On Quincy Jones and the Legacy of 'The Wiz'

The first time I ever interacted with music from The Wiz was in fourth grade, when I was in my elementary school’s choir and our teacher had us sing its most popular song, “Ease On Down The Road”. I hadn’t seen the movie or the stage musical at the time, but the song stayed with me, and I appreciated it even more when I first saw the film years later. So many of its songs (“No Bad News,” “You Can’t Win,” “What Would I Do If I Could Feel?”) are standards in the pop canon today, and it remains a load bearer for the art of musicals, especially for Black audiences.

That’s why I was so excited to receive the call from our good friends at Celebrate Brooklyn to moderate a panel dedicated to The Wiz, as part of their Quincy Jones tribute series. In late July, at the Lena Horne Bandshell in Prospect Park, I convened with Schele Williams, the director of the version of The Wiz stage show currently touring the country; Bobby Wooten III, a musician who’s worked with everyone from Jennifer Lopez to Carly Rae Jepsen to Mac Miller and is currently an associate arts professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute; and Dede Ayite, a Tony Award-nominated costume designer. We spoke about the music, costumes, and story of The Wiz, and its legacy as a love letter to Blackness in all its forms.

This conversation has been edited for content and clarity.

I want to talk about the vision and the chemistry and the way this movie is brought together. Schele, as somebody who’s been working so intensely on bringing the show to life for a new generation, talk to me about directing this show and what it meant to you.

Schele Williams: First of all, it was an honor to reimagine this incredible production for a new generation. I think about my daughters and teenagers, and I did not want another generation to go by and not enjoy The Wiz, not know it in their bones, not know it the way I knew it in the ’70s. And so when we approached this new version of the show, we wanted to honor every version. We wanted to honor the Baum books. We wanted to honor the Wizard of Oz, we wanted to honor The Wiz the Broadway show, and The Wiz the movie. And so we have elements of all of that in there. And we wanted to celebrate Black excellence in every form, our motivation of music, our dance, our beautiful costumes, our fashion, our flavor, our humor—infusing all of that with every generation, so there are moments when the grandmas are laughing and the grandkids are laughing. It's a multigenerational show, and I just wanted to give that back to us.

You said that you had also made some of your own changes and additions, because you had started this production around the time of George Floyd murder. Could you elaborate a little bit on that and what it meant to incorporate something that was always internal, something that we all get, and bring that to the fore?

Williams: Starting the show in August of 2020, the world had shifted, and I had shifted. And as I thought about these characters, and I thought about putting Black men on stage, it was really important to me that each one of them had a back story, that they had belonged, that they had purpose, that they were entrenched in community, that there were people who would love them and miss them. And so [show writer] Amber Ruffin and I had a lot of discussions about gentle things that we can put in there to ensure that when a Black man shows up on stage, he's not just there to entertain us. He is infused in the community. He is a part of us. It was important for me, even in the subtlest of ways, to put that in a show. You know, when the Tin Man sings “What Would I Do If I Could Feel,” it just hits a little different now, and I just wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a show about the fun of it. It’s about the depth of us and all of who we are.

I saw the show in 1978—that's the same year the movie came out—so I got to relive that experience over and over again. And what I think is so beautiful about the story is that, at the core of it, it's about belonging. So it doesn't matter if you're six, if you're 16, if you're 26, if you're 36, you're going to revisit these moments of what it means to find your tribe, what it means to believe in yourself, what it means to have people who truly love you encourage you on their journey and force you to be braver than you think you can be.

Dede, talk to me about how the costume design affected you when you first saw it, and maybe even some of your favorite pieces.

Dede Ayite: I definitely just admire how fantastical it is, and the magical realism of it all. But I always have to acknowledge Geoffrey Holder, because his design work [for the original Broadway production] came before the film’s. His work really just permits us to explore what costume design could be. And then we see how he would increase the idea of Black culture in the 1970s: Just the grooviness of it all, the textures and colors for Evillene and the flying monkeys, for example. They’re just so badass. You can see the research, looking into New York City of the ’70s and examining each character and lifting it all up.

Even though Evillene and Glinda are only on screen for barely 10 minutes, they both made such an impression in this movie. Can you touch on her visual presence a bit more, since she seems to be a focus character for you?

Ayite: You look at Evillene’s costume, right? The textures that [the film’s costume designer Tony Walton] used, and all the colors? There’s so much depth there to her character—she has her eyes bulging out! Every time you watch, at least for me, I’m always picking up on new details. From a design standpoint, there’s so much of our culture in the ways Evillene and Glinda came out. It’s such an ode to Blackness in all its different capacities. There’s Evillene, who’s down and upset and angry and a beacon for how that manifests, but we also get to see the lightness coming from Glinda.

When I think about sculpting a world that’s unapologetic about the ways in which Black culture can be seen on stage and in film, I think about Tony Walton’s work. When I see The Wiz, it’s just mindblowing. Thinking about how design can impact the way we see ourselves, and for that to impact the way we see each other and ourselves honestly, it’s amazing. It really puts a value on Black stories and storytelling, and doesn’t put them in a box. It acknowledges how large and broad the Black experience in America can be, and watching the movie is always a great reminder of storytelling in a way that’s expansive.

As most of us know, Quincy Jones is already a legend by the late 1970s, and The Wiz was the first time Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson worked together. Bobby, what was it about this era of Jones’s music that you feel was integrated into this film?

Bobby Wooten III: At this point in his career, he’s in his 40s. What he injected into this film version, in my opinion, is a lot of the pop and R&B sensibilities, as well as orchestral. If you go back to when Quincy’s first starting out, he’s a jazz trumpet player, he moves onto arranging, and then he’s working with Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, and the Count Basie Orchestra. Then he wants to challenge himself again, and part of it is in film scoring. At the time, there were basically no Black film composers, and one of the first things he did—and he was really the perfect person to do this—he goes to Europe to study with Nadia Boulanger, who taught Igor Stravinsky, Phillip Glass, all these classical composers. Jones may have been the first Black student she ever had. After that, he comes back and starts film composing. The first film he does is The Pawn Broker with Sidney Lumet, and he winds up doing over 30 films in 20 years. Most composers are good for one, maybe two films a year. Jones once scored eight movies in a year, which is insane.

With The Wiz, all of his sensibilities are showing. He can look at the landscape and see what’s going on in R&B music and lean into the jazz sensibilities and the blues. He’s using synthesizers here, which I know for sure they weren’t using in the Broadway version. One of my personal favorite scoring moments is “Is This What Feeling Gets?” It starts with a very Stevie Wonder-sounding Steinway synth that’s pretty ethereal as it landscapes up into opening the song. That was the genius about him.

One of my favorite moments is “You Can’t Win,” which I didn’t realize wasn’t in the Broadway version of the show, and you could tell Quincy really put his touch on that song. And then there’s the Emerald City sequence, which is one of a handful of songs that Jones wrote exclusively for the film version, and it feels super duper contemporary with these touches of R&B and disco.

But I also want to touch on Jones and Michael Jackson’s relationship, which began in earnest with The Wiz. What do you see about their relationship working on this movie that can be translated to what would come from them afterward?

Wootten: The story goes that Michael approached Quincy about producing his next album. At first, Quincy, who was busy, kinda paid it no mind. But then he started paying attention to Michael and saw that he had his lines memorized and Diana Ross’s lines and both of their choreography memorized. Because of that, Quincy was like, “You’ve got a producer right here,” and then a year later, we get Off The Wall. It was definitely a mentor/protégé relationship, but their relationship grows and Michael starts to write more, with Quincy overseeing and pulling together the superteam to put it together. If we’re talking about the influence of one of the best-selling albums of all time [in Thriller], it starts here. And it’s a testament to Michael’s discipline and focus and where that can lead you.

We can’t talk about the music in this movie and not touch on “Ease on Down The Road.” It’s the beating heart of the movie. Considering that it’s existed in the show since the beginning but that Quincy put his own touch on it, what do you think it is about this song that’s stood the test of time?

Wootten: Well, it’s a huge part of the story, right? It speaks to the transitive nature of the story, and as other characters are added, Quincy starts adding in different instruments to accentuate it as part of his arrangement as well. So it’s constantly being brought to new life and pulled in different directions.

Williams: If I may add something: In this latest version of The Wiz show, we take that song and break it down by doing a slow version at the end. It wasn’t until we did that that I really listened to those words: “Ease on down the road / Don’t you carry nothing that might be a load.” There’s nothing more spiritual than listening to those lyrics and being like “You know what? Don’t carry nothing that’s too heavy for you. Just keep going.” It’s so spiritual. The way that kept coming back, I was like “That’s Black church, y’all!” That was there the whole time. It speaks to them on their journey.