Critics claim that Jones's potpourri is more commercially than artistically successful. By offering a buffet of sounds, the argument goes, Jones creates music that merely whets the appetite. Then, before the listener can dig in, the plate is whisked away and another, equally tantalizing taste served up -- Was that Ella Fitzgerald's voice? Where did it go? Suddenly, the record is over and the listener is left titillated, but not quite sated.

"He's a salesman, but I don't consider him artistically important," says the critic Stanley Crouch, author of "Notes of a Hanging Judge," a book of cultural essays. "There's nothing wrong with enjoying a really good hot dog. But you're never going to confuse it with dinner at the Four Seasons."

On the other hand, his defenders point to his skill at adapting various styles for his own use as an art in itself. David Weiss, a former jazz writer for The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and now the recording artist known as David Was of the Was (Not Was) band, notes: "Quincy is a graduate of the university of Count Basie. He was able to prepare himself for life after jazz in pop by building on all those delicious elements and moving into a more sophisticated milieu. It's a riskier enterprise than just going into a studio and faxing some version of standard jazz fare."

When Jones speaks of his own talent, it tends to be in terms of how he handles performers. The key, he says, "is remembering this person is a human being and the human being has gifts. Love and respect force you to pay attention to all the intricacies of those gifts. Performers feel this and know you'll never let them get hurt." Some performers, of course, want to be totally in control and will not, as Jones puts it, "let you in. And I will say, 'Let's not get too full of ourselves. Let's leave space for God to come into the room.' "

THE CHEF COMES into the room. The doors to the dining room are thrown open. The table is elegantly set. The first course is served. It seems like a poor time to bring up the story of the rat.

"Sometimes I would wonder if it actually happened," Jones says. "But when I asked my brother Lloyd, he remembered it too. I was about 7 and we went to visit our grandmother in Louisville. She had been born a slave and oh, man, she was strong. She'd go out to the yard, reach down and break the neck of a chicken. Anyway, one night she sent us down to the river to catch a rat. She skinned it and cut it up. Fried it for dinner. It tasted fine to me. But then, I was just a kid."

For blacks of his generation, Jones says, music seemed the one possible and dignified road out. Recalling the impact that his neighbor Lucy's piano-playing had on him, he adds: "In the 30's and early 40's, we had no role models. Think of it. There was no TV. The only black on radio was Rochester. Even Amos and Andy were white. In sports, there was Joe Louis. How can anybody grow up and aspire to something if it doesn't exist?"