| Music

The Seattle Times (MCT) - In the late 1940s, when Quincy Delight Jones lived on 22nd Avenue, just a block from his alma mater, Garfield High School, there was a place they called "the dream window" in the attic, where he and his seven brothers and sisters slept.

"We would look out there," recalls Jones' youngest brother, Richard, now a federal judge in Seattle, "and think, 'What is it I can possibly do? Where is life going to take me?' We weren't looking at a spectacular lake. We grew up looking at the blackberry bushes and garbage in the lot across the street. You had to have a big imagination."

A big imagination indeed. This was a very different time in America. The armed forces, most musicians unions and Major League Baseball were still segregated; interracial dating was scandalous; and lynching was still a fact of life in the South. There were no black people on TV or radio, unless they were domestics.

Yet Quincy Jones, looking out that "dream window," somehow imagined a future that not only transcended all that, but in some ways would transform it.

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The 75-year-old impresario will return Sept. 26 to dedicate Garfield's new Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center, part of the school's renovation. It's his third trip home this year, at least officially (he often visits family on the QT). In June, he gave an inspirational commencement address at the University of Washington, where he received an honorary doctorate in music. In February, he was given the first Lifetime Achievement Award at the grand-opening gala for the Northwest African American Museum.

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You've seen the radiant Jones on Hollywood award shows or perhaps even read his heartbreakingly frank book, "Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones." You probably know he produced the biggest-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson's "Thriller," and one of the best-selling singles, the star-studded "We Are the World." Or that he co-produced the film "The Color Purple" with Steven Spielberg and has won more Grammy Awards (27) than any other artist in popular music.

But what was he like as a young man? What will his legacy be? Who is Quincy Jones, really? And what prompted the audacity of his dream, looking out that window?

A relaxed, rambling conversation in June at his 20,000-square-foot home in Bel Air, Calif. _ designed by Garfield classmate Gerald Allison _ offered some insights into Jones' complex personality and career.

Jones and Allison spent five years working on this dream home, which features an enormous, round living room with a domed ceiling in the style of an African house. Art from every continent graces the rooms, and family photographs are arranged in galleries. On a grand piano stands a Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Jones' Count Basie/Frank Sinatra songbook.

Jones walks in, wearing shorts, and plops down on a white cushion next to an array of couches. He looks trimmer than he did in February, and later boasts he's lost 20 pounds. ("I was drinking then.") His mellifluous voice is deep and seductive, his brown eyes magnetic, making you feel you're the most important person in the room. He smiles broadly, and often.

"I just got a doctorate from Washington University; Princeton; then there was the University of Washington; the Pequot Tribe, in Alaska; Cambodia; China; Brazil; Abu Dhabi; Dubai _ it's insane," he begins, like a man speaking with amazement about somebody else's life. "I got to go to London for Mandela's thing next week (Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday), then Sardinia on a boat for 10 days. Then the Montreux festival, Beijing. I've been to China 16 times in the last year-and-a-half."

A plaque nearby honors him as an artistic adviser for the Beijing Olympic Games.

"Spielberg pulled out, you know," he says, clearly disturbed.

Along with film director Ang Lee, the three of them were hired as consultants for the opening and closing ceremonies. Jones had come under pressure _ especially from Mia Farrow _ to quit, because of Chinese behavior toward Darfur.

"I love Mia," he says. "I've known her since she was 17. I don't need political lessons from her. I'm not a quitter, it's that simple. I'm just not a quitter. When a country is 1 billion, 300 million, you don't pull out on them. You work it out. They are comers, man."

Such spirited independence, honoring of commitments, indomitable work ethic and determination to be where the action is have been hallmarks of Jones from the beginning.

Born during the Great Depression, March 14, 1933, in Chicago's South Side ghetto, Jones and his brother Lloyd _ who later was an engineer for Seattle's KOMO-TV _ braved gang-infested streets and looked on, terrified, as their schizophrenic mother, Sarah, was taken away in a straitjacket.

"A guy attacked me with a knife when I was 7 years old," says Jones, holding up his still-scarred right hand. "I was on the wrong street."

Quincy's father, Quincy Delight Jones Sr., a carpenter who worked for gangsters, remarried, this time to Quincy's friend Waymond's ...