How Quincy Jones cheated death and attended his own memorial service 50 years ago

nypost.com:

Quincy Jones “Beat It” — as in his own odds of survival — long before he produced that “Thriller” classic for Michael Jackson.Fifty years before his death at 91 on Sunday, the legendary producer was given a 1% chance of living after he suffered a brain aneurysm in 1974.“It was scary,” Jones told GQ in 2018. “Like somebody blew my brains out.

The main artery to your brain explodes, you know.”After a seven-and-a-half-hour brain surgery, it was discovered that Jones had a second aneurysm, and with his prognosis grim, his showbiz peers began to plan a memorial service for the jazz trumpeter turned producer and arranger for everyone from Count Basie to Frank Sinatra.“I had one aneurysm that erupted and it didn’t look like I’d make it, so my friends planned a memorial service,” Jones told the Hollywood Reporter in 2008. “Well, I made it, but they had the concert anyway.”The originally planned memorial service was held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, with the 28-time Grammy winner in attendance before he underwent his second brain surgery.“The doctor said, ‘The good news is you lived through the first one, but you have another, and we have to go back in two months,'” he told THR. “He said I could go to the concert, but I couldn’t get excited.

How do I not get excited looking at Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye and Billy Eckstine and Cannonball Adderley?”Still, having already escaped death from his first aneurysm, Jones braved the service — which also featured actor-comedian Richard Pryor and jazz great Sarah Vaughan — under supervision.“The neurologist sat with me to make sure I didn’t get into trouble,” he told THR.