Quincy, a 2018 bio-doc directed by his daughter, the actress Rashida Jones. It’s a surprisingly unsparing piece of work—or maybe not so surprising, given Quincy’s legendary refusal to mince words. (That year, he gave a pair of unbuttoned interviews to promote it—to GQ’s Chris Heath and Vulture’s David Marchese—that became instantly legendary, for good reason.) And Quincy is hardly alone—in 1990, Jones was the subject of another doc, Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones, directed by Ellen Weissbrod, that chronicled the man’s history as well as the making of Back on the Block, the album Jones released 35 years ago, on Nov. 21, 1989.

In Listen Up, Jones says that the album’s impetus was personal—he’d thrown himself into making it after the collapse of his third marriage, to Mod Squad star Peggy Lipton. Their split came as a surprise to him, he says in the film. It was less surprising to anyone else interviewed about it in the film, and evident in Lipton's tight smile when he addresses her from the stage of the 1984 Grammy Awards, a segment Listen Up includes. (Lipton did not sit for an interview for that film, though she did for an American Masters episode about Jones in 2001.) Jones notes in Listen Up that realizing he had made the exact same marital mistakes yet again nearly put him in a mental hospital. Making an album that embraced the new was a way of moving forward.

Listen Up shows Jones telling a press conference that “Back on the Block is the project that all my life I’ve dreamed about;” in a television interview from 1989, he claimed to be “more [proud of it] than anything I’ve ever done.” His biz peers agreed — Back on the Block swept the 1991 Grammy Awards, winning six trophies, including Album of the Year and Producer of the Year for Jones, upping his number, at that point, to 23. (It’s now 28 total — so far.) All those trophies were a given by that point; Jones also hosted that year’s ceremony, just to keep the logrolling going.

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By the time of Back on the Block, Jones had been making albums under his own name for decades. As critic Carol Cooper noted, Jones’s ’70s and early ’80s “production style helped [to] create” the era’s “jazz fusion, quiet storm, and smooth jazz radio formats.” Albums like 1981’s The Dude were multi-format monsters, spinning off multiple hit singles and showcasing Q’s own talent squadron, such as vocalists Patti Austin and James Ingram; the latter sang lead on The Dude’s “Just Once” and “One Hundred Ways,” both Top 20 hits. If that formula seems familiar, it’s because another Jones-produced album from the year following The Dude would do something similar, only way more so: Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the biggest album of all time.

But Back on the Block was as unlike Jones’s earlier albums as it was similar. For one thing, it wasn’t simply a showcase for the writers, singers, and arrangers signed to Jones’s company, Qwest Productions, but a smorgasbord of, as a Los Angeles Times review put it, “rap, bebop, ‘70s jazz fusion, African music, and contemporary pop/R&B.” Back on the Block is a big-hearted embrace of a century’s worth of Black music history — all of it, even the stuff his peers hated. This attitude made Jones a real rarity for his time. As the R&B historian and filmmaker Nelson George told Spin in 1987, Jones and Miles Davis were at that point “the only musicians of their generation who in any way have connections to the younger generations.”

Specifically, Q’s Dutch-uncle embrace of hip-hop was unique among his cohort. For most of the ’80s, older Black-music executives hated rap and fought to keep it off the radio. Jones wasn’t so much trying to curry favor with the kids, but to make a place at the table for those kids at a time when many adults didn’t want them there. As Melle Mel, the lead voice of Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5 and one of the guest MCs on Back on the Block’s title track—along with Ice-T, Big Daddy Kane, and Kool Moe Dee—said in 2001: “The fact that we was working with Quincy on his album, and just being in the studio, the way we was treated, it made me feel more like a musician, because when we was coming up, we was disrespected by musicians.” By contrast, Quincy and his associates “treated us like we should be treated, like ... part of a musical family, instead of: ‘Oh, yeah, those guys, you know, they’re from the Bronx ... they get high and, you know, they might steal something.’”

Jones had plenty of experience with roughnecks—he’d grown up around gangsters in Chicago, which was useful training for the music business in general. (One of the talking heads in Listen Up is Morris Levy, who’d run the NYC club Birdland and, not long before the film came out, was sentenced to ten years in prison for extortion; he died two months prior to going in.) But that’s not what Back on the Block, or its title cut, transmits. Instead, it’s playful, positive, and almost aggressively family-friendly, the very opposite of hip-hop’s rep at the time.

“The music is all interrelated and connected to each other,” Jones said to that TV interviewer in 1989. “That’s what surprised me.” Uh, surprised? Hardly. This is one of those rare times Jones seems to be fibbing for the sake of politeness. Those very commonalities, the placement of those styles along the Black-music continuum, are the album’s explicit theme.

Intergenerational team-ups abound. Ray Charles and Chaka Khan duet on the hit single “I’ll Be Good to You,” which topped Billboard’s R&B chart and reached the pop Top 20. “Good to You” is one of two Brothers Johnson songs revived on Block that Quincy produced for 1976’s Look Out for #1, the other being “Tomorrow.” “Jazz Corner of the World,” a rap by Kane and Moe Dee, slides into the Joe Zawinul jazz standard “Birdland”, with vocals from Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and solos from—deep inhale—Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, George Benson, and James Moody. Another track, “Wee B. Dooinit (Acapella Party by the Human Bean Band)”—good lord, that hoary parenthetical!—features Fitzgerald, Vaughan, Al Jarreau, Bobby McFerrin, and then-R&B phenoms Take 6, as well as Qwest mainstay Siedah Garrett. Whew.

In his 1989 sit-down, Quincy sums up the all-star extravaganza this way: “It’s like a candy store.” Well, sort of—Back on the Block is so aggressively good for you that it often feels more like a broccoli store, albeit one with a heavy stock of butter and seasoning. A lot of the original material, by itself, has a frank anonymity to it; the rapping is nobody's best, the arrangements are as busy as the credits list, and the showpieces for Jones’s own crew tend to reach without grabbing. Tevin Campbell, only 12 years old when the album was made, dials up the winsomeness on “Tomorrow (A Better You, Better Me),” but the song is merely a lesser rewrite of “Man in the Mirror.” By comparison, “Round and Round,” the song Prince gave Campbell a year later on the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack, is slighter and less ambitious than “Tomorrow”—and far more effective.

Yet, you can see what Jones meant by having wanted to make this album all his life—it’s a consolidation of his career’s work, all its aspects in one hour-long go, as well as a bridge to the future. If anything, 35 years’ distance makes the album less a sum-of-parts bricolage than the one term almost nobody used at the time to describe it: Back on the Block might be the plushest new jack swing album ever made. It’s apt that the album ends with “The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite),” a slow-jam summit that, for the first and only time, pairs up El DeBarge and Barry White—the latter’s miles-deep “Show you right” would become a go-to catchphrase for Arsenio Hall on his late-night talk show—plus the now-oft-forgotten Al B. Sure!, exclamation mark and all.

Back on the Block often sounds as cluttered as it can look written down. The same applies to Listen Up, with its overlapping monologues and ostentatious cuts between testimony from and about different eras. The latter works better in Jones’s hands than in those of the filmmakers. Yet Listen Up also affords us the opportunity to hear many of the vocal parts (and some of the instrumental soloing) in isolation. These are brief snatches, not full performances, but they allow us to see just how many moving parts Jones could, and did, juggle, and not just here. In a way, Back on the Block is a continuation of “We Are the World” itself—which, as Jones noted in a 2007 interview with The History Makers, had been a kind of spin-off of Donna Summer’s “State of Independence,” from her 1982 self-titled album, produced by Jones, and featuring an all-star choir, many of whom would end up on the USA for Africa record.

The producer-as-mastermind was Jones’s ultimate role. As the Los Angeles Times noted, Back on the Block came “at a time when Svengali producers are ascendant in rap and R&B.” They’ve only become more so, all over pop and, particularly, dance music. That’s another way we’re still living in a Quincy continuum. Particularly as we face a future that’s growing ever more unsteady—in a society that is being ever more deliberately pushed toward chaos—Jones’s big-tent ecumenicism still has value, and not just musically.

Or, as the Dude himself put it in Listen Up, explaining the Quincy philosophy in a nutshell: “It’s about recycling energy—taking that powerful energy that you have inside of you and putting it into something real positive or creative, or something with love. And it’s a bitch to try and convert hate to love. It’s a tough trick. But if you do it? It’s the only salvation.”