05/03/2026
Mural is coming to Seattle!
When Quincy Jones was eleven, he broke into a rec center in Bremerton with his brother to steal lemon meringue pie. On the way out he passed a dark room, glimpsed a spinet piano in the corner, and almost closed the door. Something told him to go back. He walked over, touched the keys, and—as he would tell the story for the rest of his life—every cell in my body said this is what you're going to do forever. He didn’t know how to play, and he didn’t have words for what he was feeling. His body knew before his mind did.
Three years later, in Seattle, he met a sixteen-year-old blind pianist named Ray Charles, newly arrived from Florida. Ray taught him how to read music in Braille: the blind boy teaching the sighted boy how to read with his fingers. Quincy spent the rest of his life telling other artists to trust what he’d learned in those rooms: that the body recognizes the music before the mind can name it, and your only real job is to stay human enough to receive it. He said it to Michael Jackson, and to Aretha Franklin. Decades later he said it to Jon Batiste, in a line his teacher Nadia Boulanger had once given him: “Your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being. Work on the human part.” The human part, I believe, is the body
The five portraits, composed as a mural, are to honor the transmission between Quincy Jones and the musicians.