SEATTLE — Eddie Francis is an ’80s baby, a product of the Michael Jackson generation. As a teenager, Francis was raised on hip-hop and “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” falling in love with music while poring through copies of Vibe magazine.

The Renton kid who became a longtime KUBE 93 personality didn’t fully comprehend at the time that the man behind so many of those cultural touchstones that set him on a course to chase a career in music media was hometown hero Quincy Jones — the Seattle trumpeter who cut his teeth with Ray Charles in Jackson Street jazz clubs en route to becoming a visionary music producer, composer and entertainment mogul.

“You start realizing the impact he had in the culture, before we were saying ‘the culture’ like that,” Francis says.

In many ways, Jones’ boundless pursuits embodied a Seattle spirit rooted in the Central District, where Jones attended Garfield High School before touring the world with various jazz bands. Jones, who died in November at age 91, was a living link to a Seattle that no longer exists (at least not in the same way), a symbol of limitless creativity and possibility, and a “north star” — as Francis puts it — for Seattle’s Black community.

A 28-time Grammy winner, trailing only Beyoncé and conductor Georg Solti, Jones will be honored with a tribute separate from the show's "In Memoriam" segment during the 67th Annual Grammy Awards on Sunday (5-8:30 p.m. PT CBS/Paramount+), where a host of Washingtonians like Pearl Jam and Benson Boone are up for some of music’s top honors.

“It was aspirational every time you saw Quincy. It wasn’t just something that you saw on your own, it was the generations before you — there was this sense of pride,” says Francis, now based in Los Angeles where he co-hosts Apple Music’s “Rap Life Review” show. “I grew up in the ’90s and, during the grunge scene, there was Seattle representation.” But there wasn’t representation for Seattle’s Black community besides Sir Mix-A-Lot, he said. “And that mattered. But as this grunge scene becomes the face of Seattle, it wasn’t the face of my community. So, it’s a different level of pride.”

'The sky’s the limit'

Jones might be one of the most decorated artists in Grammys history, but he’s not the only genre-bending Garfield Bulldog to grab the Grammys spotlight.

Years before Ishmael Butler and his influential jazz-rap group Digable Planets won best new artist in 1994, the innovative rapper performed for the first time at a school talent show in Garfield’s Quincy Jones Auditorium. By then, Butler, a high school sophomore, was well aware of Jones’ lofty resume, having heard his music-loving parents and former Garfield jazz band director Clarence Acox speak of the local legends’ achievements. The same way an 11-year-old Jones was transfixed when he touched a piano for the first time, after sneaking into an armory in Bremerton where his family lived before moving to the Central District, Butler was hooked that day in the Quincy Jones Auditorium. It’s where his own adventurous music career began in earnest.

“That was the first time I ever discovered that … the pressure that I felt — the anxiety and the nervousness around (performing) was something that I wanted in my life,” Butler says. “I realized I’m in pursuit of this feeling rather than trying to avoid it.”

Butler would go on to help dissolve the barriers between jazz and hip-hop with Digable Planets, which rose to fame in the early ’90s, a few years after Jones made his own foray into hip-hop with 1989’s “Back on the Block,” winning album of the year at the 1991 Grammys.

Over the years, Jones has directly opened doors for many artists and entertainers, everyone from Will Smith to Jacob Collier, whose “Djesse Vol. 4” is up for album of the year on Sunday. Perhaps more profoundly, his example opened countless other creative minds to a world of possibility, as he confidently moved from jazz to producing pop hits like “Thriller” and “We Are the World” — the subject of last year’s documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop,” nominated for best music film — to scoring for film and TV.

“(We) understood through his example that the boundaries didn’t really exist,” says Butler, 55, who’s still breaking new ground with his Afrofuturist experimental hip-hop project Shabazz Palaces. “Watching him bouncing from these different worlds … definitely helped myself and anybody else that witnessed it realize that the sky’s the limit and that there is no genre. There is no category other than expression, instinct and result. … The reason he’s a legend is because he fostered that in so many people. It allowed us to find our own way through internalizing possibility through his accomplishments.”

Progressive jazz drummer and producer Kassa Overall, another independent-minded Garfield grad on his own artistic plane, agrees. Genre fluidity is more commonplace in 2025 than it was in Jones’ heyday and seeing how Jones constantly innovated and executed his singular artistic visions inspires Overall.

“The thing that he did that gives me power is, I don’t think he was trying to do something that had already been done,” Overall says. “Whenever I’m working on a project, that’s part of it. I’m just trying to find something that hasn’t already been perfected.”

Maybe that’s just the Seattle in them.

Multiracial mingling ground

Jones was born in Chicago before his father, a carpenter originally from South Carolina, moved the family to Bremerton in 1943 and worked in a naval shipyard. When World War II ended, they moved to Seattle where Jones attended Garfield and played trumpet in the school pep band. After a semester at Seattle University, Jones left for the Berklee College of Music in Boston and by 1953 he was touring Europe with Lionel Hampton’s orchestra.

Jones’ time in Washington was a relatively short but formative period of his life. When Butler looks at how Jones navigated his career with ambition and dedication, he sees a reflection of the Seattle community he grew up in.

“Seattle really cultivates an adventurous, anything-is-possible outlook,” Butler says. “Especially in those years in the Central District.”

Like the Joneses, Butler’s family moved to Seattle during the Great Migration, when roughly 6 million Black Americans moved from the South to other parts of the United States between 1910 and 1970 to escape Jim Crow laws and seek better economic opportunities. Butler’s grandparents relocated to Seattle “sight unseen” from Baton Rouge after Boeing went to rural Louisiana to recruit new workers, promising jobs, housing and a chance to make a new life.

“A lot of people came up here and moved to the Central District under that plan,” Butler says. “To me, that showed that people were courageous, curious — really frontiersmen and women. Us as their offspring, we had that innately in us as well and that became the culture of the Black community here in Seattle, as people that were down to see what’s up with the world and be curious about it. I think (Jones’) time here cultivated that in him.”

Drummer D’Vonne Lewis’ deeply musical family similarly came to Washington from the South, also settling in Bremerton and later the Central District. Lewis’ grandfather Dave Lewis, Sr. was a barber and guitarist, and their home became “like a hub of music” where the neighborhood kids — including Jones and Jimi Hendrix — would congregate, Lewis says.

Lewis describes Seattle as something of a musical “melting pot” where artists are adept at taking different sounds and applying their own spin or pushing it in new directions — a trait he sees in Jones, who “did a little bit of everything” throughout his career.

“A lot of people moved here from elsewhere … so we got all these different musicians or different ideas,” Lewis says. “It’s like we got a sound that derives from everywhere because all these different people are bringing that here.”

Though some say it’s been overly idealized, the Jackson Street jazz scene that once bloomed on the edge of the Central District and the Chinatown International District, where a young Jones got his start, was said to have been a multiracial mingling ground. Francis sees a similar spirit still present in parts of Seattle.

“That is something that’s true about Seattle to this day. If you look at the population of Seattle, it’s not a diverse city, if you look at the demographics. But in reality, the cultures do mix a lot in Seattle,” he says. “Even for me, I grew up around Filipino people, Black people, white people … Asians and Samoans. I can probably attest to a little bit of what Quincy went through. It allows you to go into other rooms and be familiar or be understanding, or know how to communicate in those areas.”

The legacy continues

Quincy Jones was indeed an excellent communicator. Gregarious and charismatic, Jones was an “old-school superstar,” as Francis puts it, with an aura that would light up a room. And he was usually the last one to leave it. Jones often made a point of connecting with every person in the room, whether regaling John Legend’s family with stories during Legend’s wedding to Snohomish’s Chrissy Teigen, or chatting up the young woman holding the boom mic when Francis and Dr. Dre interviewed Jones at his Bel-Air home in 2015. (Part of that interview appeared in the Grammy-winning Netflix documentary “Quincy,” co-directed by Jones’ daughter Rashida Jones.)

On the occasions when Francis and Butler met him, Jones clearly delighted in talking about his Seattle roots, rattling off street names, asking if they’d seen his mural at Garfield and proudly mentioning how his younger brother Richard A. Jones was a judge.

Meeting Quincy Jones was a “full circle” moment for Francis, who used to clean Judge Jones’ courtroom as a janitor at the King County Courthouse.

“I never really understood how much Quincy felt like he was from Seattle,” Francis says. “So, when he said ‘I’m from Seattle, have you seen my mural?!’ I saw him kind of light up. At one point when we were doing” the interview, “he said he was grateful that he grew up there. Part of it was he doesn’t think he would’ve been as great of a musician or a creator if it wasn’t for the climate in Seattle.”

The gratitude is reciprocated.

With Jones’ death, Washington lost a living link to an essential part of our cultural history, yet his legacy will continue to be felt. Subtly, through artists like Butler and Overall, who follow the spirit of the music with the same limitlessness that Jones did. More tangibly, it lives whenever Lewis’ band Northwest Deluxe — one of many endeavors from the ace drummer with a strong sense of Seattle heritage — performs classic songs from Seattle greats like Jones, Ernestine Anderson and Jimi Hendrix.

Carrying that torch is part of Eugenie Jones’ mission. Eugenie Jones (no relation) is the executive director of the Jackson Street Jazz Walk, a three-day community festival that celebrates the history of the Central District jazz scene. The Kitsap County jazz singer was also the founding board president with the Music Discovery Center, a Bremerton nonprofit that runs youth music programs, a year-round instrument drive and provides scholarships for music education.

The organization is teaming up with Olympic College for the inaugural Quincy Square Jazz Festival on Feb. 7, featuring local school jazz bands performing at the Roxy Theatre and the Olympic College Performing Arts Center in Bremerton.

“The Black community across the world is always looking for lights of inspiration because so many of us feel disenfranchised and marginalized and victims of institutional racism,” Eugenie Jones says. “Quincy’s life as a musician and the things that he did across all different genres made African Americans proud that there was somebody out there saying, yes, we are special.

“You always lose something when that light is extinguished because there won’t be anything new added to it. … We lose that presence, but we don’t lose what that presence meant to our lives when they were here — and will continue to mean by the legacy they left behind.”

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