The late Quincy Jones’ life spanned the entirety of modern American pop music — a tradition he absorbed, influenced and reinvented for generations. It’s remarkable to look back on the composer, arranger and producer’s life and hear him speak on his friendships and work with Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur, among hundreds more.

Over the years, The Times spoke to Jones — who died Sunday at 91 — at many junctures in his career, where he recalled being a Black composer in Hollywood in a less-enlightened mid-century climate; making perhaps the biggest pop album of the century with Michael Jackson, and his heartbreak over gangsta rap’s real world violence that touched his family.

Jones’ philosophy on music was cosmopolitan and curious from the start. He traveled widely, and as a composer, he learned from European classical and folk traditions, pairing them with the innovations of Black art forms like American jazz.

Traditional music “enhances your soul,” he told The Times in 2001. “Because you see that most countries, the evolution of their music is based on the roots of their folk music, like ours is. [Béla] Bartók came out of Hungarian folk music. The Scandinavian folklore is awesome. All those tunes that Miles [Davis] and Stan Getz played, ‘Dear Old Stockholm,’ beautiful folk music, you can’t believe how beautiful it is. Traveling is the best education there is. You’re experiencing their food that they like to eat and their language and their music. And that’s the soul. That’s the real stuff. They would tell us: Don’t go to the souk [a marketplace or bazaar]! Don’t go to the casbah! That’s just where we went. That’s like going to the ‘hood! I’m right up in there in a minute, baby.”

Jazz, one of his first loves, imbued everything he did in film scores, pop and education. “[Count] Basie, Clark Terry, it was an amazing education,” he said. “I talk a lot now. But I used to sit down and shut up and listen to them. Because old people know what they are talking about, they’ve been there. All of the young brothers that call Louis Armstrong a ‘Tom’ and all that stuff. This is the man who invented our music. He had no samples, he has no radio station or nothing to listen to. He’s just inventing it. Art Blakey told Branford Marsalis, ‘We had to take a lot so you can do your little flip stuff.’ It’s true. There is a lot of blood out there.”

“Before I die, I want to be a part of a way for Americans to know their own music,” he added. “They don’t get it. We’ve got the greatest mother ship on the planet. We’ve got to talk to the administration. We need a minister of culture — I don’t want to do it, but we need one. Everyone’s got one. This country’s culture is the Esperanto of the world. It’s the first thing that they cut from schools, but if they had it, [there] would be a better spirit in the country.”

Jones came to early renown as a film composer, where he wrote the scores to Oscar-winning “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Wiz,” “In Cold Blood” and “The Color Purple,” among many others. But breaking that ground was an often lonely endeavor for a Black artist in mid-century Hollywood.

“Sidney Poitier and I were the only ones out there,” said Jones, who scored several films starring Poitier, a close friend. “He handed me the baton for composers.”

As recording technology evolved away from simply documenting live performances to an artistic craft of its own, Jones adapted his methods for a new era. But he always tried to emphasize the human qualities of being in a room together with a band, reading each other.

“The essence of the music is designed to interact. Synthesizers and drum machines? That’s not interaction,” he said in 2001. “When I recorded with [Frank] Sinatra, Sinatra sitting right there in the booth, looking me, the rhythm section and the trumpet section straight in the eye. That was the only way we knew. And I can handle it any different way. Because I’ve worked with all the generations. It keeps moving. A lot of the guys didn’t want to change. … Now it’s modular and layers and overdubs and all of that.”

Yet Jones was quick to see the potential in new electronic instruments, and used a then-nascent Moog synthesizer to write his theme for 1967’s “Ironside.”

“Robert Moog said to me, ‘Quincy, why don’t the brothers use my instrument?’ ” he recalled in 2017. “I said, ’Cause, man, No. 1: we sculpt an electronic signal into a sine wave that’s smooth, or a sawtooth, which is rough. The problem with it, though, is it doesn’t bend. And if it doesn’t bend, it can’t get funky. And if it can’t get funky, brother, you don’t touch it.’ So he came up with a pitch-bender and a portamento on it … and I got it, real quick.”

In the world of pop music, Jones’ work with Jackson, especially on the era-dominating LP “Thriller,” changed everything . “It was the perfect convergence of forces,” he said, in 2009’s moving reminiscence after Jackson’s death. ”In the music business, every decade you have a phenomenon. In the ‘40s you had Sinatra, in the ‘50s Elvis [Presley], in the ‘60s the Beatles. …In the ‘80s you had Michael Jackson.”

Jones discussed how he refined the gifts that made Jackson such a potent performer. “We owned the ‘80s and our souls would be connected forever,” he said. “Evoking Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr. and James Brown all at once, he’d work for hours, perfecting every kick, gesture and movement so that they came together precisely the way they were intended to. We tried all kinds of tricks that I’d learned over the years to help him with his artistic growth, like dropping keys just a minor third to give him flexibility and a more mature range in the upper and lower registers, and more than a few tempo changes. I also tried to steer him to songs with more depth, some of them about real relationships…

“At one point during the session, the right speaker burst into flames. How’s that for a sign?” He asked. “It’s no accident that almost three decades later, no matter where I go in the world, in every club and karaoke bar, like clockwork, you hear ‘Billie Jean,’ ‘Beat It,’ ‘Wanna Be Starting Something,’ ‘Rock With You’ and ‘Thriller.’ ”

After Jackson’s ‘80s peak, as hip-hop became the dominant commercial force in pop music, he spoke with sadness and insight about how music designed to reflect real-world pain and neglect could also succumb to it. Jones, the founder and chairman of Vibe magazine whose daughter Kidada was engaged to Shakur at the time of his death, and Jones said for “the rest of my life” he’d pursuing peace within Black music.

“We need a coalition of the hip-hop nation,” he said. “I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we’ve had in a long time. It’s sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America. If you read the musicology books, you don’t always get the full story.”

If major labels “participate in the profits of the music” suffering under violence, he added, “They have a responsibility for it. You’ve got to keep going, man. What else do you do? Go under? I wouldn’t be devoting my time to this if I didn’t think positively. The community has got to get it together. We want to help these young people survive and live out their talents and dreams.”

Looking back on his career, Jones bristled at the idea that his later achievements were due to his stature and connections rather than consistently inventive musicianship.

“What bothers me, people young and old try to minimize you by saying, ‘Well, Quincy’s strongest suit is that he’s got a strong telephone book … and he can just call up anybody!’ ” he said in 2001. “Now that’s the funniest thing. I spent most of my life perfecting my skills. I wanted to be a great arranger, great orchestrator and great composer. That was it from 13. I did my thing. And then I was able to apply all of the elements. They see you sitting at a console holding your head like this, thinking, people don’t know what you’re doing. I’ve done 40,000 arrangements, 40 movies, I’ve worked with every singer on the planet, Black or white, Nana Mouskouri, Charles Aznavour, Stevie [Wonder]. That’s a lot of work. Like you don’t have to do anything. You just have a telephone book and call a bunch of great guys up. Please, man! That will get you two inches.”

Jones was never short on words when it came to setting the record straight about critics who tried to paint him as a sellout. By staying true to the craft of music in whatever shape or form he could, Jones may not have sold out, but his work made an indisputable mark and sold immensely.

“I started as an arranger first. That’s how I became a producer,” he said in 2001. “It’s a path you go through as an arranger that opens up a lot of doors of understanding. You work with all kinds of different people from Dinah Washington and Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Paul Simon, Sinatra, Aretha [Franklin], Sarah [Vaughan], Ella [Fitzgerald], Carmen McRae. You learn so much by that school. That school doesn’t exist now, so it’s hard for them to understand what that gives you. Seven hundred miles a night for years. Traveling on that band bus. Seventy gigs in just the Carolinas. Twenty-seven in California. Everywhere. It’s ridiculous. And get stranded with a big band in Europe, and some sucker is gonna come talk to me about sellin’ out. Please. Give me a break. Yo mama!”

The last time audiences saw superpowered alien symbiote Venom (Tom Hardy) and his human “host” Eddie Brock (also Hardy) on the big screen, it wasn’t in a “Venom” movie, it was in a mid-credits sequence in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” The scene saw the pair briefly hop universes into the Disney-controlled Marvel Cinematic Universe, but then quickly get sucked back into the Sony-controlled Marvel universe – the one that has “Spider-Man” characters, but no Spider-Man (and is not to be confused with the animated Spider-verse). The scene is shown again at the beginning of “Venom: The Last Dance,” but it has no bearing on the story. Fans of the character should know not to expect MCU quality from this movie. This is the “Morbius”/”Madame Web” arm of the franchise.

The new film sees Eddie and Venom as fugitives in Mexico following some frowned-upon crimefighting in 2021’s “Let There Be Carnage.” They try to flee to New York, where they should be safe from human authorities, but they fail to factor in threats from non-humans. Venom’s recent activity inadvertently activated a device called a Codex, which exists as long as a symbiote and its human host are both alive. Supervillain Knull (Andy Serkis), imprisoned on a faraway planet, can use his minions called Xenophages to steal the Codex, break free and conquer the universe. I think the way it works is that if the Xenophages can swallow Venom alive, that counts as stealing the Codex for Knull. And simple evasion isn’t an option for Venom because the Xenophages are sure to cause a lot of collateral damage to Earth, and he’s the only one that can stop them. He and Eddie are going to have to fight.

If you thought I was spouting too much exposition just now, wait until you see the subplot about the secret Area 51 facility where symbiotes are studied by scientists like Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple). The character comes complete with a backstory about feeling guilt over the death of her brother, who wanted to be a scientist. I get the impression that she only devotes herself to science out of guilt and not passion. If the character is supposed to be passionate about her work, it’s not coming through in Temple’s performance. She has several conversations with the facility’s enforcer Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), one of those grunts that wants to kill any being he doesn’t understand, where all they do is explain the facility’s purpose to one another. Almost all of their dialogue could be preceded with the dreaded words “as you know…” because there’s no way these characters wouldn’t know all of this information already, but the audience has to be filled in.

Literally thrown off their flight, Eddie and Venom hitch a ride with the hippie Moon family, led by Martin (Rhys Ifans), on their way to Area 51 to try to see aliens. I guess the family’s scenes are supposed to be comic relief, but they aren’t funny. What is funny is a brief stop in Las Vegas where Eddie and Venom share a dance with franchise mainstay Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu). Could the scene be cut without doing a disservice to the story? Yes. Should the scene stay in because it’s a welcome distraction from the story? Also yes.

That scene aside, “Venom: The Last Dance” is a slog. The script is a mess, the new characters unlikeable, the action murky and hard to follow, and the mindless Xenophages are terrible antagonists, with Knull not exactly helping by sitting on the sidelines the whole time. I’d say that Hardy comes off relatively unscathed because he has pretty good chemistry with… himself (I can’t decide if that makes the repartee easier or harder), but then I found out he has a story credit on this slop, so I can’t let him off the hook. I hope this really is the “Last Dance” for these “Spider-Man”-adjacent movies outside the MCU and Spider-verse.

Grade: D

“Venom: The Last Dance” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, bloody images and strong language. Its running time is 110 minutes.

Robert R. Garver is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at New York University. His weekly movie reviews have been published since 2006.

“The Streetcar Project,” a bare-bones production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” passed through town last week. First stop was an airplane hangar in East L.A., followed by a warehouse in Venice.

I caught the show in Venice on Friday, after a traffic nightmare prevented me from seeing it earlier in the week in Frogtown. The production, co-created by Lucy Owen, who plays Blanche DuBois, and director Nick Westrate, employed a four-person cast. There were no props or scenery (except for a few folding chairs and some basic lighting). The costumes seemed pulled from the actors’ closets. A few sound effects (a rattling streetcar, raucous alley cats) and some period music fleshed out the surrounding world.

The focus was on Williams’ words. At times, the actors spoke their lines from obscure corners of the cavernous playing area. I found myself at times closing my eyes and listening attentively, as though to a radio drama. The production, built to be performed in alternative spaces, sought to get us to hear the play anew.

Most of the time, of course, the actors were front and center. Their appearances, with the exception of Mitch, suggested what the character might be like in a home movie. Owen’s Blanche, battered by life, looked in desperate need of a good night’s sleep. Brad Koed’s beefy Stanley seemed like he just crawled from under a broken-down car.

The plainness of Mallory Portnoy’s Stella was epitomized by the way she cuffed her jeans. The one wild card was James Russell’s “Mitch” (as Harold Mitchell is known to his friends), a leaner and less clumsy version of the character.

Russell was called upon to serve as a utility player, so perhaps it was best that he wasn’t a replica of the lumbering Mitch we’ve come to expect from Karl Malden’s memorable portrayal. Koed was no Marlon Brando, for that matter. But he was closer to the Polish American factory parts salesman than more glamorous Hollywood types striving to live up to Brando’s masculine archetype.

Few contemporary classics have been as defined as “Streetcar” by its original production. Elia Kazan, who directed the Broadway premiere and the subsequent movie adaptation, ushered in a new era of American acting with Williams’ drama

Brando, Malden and Kim Hunter, who played Stella, reprised their Broadway performances onscreen. The one significant cast change was Vivien Leigh as a replacement for Jessica Tandy in the role of Blanche. This shift was in part to alter the dramatic balance of power between Stanley and Blanche. (On Broadway, audiences were so seduced by Brando that some assumed he was meant to be the hero of “Streetcar” and not the play’s brutish antagonist.)

I appreciated the opportunity of re-experiencing the play, though I’m not convinced by this production that “Streetcar” is the everlasting masterwork it is widely assumed to be. I realize this is heresy, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the irreducible strangeness of the drama.

This is the story of a guilt-ridden high school English teacher, who after her role in the suicide of her gay husband, has become a sexual pariah. She was thrown out of her hotel residence for her nightly trysts and was deemed morally unfit to teach after an affair with a 17-year-old boy. Considered a nymphomaniac, a child predator and a loon, she had no choice but to seek refuge at the cramped, tatty New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella, who wisely escaped from Belle Reve, the DuBois plantation that was lost along with the family’s last remaining connection to the Southern gentry.

Married to Stanley, a man of carnal appetites and vulgar manners, Stella has embraced the crude pleasures of realism, while her freeloading sister still clings to tattered aristocratic illusions. The standoff between Blanche’s impractical aestheticism and Stanley’s ruthless pragmatism is the heart of this quintessentially American drama. Westrate, however, is less concerned with the allegorical meaning of this battle than with the interpersonal dynamics of the combatants.

The production was determined to make the dramatic situation and characters credible for a 21st century audience. But in doing so, the play can’t help revealing its age.

Williams was writing in an idiom that was unique to him. The more stylized approaches of traditional “Streetcar” revivals aren’t just frippery. Williams challenges directors to meet his poetry without losing sight of the play’s earthiness. The characters must be larger than life and one of us.

Although the scenes are often played to music, Westrate’s staging lacks a certain lyricism. When more theatrical elements come into play — such as the Mexican flower lady crying, “Flores para los Muertos” — the staging feels almost intruded upon by an extraneous sensibility. The humor, an integral part of the playwright’s flamboyant arsenal, is also missed. In the final scene, the mix of secondary voices, pinballing among cast members, makes for a confusing pileup.

The lack of sentimentality was admirable. Owen’s bedraggled Blanche, too exhausted to keep up with her own lies, seemed complicit in her own demise. Koed’s Stanley, full of class grievance, had a vengeful look from the outset. Portnoy’s Stella clearly loved Blanche but didn’t seem to like her all that much. Russell’s Mitch was as in touch with his animal needs as with his guilty concern for his sick mother.

The true compensation of this “Streetcar” was the way the language was translated by the actors into natural-sounding speech. Each performer made the dialogue ring true to contemporary mores. The resulting authenticity passed the verisimilitude test with flying colors. But Williams, like Blanche, wants magic, not the realism of today’s TV drama.

“Streetcar” may be Williams’ most exciting and even hypnotic play, but I’m not sure it’s his best. (I prefer “The Glass Menagerie.” Theater critic Gordon Rogoff once made the astute observation that Williams was always better at writing scenes than constructing seamless dramas and that his true gift may have been as “a pointillist painter of shimmering portraits.”

That’s enough genius for any writer, but Williams goes further by offering actors the opportunity of incarnating his interior poetry. He also gives directors the chance to prove that the theater can simultaneously capture the sweaty and symbolic levels of our lives.

The production’s simplicity ditched the cliches that have accumulated around the play over decades. But it also reminded us that naturalism is only one thread in the multi-hued fabric of Williams’ playwriting.