Friday, November 8, 2024

A01814 - Quincy Jones, The Eternal Essence of Quincy Jones

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Quincy Jones
Jones in 1980
Born
Quincy Delight Jones Jr.

March 14, 1933
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
DiedNovember 3, 2024 (aged 91)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupations
  • Record producer
  • conductor
  • arranger
  • record executive
  • songwriter
Years active1951–2024
Spouses
Jeri Caldwell
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(m. 1957; div. 1966)​
​
​
(m. 1967; div. 1974)​
​
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(m. 1974; div. 1990)​
PartnerNastassja Kinski (1992–1995)
Children7, including Quincy III, Kidada, Rashida, and Kenya
RelativesRichard A. Jones (half-brother)
AwardsFull list
Musical career
Genres
Instruments
  • Trumpet
  • keyboards
DiscographyFull list
Labels

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  In the Spring of 1963, I had some of my happiest times as a youth.  My Dad was stationed on the remote air force outpost of Glasgow Air Force Base in Glasgow, Montana.  The previous Fall of 1962 had led to some tense times on the base associated with being on a Strategic Air Command Air Force Base with a large number of B-52 bombers during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I was in the fourth grade then and the entire school (the North Star Elementary School) took seriously the Duck and Cover drills that we practiced in preparation for a potential nuclear strike against us.  (Do not laugh, back then I had no idea that such drills would not have saved us from a nuclear strike.  Such knowledge would not come until a decade later.)   But after the Crisis had passed, the Winter came, and I experienced, for the first time, six-foot snow drifts and temperatures at 38 below zero.  How refreshing!


By the time Spring finally came, we were all looking forward to being able to come out of the house and play in the neighboring fields.  We also looked forward to spending time at a new youth center that the Base folks had erected just down the street to relieve the Moms who had been confined for almost six months with children who needed to be outside.

The Youth Center was amazing.  It was a gathering of kids from eight to eighteen and was a hot bed of social learning.  I learned how to play chess and the board game Risk.  There was a bumper pool table and a shuffleboard and I learned to play them well.  And there was a stereo system that played all the latest pop hits.  The Spring of 1963 predates the British Invasion, so the Beatles were still a year away.  But there was a song that was played over and over again in the Spring of 1963. It was an Ear Worm song by a young girl and all the teenagers seemed to love it.  The song was "It's My Party" and the singer was Lesley Gore.  Here is the song that became embedded in my mind and memory. 


It would not be until some 60 years later that I learned that the man behind this Ear Worm song -- the producer -- was none other than Quincy Jones.


Quincy Jones passed away yesterday.


I immediately thought about him with a smile.  He had an incredible career and his work with such superstars as Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson is legendary.  And, of course, his production of "We Are the World" was an epic work of musical genius.

I smiled at all of his achievements but the song I immediately remembered was a song from the album that introduced the World to the Solo artistry of Michael Jackson, and which, even today, breaks my heart.    



Ironically, while Quincy Jones is no longer physically here unlike this song, because of his spirit, he will never be out of my life.

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Fairfield, California
November 4, 2024

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Quincy Jones (born March 14, 1933, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died November 3, 2024, Los Angeles, California) was an American musical performer, producer, arranger, and composer whose work encompassed virtually all forms of popular music. A titan of the music industry, Jones worked with many of the biggest names in jazz, rock, rhythm and blues, pop, and hip-hop. Among his many legendary achievements is his work serving as producer on Michael Jackson’s blockbuster albums Off the Wall (1979) and Thriller (1982).

Early career in jazz

Jones was born in Chicago and reared in Bremerton, Washington, where he studied the trumpet and worked locally with the then-unknown pianist-singer Ray Charles. In the early 1950s Jones studied briefly at the prestigious Schillinger House (now Berklee College of Music) in Boston before touring with Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger. He soon became a prolific freelance arranger, working with Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce, Oscar Pettiford, Cannonball Adderley, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, and many others. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band in 1956, recorded his first album as a leader in the same year, worked in Paris for the Barclay label as an arranger and producer in the late 1950s, and continued to compose. Some of his more successful compositions from this period include “Stockholm Sweetnin’,” “For Lena and Lennie,” and “Jessica’s Day.”

Shift from jazz to pop


Back in the United States in 1961, Jones became an artists-and-repertoire (or “A&R” in trade jargon) director for Mercury Records. In 1964 he was named a vice president at Mercury, thereby becoming one of the first African Americans to hold a top executive position at a major American record label. In the 1960s Jones recorded occasional jazz dates, arranged albums for many singers (including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Billy Eckstine), and composed music for several films, including The Pawnbroker (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and In Cold Blood (1967).


Jones next worked for the A&M label from 1969 to 1981 (with a brief hiatus as he recovered from a brain aneurysm in 1974) and moved increasingly away from jazz toward pop music. During this time he became one of the most famous producers in the world, his success enabling him to start his own record label, Qwest, in 1980.

Impact and honors


Jones’s impact on the music industry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was profound. He was as well-known to many music fans as the famous recording artists with whom he collaborated. His work includes producing an all-time best-selling album, Jackson’s Thriller, organizing the all-star charity recording “We Are the World” (1985), and producing the film The Color Purple (1985) and the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–96). In 1993 he founded the magazine Vibe, which he sold in 2006.


Jones’s later albums include Back on the Block (1989), a cross-genre celebration of Black music featuring three generations of artists, such as jazz great Ella Fitzerald, soul singer Luther Vandross, and rapper Ice-T; and Q: Soul Bossa Nostra (2010), which showcases the talents of Jennifer Hudson, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, and Amy Winehouse among others.


Throughout the years, Jones worked with a “who’s who” of figures from all fields of popular music. He was nominated for more than 75 Grammy Awards (winning more than 25) and seven Academy Awards and received an Emmy Award for the theme music he wrote for the television miniseries Roots (1977). He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001 and the National Medal of Arts in 2010. In 2013 Jones was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Books and documentaries


Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones was published in 2001. His life and career are also chronicled in the documentaries Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones (1990), directed by Ellen Weissbrod, and Quincy (2018), which was directed by his daughter, actress and screenwriter Rashida Jones, and filmmaker Alan Hicks. In 2022 Jones published 12 Notes: On Life and Creativity, which shares his reflections on the creative process.

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Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (March 14, 1933 – November 3, 2024) was an American record producer, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer. Over the course of his seven-decade career, he received many accolades including 28 Grammy Awards,[1] a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Tony Award as well as nominations for seven Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards.[2]

Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor before producing pop hit records for Lesley Gore in the early 1960s (including "It's My Party") and serving as an arranger and conductor for several collaborations between Frank Sinatra and the jazz artist Count Basie. Jones produced three of the most successful albums by pop star Michael Jackson: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987). In 1985, Jones produced and conducted the charity song "We Are the World", which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia.[1]

Jones composed numerous films scores including for The Pawnbroker (1965), In the Heat of the Night (1967), In Cold Blood (1967), The Italian Job (1969), The Wiz (1978), and The Color Purple (1985). He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series for the miniseries Roots (1977). He received a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical as a producer for the revival of The Color Purple (2016).

Throughout his career he was the recipient of numerous honorary awards including the Grammy Legend Award in 1992, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, the National Medal of the Arts in 2011, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2014, and the Academy Honorary Award in June 2024. He was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time.[3]

Early life

[edit]

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, the elder of two sons to Sara Frances (née Wells; 1904–1999[4]), a bank officer and apartment complex manager,[5] and Quincy Delight Jones (1895–1971), a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Charleston, South Carolina. Quincy Jr.'s paternal grandmother was an ex-slave from Louisville,[5] and he later discovered that his paternal grandfather was Welsh.[6][7]

Jones said, "He had a baby with my great-grandmother [a slave], and my grandmother was born there [on a plantation in Kentucky]. We traced this all the way back to the Laniers, the same family as Tennessee Williams."[5] Learning that the Lanier immigrant ancestors were French Huguenots who had court musicians among their ancestors, Jones attributed some of his musicianship to them.[5]

For the 2006 PBS television program African American Lives, Jones had his DNA tested and genealogists researched his family history again. His DNA revealed he was mostly African, but also had 34% European ancestry on both sides of his family. Research showed that he had English, French, Italian, and Welsh ancestry through his father. His mother's side was of West and Central African descent, specifically from the Tikar people of Cameroon.[8] His mother also had European ancestry, including Lanier male ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, making him eligible for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Among his ancestors was Elizabeth Washington Lewis, a sister of president George Washington.[9]

Jones' family moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Jones had a younger brother, Lloyd, who was an engineer for the Seattle television station KOMO-TV until his death in 1998. Jones was introduced to music by his mother who always sang religious songs, and next-door neighbor Lucy Jackson. When Jones was five or six, Jackson played stride piano next door, and he would listen through the walls. Jackson recalled that after he heard her one-day, she could not get him off her piano.[10]

When Jones was young, his mother had a schizophrenic breakdown and was sent to a mental institution.[5][11] His father divorced her and married Elvera Jones, who already had three children: Waymond, Theresa, and Katherine.[11] Elvera and Quincy Sr. had three more children together: Jeanette, Margie, and Richard.[11][12] The family moved to Bremerton, Washington, in 1943. Jones' father took a wartime job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.[11]

After the war, the family moved to Seattle, where Jones attended Garfield High School and developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger.[5] His classmates included Charles Taylor, who played saxophone and whose mother, Evelyn Bundy, was one of Seattle's first society jazz bandleaders. Jones and Taylor began playing music together,[11] and at the age of fourteen they played with a National Reserve band. Jones said he acquired more experience with music growing up in a smaller city because of the lack of competition.[5]

Jones cited Ray Charles as an early inspiration for his own music career, noting that Charles overcame his blindness to achieve his musical goals. Jones credited his father's sturdy work ethic with giving him the means to proceed, and his loving nature with holding the family together. Jones cited his father's rhyming motto: "Once a task is just begun, never leave until it's done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all."[11]

Jones earned a scholarship to Seattle University in 1951. After one semester, he transferred to what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston on another scholarship,[13] where he played at Izzy Ort's Bar & Grille with Bunny Campbell and Preston Sandiford, whom he cited as important influences.[14]

Career

[edit]

1953–1959: Career beginnings with jazz music

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Jones in 1960

In 1953, at age 20, Jones traveled with jazz bandleader Lionel Hampton for a European tour of the Hampton orchestra. He said the tour changed his view of racism in the United States, "It gave you some sense of perspective on past, present, and future. It took the myopic conflict between just black and white in the United States and put it on another level because you saw the turmoil between the Armenians and the Turks, and the Cypriots and the Greeks, and the Swedes and the Danes, and the Koreans and the Japanese. Everybody had these hassles, and you saw it was a basic part of human nature, these conflicts. It opened my soul; it opened my mind."[5]

After leaving the Hampton band in 1954, Jones settled in New York, and started writing "for anyone who would pay".[15] In early 1956, he accepted a temporary job at CBS' Stage Show hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey that was broadcast live from Studio 50 in New York City (known today as the Ed Sullivan Theater). On January 28, February 4, 11 and 18, as well as on March 17 and 24, Jones played second trumpet in the studio band that supported 21-year-old Elvis Presley in his first six television appearances. Presley sang "Heartbreak Hotel", which became his first No. 1 record and the Billboard magazine Pop Record of the year. Soon after, as a trumpeter and musical director for Dizzy Gillespie, Jones went on tour of the Middle East and South America sponsored by the United States Information Agency. After returning, he signed a contract with ABC-Paramount and started his recording career as the leader of his band. In 1957, he moved to Paris, where he studied composition and theory with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen and performed at the Paris Olympia.[16] Jones became music director at Barclay,[17] a French record company (and the licensee for Mercury in France).[18][19]

In the 1950s, Jones toured Europe with several jazz orchestras. As musical director of Harold Arlen's jazz musical Free and Easy, he took to the road again. With musicians from the Arlen show, he formed his big band, The Jones Boys, with eighteen musicians. The band included double bass player Eddie Jones and trumpeter Reunald Jones. None of the three were related. The band toured North America and Europe, and the concerts met enthusiastic audiences and sparkling reviews, but the earnings failed to support a band of this size. Poor budget planning resulted in an economic disaster. The band dissolved, leaving Jones in a financial crisis.[20] "We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That's when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two."[21] Irving Green, head of Mercury, helped Jones with a personal loan[22] and a job as musical director of the company's New York division. He worked with Doug Moody, founder of Mystic Records.[citation needed]

Quincy Jones first worked with Frank Sinatra in 1958 when invited by Princess Grace to arrange a benefit concert at the Monaco Sporting Club.[23] Six years later, Sinatra hired him to arrange and conduct Sinatra's second album with Count Basie, It Might as Well Be Swing (1964). Jones conducted and arranged Sinatra's live album with the Basie Band, Sinatra at the Sands (1966).[24] Jones was also the arranger/conductor when Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Johnny Carson performed with the Basie orchestra in June 1965 in St. Louis, Missouri, in a benefit for Dismas House. The fund-raiser was broadcast to movie theaters around the country and eventually released on VHS.[25] Later that year, Jones was the arranger/conductor when Sinatra and Basie appeared on The Hollywood Palace TV variety show on October 16, 1965.[26] Nineteen years later, Sinatra and Jones teamed up for the 1984 album L.A. Is My Lady.[27] Jones said,

Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.[28]

1961–1977: Breakthrough and acclaim

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The logo for Quincy Jones Productions

In 1961, Jones was promoted and became the vice-president of Mercury, the first African American to hold the position. In the same year, at the invitation of director Sidney Lumet, he composed music for The Pawnbroker (1964). It was the first of his nearly 40 major motion picture scores. Following the success of The Pawnbroker, Jones left Mercury and moved to Los Angeles. After composing film scores for Mirage and The Slender Thread in 1965, he was in constant demand as a composer.[citation needed]

His film credits over the next seven years came to include Walk, Don't Run, The Deadly Affair, In Cold Blood, In the Heat of the Night, Mackenna's Gold, The Italian Job, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Cactus Flower, The Out-of-Towners, They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, The Anderson Tapes, $ (Dollars), and The Getaway. He composed "The Streetbeater", which became the theme music for the television sitcom Sanford and Son, starring his close friend Redd Foxx, and the themes for other TV shows, including Ironside, Rebop, Banacek, The Bill Cosby Show, the opening episode of Roots, Mad TV, and the game show Now You See It.[citation needed]

In the 1960s, Jones worked as an arranger for Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn, Peggy Lee, Nana Mouskouri, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and Dinah Washington. His solo recordings included Walking in Space, Gula Matari, Smackwater Jack, You've Got It Bad Girl, Body Heat, Mellow Madness, and I Heard That!![citation needed]

Jones' 1962 tune "Soul Bossa Nova", which originated on the Big Band Bossa Nova album, was later used as the theme for the 1997 spy comedy Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.[29]

Jones produced all four million-selling singles for Lesley Gore during the early and mid-1960s, including "It's My Party" (UK No. 8; US No. 1), its sequel "Judy's Turn to Cry" (US No. 5), "She's a Fool" (also a US No. 5) in 1963, and "You Don't Own Me" (US No. 2 for four weeks in 1964). He continued to produce for Gore until 1966, including the Greenwich/Barry hits "Look of Love" (US No. 27 in 1965) and "Maybe I Know" (UK No. 20; US No. 14 in 1964).[citation needed] In 1975, Jones founded Qwest Productions, for which he arranged and produced successful albums by Frank Sinatra and others.[citation needed]

1978–1989: Exploration into pop music

[edit]
Jones worked with Michael Jackson as a producer on Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987).

In 1978, he produced the soundtrack for The Wiz, the musical adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, which starred Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. While working on The Wiz, Michael Jackson asked Jones to recommend some producers for his upcoming solo album. Jones offered some names but eventually offered to produce the record himself. Jackson accepted and the resulting record, Off the Wall, sold about 20 million copies. This made Jones the most powerful record producer in the industry at that time. Jones and Jackson's next collaboration, Thriller, sold 65 million copies and became the highest-selling album of all time.[30][31] The rise of MTV and the advent of music videos as promotional tools also contributed to Thriller's sales. Jones worked on Jackson's album Bad, which sold 45 million copies, and was the last time they worked with each other. Audio interviews with Jones are included in the 2001 special editions of Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad.[citation needed]

His 1981 album The Dude yielded the hits "Ai No Corrida" (a remake of a song by Chaz Jankel), "Just Once", and "One Hundred Ways", both sung by James Ingram.[citation needed] Marking Jones' debut as a film producer, 1985's The Color Purple received 11 Oscar nominations that year, including one for Jones's score. Jones, Thomas Newman, and Alan Silvestri are the only composers besides John Williams to have written scores for a Steven Spielberg-directed theatrical feature film.[32][33] Additionally, through this picture, Jones is credited with introducing Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey to film audiences around the world.[34]

Jones in Venice, Italy, 1989

After the 1985 American Music Awards ceremony, Jones used his influence to draw most of the major American recording artists of the day into a studio to record the song "We Are the World" to raise money for the victims of famine in Ethiopia. When people marveled at his ability to make the collaboration work, Jones explained that he had taped a sign on the entrance reading "Check Your Ego at the Door". He was also quoted as saying, "We don't want to make a hunger record in tuxedos",[35] requiring all participants to wear casual clothing in the studio. In 1986, Jones started off Qwest Entertainment to produce theatrical feature films, through Qwest Film and Television. He launched a home video label, Qwest Home Video, in order to manage the home video titles made by the studio. Qwest Entertainment continued to operate their pre-existing subsidiaries like Qwest Records, Quincy Jones Productions and Qwest Music Publishing.[36]

1990–2024: Established career

[edit]

In 1990, Quincy Jones Productions joined with Time Warner to create Quincy Jones Entertainment (QJE).[34] The company signed a 10-picture deal with Warner Bros. and a two-series deal with NBC Productions, now Universal Television. The television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Will Smith's first acting credit) began in 1990, while In the House (on NBC and UPN) aired from 1995 to 1999. Jones also produced first-run syndication's The Jenny Jones Show (in association with Telepictures Productions, 1994–1997 only) and FOX's Mad TV, which ran for 14 seasons.[37] In the early 1990s, he started a huge, ongoing project called "The Evolution of Black Music". QJE started a weekly talk show with Jones' friend, Reverend Jesse Jackson, as the host.[38]

Beginning in the late 1970s, Jones had tried to convince Miles Davis to revive the music he recorded on several classic albums of the 1950s, which was arranged by Gil Evans. Davis always refused, citing a desire to avoid revisiting the past. In 1991, Davis relented. Despite having pneumonia, he agreed to perform the music at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The recording, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux, was his last album; he died several months afterward.[39] Jones had a brief appearance in the 1990 video for the Time song "Jerk Out",[citation needed] and was a guest actor on an episode of The Boondocks. He appeared with Ray Charles in the music video of their song "One Mint Julep" and also with Ray Charles and Chaka Khan in the music video of their song "I'll Be Good to You".[citation needed] Jones hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live on February 10, 1990, during SNL's 15th season. The episode was notable for having 10 musical guests,[40][unreliable source] the most any SNL episode has had in its years on the air: Tevin Campbell, Andrae Crouch, Sandra Crouch, rappers Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane, Melle Mel, Quincy D III, Siedah Garrett, Al Jarreau, and Take 6, and for a performance of Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca" by the SNL Band, conducted by Jones.[40][unreliable source] Jones impersonated Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., in the recurring sketch The Bob Waltman Special. He later produced his own sketch comedy show, FOX's Mad TV, which ran from 1995 to 2009.[41]

Jones during an annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2004

In 1993, Jones collaborated with David Salzman to produce the concert An American Reunion, a celebration of Bill Clinton's inauguration as President of the United States. During the same year, he and Salzman renamed his company to Quincy Jones/David Salzman Entertainment.[42]

In 2001, Jones published his autobiography Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. In a 2002 interview, when asked if he would work with Jones again, Michael Jackson suggested he might. But in 2007, when Jones was asked by NME, he said: "Man, please! We already did that. I have talked to him about working with him again but I've got too much to do. I've got 900 products, I'm 74 years old."[43] Following Jackson's death on June 25, 2009, Jones said, "I am absolutely devastated at this tragic and unexpected news. For Michael to be taken away from us so suddenly at such a young age, I just don't have the words. Divinity brought our souls together on The Wiz and allowed us to do what we were able to throughout the '80s. To this day, the music we created together on Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad is played in every corner of the world, and the reason for that is because he had it all ... talent, grace, professionalism, and dedication. He was the consummate entertainer, and his contributions and legacy will be felt upon the world forever. I've lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him."[44]

Jones appeared in the 1999 Walt Disney Pictures animated film Fantasia 2000, introducing the set piece of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. In 2002, he made a cameo appearance as himself in the film Austin Powers in Goldmember. On February 10, 2008, Jones joined Usher in presenting the Grammy Award for Album of the Year to Herbie Hancock.[45]

On January 6, 2009, Jones appeared on NBC's Last Call with Carson Daly to discuss his career. Daly informally floated the idea that Jones should become the first minister of culture for the United States, pending the inauguration of Barack Obama as president. Daly noted that only the US and Germany, among leading world countries, did not have a cabinet-level position for this role. Commentators on NPR[46] and in the Chronicle of Higher Education also discussed the topic of a minister of culture.[47]

Norman Jewison with Jones in 2014

In July 2007, Jones partnered with Wizzard Media to start the Quincy Jones Video Podcast.[48] In each episode, he shares his knowledge and experience in the music industry. The first episode features him in the studio producing "I Knew I Loved You" for Celine Dion. This song is included on the Ennio Morricone tribute album We All Love Ennio Morricone.[49] Jones helped produce Anita Hall's 2009 album Send Love. In 2013, he produced Emily Bear's album Diversity. After that, he produced albums for Grace, Justin Kauflin, Alfredo Rodríguez, Andreas Varady, and Nikki Yanofsky. He also became a mentor to Jacob Collier.[50]

In 2010, Jones, along with brand strategist Chris Vance, co-founded Playground Sessions, a NY City-based developer of subscription software that teaches people to play the piano using interactive videos.[51] Pianists Harry Connick Jr. and David Sides are among the company's video instructors. Jones worked with Vance and Sides to develop the video lessons and incorporate techniques to modernize the instruction format.[52]

In February 2014, Jones appeared in Keep on Keepin' On, a documentary about his friend, jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player Clark Terry. In the film, Terry introduces Jones to his protégé Justin Kauflin, whom Jones then signs to his band and label. In July 2014, Jones starred in a documentary film called The Distortion of Sound.[53] He was featured on Jacob Collier's YouTube cover of Michael Jackson's "PYT (Pretty Young Thing)".[citation needed] On February 28, 2016, he and Pharrell Williams presented Ennio Morricone with the Oscar for Best Original Score.[54] In August 2016, he and his music were featured at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, London.[55] In 2017, Jones and French producer Reza Ackbaraly started Qwest TV, the world's first subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service for jazz and eclectic music from around the world. The platform features a handpicked selection of ad-free concerts, interviews, documentaries, and exclusive, original content, all in HD or 4K.[citation needed]

On March 20, 2020, Jones guest starred on a music video by Travis Scott and Young Thug for the song "Out West".[56][57] In January 2022, Jones appeared on the album Dawn FM by Canadian singer the Weeknd, performing a monolog in the sixth track, "A Tale by Quincy".[58]

Activism

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Jones at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., 1997

Jones' social activism began in the 1960s with his support of Martin Luther King Jr. Jones was one of the founders of the Institute for Black American Music (IBAM), whose events aimed to raise funds for the creation of a national library of African-American art and music. Jones was also one of the founders of the Black Arts Festival in his hometown of Chicago. In the 1970s, Jones formed the Quincy Jones Workshops. Meeting at the Los Angeles Landmark Variety Arts Center, the workshops educated and honed the skills of inner-city youth in musicianship, acting, and songwriting. Among its alumni were Alton McClain, who had a hit song with Alton McClain and Destiny, and Mark Wilkins, who co-wrote the hit song "Havin' a Love Attack" with Mandrill and became National Promotion Director for Mystic Records.[59]

For many years, Jones worked closely with Bono of U2 on a number of philanthropic causes. He was the founder of the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, a nonprofit organization that built more than 100 homes in South Africa and which aimed to connect youths with technology, education, culture, and music.[31] One of the organization's programs was an intercultural exchange between underprivileged youths from Los Angeles and South Africa.[31]

In 2004, Jones helped to launch the We Are the Future (WAF) project, which gave children in poor and conflict-ridden areas a chance to live their childhoods and develop a sense of hope. The program was the result of a strategic partnership between the Global Forum, the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, and Hani Masri, with the support of the World Bank, UN agencies, and major companies. The project was launched with a concert in Rome, Italy, in front of an audience of half a million people.[60]

Jones supported a number of other charities, including the NAACP, GLAAD, Peace Games, AmfAR, and the Maybach Foundation.[61] He served on the advisory board of HealthCorps. In July 2007, he announced his endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. With the election of Barack Obama, Jones said that his next conversation "with President Obama [will be] to beg for a secretary of arts."[62] This prompted the circulation of an internet petition, asking Obama to create such a Cabinet-level position in his administration.[63][64]

In 2001, Jones became an honorary member of the board of directors of the Jazz Foundation of America. He worked with the foundation to save the homes and lives of America's elderly jazz and blues musicians, including those who had survived Hurricane Katrina.[65] Jones was a spokesperson for the Global Down Syndrome Foundation,[66] co-founded by his friend John Sie,[67] which annually awarded the Quincy Jones Exceptional Advocacy Award.[68] He was also involved in the Linda Crnic Institute which aimed to improve the lives of people with Down Syndrome through advanced biomedical research.[69]

Personal life

[edit]

Marriages and family

[edit]

Jones was married three times and had seven children with five different women.[11][70] He was married to Jeri Caldwell from 1957 to 1966, and they had a daughter named Jolie. He had a brief affair with Carol Reynolds, and they had a daughter named Rachel. He was later married to Swedish actress Ulla Andersson from 1967 to 1974, and they had a daughter named Martina and a son named Quincy, who also became a music producer.[71][72][73]

The day after his divorce from Andersson, Jones married American actress Peggy Lipton. They had two daughters, Kidada, who was born before they were married, and Rashida, both of whom became actresses. Jones and Lipton divorced in 1990.[74][72][75] He later dated and lived with German actress Nastassja Kinski from 1991 to 1995, and they had a daughter named Kenya, who became a fashion model. In an interview with New York Magazine Jones stated that he dated Ivanka Trump.[76]

In 1994, rapper Tupac Shakur criticized Jones for having relationships with white women, prompting Jones' daughter Rashida to pen a scathing open letter in response, which was published in The Source.[77] Jones' daughter Kidada developed a romantic relationship with Shakur and had been living with him for four months at the time of his death, and they were engaged.[77]

Interests and beliefs

[edit]

Jones never learned to drive, citing his involvement in a car crash at age 14 as the reason. During this time, he and a group of friends were heading to a rodeo in Yakima when a bus hit them. He said everybody in the car died except him—the scene was gruesome and left him traumatized. He attempted to take driving lessons a few years later but he "just couldn't do it" and never drove again.[78][79]

Jones in May 2014

Jones revealed that Ray Charles introduced him to heroin at the age of 15, although he stopped using after five months.[80] He was a believer in astrology. In regard to religion, he stated in February 2018 that he believed in a God that opposes the love of money but dismisses the notion of an afterlife. He held a negative opinion of the Catholic Church, believing it is built upon the notions of money and "fear, smoke, and murder".[81] Jones claimed to have knowledge of the truth of the Kennedy assassination, stating his belief that mobster Sam Giancana was responsible, as well as outing sexual relationships Marlon Brando had with James Baldwin, Richard Pryor, and Marvin Gaye.[81]

[edit]

In October 2013, the BBC and The Hollywood Reporter said Jones planned to sue Michael Jackson's estate for $10 million. Jones said that MJJ Productions, a song company managed by Jackson's estate and Sony Music Entertainment, improperly re-edited songs to deprive him of royalties and production fees and breached an agreement giving him the right to remix master recordings for albums released after Jackson's death.[82] The songs Jones produced for Jackson were used in the film This Is It. Jones was reported to be filing the suits against the Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil shows and the 25th-anniversary edition of the Bad album.[83] He believed he should have received a producer credit in the film.[82][84][85]

Health issues and death

[edit]

In 1974, Jones developed a life-threatening brain aneurysm, leading to a decision to reduce his workload to spend time with his friends and family.[86] Since his family and friends believed Jones's life was coming to an end, they started to plan a memorial service for him. He attended his own service with his neurologist by his side, in case the excitement overwhelmed him. Some of the entertainers at his service were Richard Pryor, Marvin Gaye, Sarah Vaughan, and Sidney Poitier.[87]

Jones had two brain surgeries, and after the second was warned to never play the trumpet again, because "if he blew a trumpet in the ways that a trumpet player must, the clip would come free and he would die". He ignored that advice, went on tour in Japan, and one night after playing trumpet had a pain in his head. Doctors said the clip in his brain had nearly come loose, as they had warned, and Jones never played trumpet again.[88]

On November 3, 2024, Jones died at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles at the age of 91.[89][90][91] His publicist confirmed his death. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.[92]

Artistry, legacy and tributes

[edit]
Jones at his recording studio in 1980

President Joe Biden issued a statement praising Jones as "a great unifier, who believed deeply in the healing power of music to restore hope and uplift those suffering from hunger, poverty, and violence, in America and the continent of Africa".[93] Former President Barack Obama praised Jones for "building a career that took him from the streets of Chicago to the heights of Hollywood...paving the way for generations of Black executives to leave their mark on the entertainment business".[94] Former President Bill Clinton stated, "He changed the face of the music industry forever".[95] Vice President Kamala Harris called him a "trailblazer" and remembered him for his "championing of civil and human rights".[96]

Numerous celebrities and public figures paid their tributes such as Steven Spielberg, Michael Caine, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, Colman Domingo, Will Smith, Clive Davis, and Berry Gordy.[97][98] Several musicians that have paid tribute include Paul McCartney, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, John Legend, Lenny Kravitz, Darius Rucker, Nile Rodgers, David Guetta, Kelly Rowland, Victoria Monét, Gladys Knight, Ice-T, The Weeknd, Pharrell Williams, and Russ.[citation needed]

Brazilian musicians Simone,[99] Ivan Lins,[100] Milton Nascimento and percussionist Paulinho da Costa[101] were close friends and partners in Jones' most recent works. Japanese film composer Joe Hisaishi, came up with his alias (久石 譲, Hisaishi Jō) as a play on Jones's name.[102][103]

Awards and honors

[edit]
Further information: List of awards and nominations received by Quincy Jones
President Barack Obama presenting Jones with the National Medal of Arts, March 2011

In 1968, Jones became the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for "The Eyes of Love" from the film Banning (1967). Jones was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work on the 1967 film In Cold Blood, making him the first African American to be nominated twice in the same year.[citation needed]

Jones became the first African American to be the musical director and conductor of the Academy Awards in 1971. He was the first African American to receive the academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995. He tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the second most Oscar-nominated African American, with seven nominations each.[citation needed]

OrganizationsYearNotesResultRef.
Berklee College of Music1983Honorary Doctorate of MusicHonored[104]
American Academy of Achievement,1984Golden Plate Award presented by Ray CharlesHonored[105][106]
Grammy Legend Award1992Honorary award (one of only 15 people ever to receive it)Honored[107]
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences1995Jean Hersholt Humanitarian AwardHonored[108]
Government of France2001Commander of the Legion of HonourHonored[109]
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing ArtsKennedy Center HonorsHonored[110]
Garfield High School2008Performing arts center is named after himHonored[111][112]
BET AwardsHumanitarian AwardHonored[113]
Quincy Jones Elementary School2010South Central Los Angeles school is named after himHonored[114][115]
National Medal of Arts2011Medal bestowed on him by President Barack ObamaHonored[116]
TIME2013Named as one of "The 10 Most Influential 80-Year-Olds"Honored[117]
Rock and Roll Hall of FameAhmet Ertegun AwardHonored[118][119]
Los Angeles Press Club2014Visionary AwardHonored[120]
Government of FranceGrand Commandeur de Ordre des Arts et des LettresHonored[109]
Royal Academy of Music, London2015Honorary doctorateHonored[121]
Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame2021"Foundational inductee"Honored[122]
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences2024Academy Honorary AwardHonored[123]

Filmography

[edit]

Film

[edit]
YearFilmDirectorCreditRef.
1965The PawnbrokerSidney LumetComposer
MirageEdward Dmytryk
The Slender ThreadSydney Pollack
1966Walk, Don't RunCharles Walters
1967The Deadly AffairSidney Lumet
Enter LaughingCarl Reiner
BanningRon Winston
In the Heat of the NightNorman Jewison
In Cold BloodRichard Brooks
1968A Dandy in AspicAnthony Mann
The Counterfeit KillerJózef Lejtes
JigsawJames Goldstone
For Love of IvyDaniel Mann
The Hell with HeroesJoseph Sargent
The SplitGordon Flemyng
1969Mackenna's GoldJ. Lee Thompson
The Italian JobPeter Collinson
The Lost ManRobert Alan Aurthur
Bob & Carol & Ted & AlicePaul Mazursky
John and MaryPeter Yates
Cactus FlowerGene Saks
1970Last of the Mobile Hot ShotsSidney Lumet
The Out-of-TownersArthur Hiller
They Call Me Mister Tibbs!Gordon Douglas
1971Brother JohnJames Goldstone
The Anderson TapesSidney Lumet
HonkyWilliam Graham
DollarsRichard Brooks
1972The Hot RockPeter Yates
The New CenturionsRichard Fleischer
The GetawaySam Peckinpah
1978The WizSidney Lumet
1985The Color PurpleSteven SpielbergComposer
Producer
1990StalingradYuri OzerovProducer
1997SteelKenneth Johnson
2005Get Rich or Die Tryin'Jim SheridanComposer
2023The Color PurpleBlitz BazawuleProducer
2024LolaNicola PeltzComposer

Television

[edit]
YearProjectRoleNotesRef.
1966–1967Hey LandlordComposer"Hey Landlord Theme"; 7 episodes[124]
1967–1968Ironside12 episodes
1969–1971The Bill Cosby Show52 episodes
1971The Bill Cosby SpecialComedy special
43rd Academy AwardsMusical DirectorTelevision Special
1972The New Bill Cosby Show2 episodes
1973Sanford and SonComposer"Sanford and Son Theme"; 135 episodes
1977RootsMiniseries
1990–1996The Fresh Prince of Bel-AirExecutive Producer148 episodes
1991The Jesse Jackson ShowEpisode: "The Homefront"
1995–1999In the House76 episodes
199668th Academy AwardsTelevision special
1997Lost on Earth6 episodes
1997–1998Vibe28 episodes
1997–2009Mad TV215 episodes
2001Say it Loud: A Celebration of Black America5 episodes
2022Bel-Air6 episodes

Music videos

[edit]
YearArtistSongNotesRef.
1979Michael Jackson"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough"Producer
"Rock with You"
1982Donna Summer"Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)"Composer
1983Michael Jackson"Beat It"Producer
1985Various Artists"We Are the World"Conductor

Producer

1987Michael Jackson"Bad"Music supervisor
1988"Man in the Mirror"
1988Barbra Streisand & Don Johnson"Till I Loved You"Producer
1990Quincy Jones"Back on the Block"Composer

Producer

"The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite)"
19962Pac Feat. K-Ci & JoJo"How Do U Want It"Composer
2001Sheena Easton"Love is in Control"
2005Ludacris"Number One Spot"
2007Kanye West Feat. T-Pain"Good Life"

Acting credits

[edit]
YearFilmRoleNotesRef.
1967IronsideLes AppletonEpisode: "Eat, Drink and Be Buried"
1978The WizEmerald City PianistUncredited
1990Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy JonesHimselfDocumentary[125]
1990–1993The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air2 episodes
1992The Whoopi Goldberg Show
1999Fantasia 2000Segment: "Rhapsody in Blue"
2002Austin Powers in GoldmemberCameo role
2017Sandy Wexler
2018QuincyDocumentary
2019The Black Godfather
2020Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth

Theatre

[edit]
YearProjectRoleVenueRef.
2005The Color PurpleProducerBroadway Theater, Broadway debut[126]
2015Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Broadway revival[127]

Discography

[edit]
Main article: Quincy Jones production discography

References

[edit]
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  7. ^ "Quincy Jones tells of sadness at Michael Jackson's death". walesonline. July 3, 2009. Retrieved November 17, 2018. Mr. Jones ... discovered his father was half Welsh around 15 years ago ...
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  94. ^ "Quincy Jones: Oprah Winfrey, Elton John and Barack Obama among famous figures paying tribute to music legend". Sky News. November 5, 2024. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  95. ^ "Bill Clinton". X. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  96. ^ "Statement from Vice President Kamala Harris on the Passing of Quincy Jones". The White House. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  97. ^ The Hollywood Reporter https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/quincy-jones-death-reaction-tributes-1236052799/. Retrieved November 5, 2024. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Text "title Oprah Winfrey, Mariah Carey Among Stars Paying Tribute to Quincy Jones: "A Legend, a Titan, a Mentor"" ignored (help)
  98. ^ Cobb, Kayla (November 4, 2024). "Quincy Jones Remembered by Ice-T, Gladys Knight and More: 'What Couldn't He Do?'". TheWrap. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  99. ^ Brazilian Television, Rede Bandeirantes, 2006, Flash Program
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  102. ^ Joe Hisaishi Archived November 28, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. Who's Who, Nausicaa.net. Retrieved on November 5, 2024.
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  104. ^ Hermon, James (March 29, 2012). "The Eagles Among Berklee College Doctorate of Music Honorees". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved April 15, 2020.
  105. ^ "Photos: 1984: Awards Council member, Ray Charles, presenting the Golden Plate Award to Quincy Jones, Grammy Award-winning musician and record producer, at the American Academy of Achievement's 1984 banquet in Minneapolis". American Academy of Achievement.
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  110. ^ Sandell, Scott (December 26, 2001). "Quincy Jones Tribute Ignites 'The Kennedy Center Honors'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 5, 2024. ...on a night of seemingly endless standing ovations, the only tribute that really gets everyone from Laura Bush to Secretary of State Colin Powell moving in their seats is the last, for Jones.
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  114. ^ Bryant, John Hope (December 13, 2010). "LAUSD announces new Quincy Jones Elementary School and Synergy Charter Academy in honor of 5MK co-chair Quincy Jones". Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  115. ^ "Quincy Jones cuts ribbon at namesake school". ABC7. December 16, 2010. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  116. ^ Taylor, Derrick Bryson. "Obama Honors Quincy Jones With Arts Medal" Essence.com, 2010. Retrieved March 31, 2019.
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  118. ^ Anderson, Kyle (December 11, 2012). "Public Enemy, Rush, Heart, Donna Summer to be inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on December 12, 2012. Retrieved December 13, 2012.
  119. ^ "Gallery Talk: 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Quincy Jones". Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. April 18, 2013. Retrieved November 5, 2024 – via YouTube.
  120. ^ "Music Legend Quincy Jones to Receive the Visionary Award". LA Press Club. September 22, 2014. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  121. ^ "Quincy Jones 1933-2024". ram.ac.uk. London: Royal Academy of Music. November 4, 2024. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  122. ^ Grein, Paul (February 18, 2021). "Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame Announced With First Three Inductees". Billboard. Retrieved April 15, 2021.
  123. ^ Bahr, Lindsey (June 12, 2024). "Quincy Jones, Richard Curtis, Juliet Taylor and Bond producers will get honorary Oscars". Associated Press. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  124. ^ "HEY, LANDLORD opening credits NBC sitcom", YouTube, posted March 18, 2012.
  125. ^ "Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones". IMDB. Retrieved November 4, 2024.
  126. ^ "The Color Purple (2005, Broadway)". Playbill. Retrieved November 5, 2024.
  127. ^ "The Color Purple (2015, Broadway)". Playbill. Retrieved November 5, 2024.

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Quincy Jones’s Legacy in 14 Essential Songs

As a producer, arranger, composer, bandleader and recording artist, he made a powerful mark on nearly every genre he touched. He died Sunday, at 91.

In a black and white photo, Quincy Jones leans back against a piano, smiling slightly and looking straight at the camera.
Quincy Jones was one of the most powerful forces in American popular music for more than half a century. Credit...Bettmann, via Getty Images

By Ben Sisario

Leer en español

Quincy Jones, who died at 91 on Sunday, was a colossus of American music, leaving a profound influence on nearly every genre he touched, from the 1950s on — jazz, funk, soundtracks, syrupy R&B and chart-topping pop.

The scope of his career is so vast, it seems almost impossible that it’s the work of a single person. He cut his teeth as a trumpeter in Lionel Hampton’s touring band in the early ’50s, then studied in Paris under the great classical pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He produced jazz albums for Mercury Records, made fast friends with Frank Sinatra — who called him “Q,” a nickname that stuck — and recorded “It’s My Party,” a No. 1 hit by a teenage Lesley Gore.

Then came gorgeously textured movie scores, slithery funk and a fantastically successful partnership with Michael Jackson, whose 1982 LP “Thriller,” produced by Jones, is the biggest seller of all time. And it didn’t end there. In a 2018 documentary, “Quincy,” Kendrick Lamar, the reigning rap laureate, is seen bumping fists with Jones and crediting him as the inspiration for “combining hip-hop and jazz.”

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Here is a sampling of some of Jones’s essential work, as a producer, arranger, composer, bandleader and recording artist in his own right. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)

Jones was a jazz journeyman in the 1950s, playing trumpet with Hampton, working at Mercury and putting together his own albums. This gorgeous ballad, from “This Is How I Feel About Jazz,” his standout early LP, was composed by Jones and features an all-star band including Herbie Mann, Zoot Sims, Hank Jones and Charles Mingus.

Jones and Ray Charles met as teenagers in Seattle in the 1940s, as dramatized in the 2004 film “Ray.” By the time of his big band LP “Genius + Soul = Jazz,” Charles was a giant who seemed to remake American music with every step. Jones arranged half the tracks on the album, including “One Mint Julep,” a hot and swinging instrumental take on the Clovers’ original that Charles — leading from the organ — made a Top 10 hit.

Jones’s version of Brazilian music on “Big Band Bossa Nova” is bold and playful, full of whistling flutes, blaring trumpets and squeaky cuíca drums. Mike Myers made the most of its comedic potential when he used “Soul Bossa Nova” throughout his “Austin Powers” film series.

One day on the job as a Mercury producer, Jones lugged a pile of demo recordings to the New Jersey home of a 16-year-old signing, Lesley Gore. Among them was “It’s My Party,” which Jones and the song’s arranger, Claus Ogerman, spiced up with some Latin-style percussion, staccato horn hits and double-tracked vocals. The day after recording it, Jones learned that Phil Spector had also recently cut the tune; Jones rushed to get his version out first, and it went to No. 1.

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For his first collaboration with Sinatra on a studio LP, “It Might as Well Be Swing,” Jones provided arrangements with a light, sweet touch, adding just enough punch in “Fly Me to the Moon” to send it into the stratosphere. The sessions cemented what would be a long and close relationship between the two men, with Jones even inheriting Sinatra’s Sicilian ring. “I loved him as much as anyone else I ever worked with,” Jones wrote in his memoir, “Q” (2001).

In the mid-60s, Jones turned his attention to film scores. His first major project was “The Pawnbroker,” featuring Rod Steiger as a New York man numbed by his experiences in a Nazi camp. Jazz and Latin music are sprinkled throughout the score; the main title theme is moody and surreal, with ominously swelling strings and minor-key woodwind melodies that float and quickly disappear.

An obscure nugget in Jones’s film oeuvre, but a luscious one. This is from “Mirage,” a Gregory Peck thriller, with a wistful flute theme floating over a mellow jazz combo. Elsewhere in the score, swirls of dissonant strings, crashing percussion and a broken keyboard create a nightmarish sense of vertigo.

Ever the chameleon, Jones turned to funk in the 1970s. This track, the theme song to the television show “Sanford and Son,” gets its gritty rooster strut from the syncopated interplay of harmonica, sax and electric keyboard (plus no shortage of shakers and cowbell). Of course, Jones looked the part, posing on the cover of his album “You’ve Got It Bad Girl” the following year in black leather.

The groove is sexy and caramel smooth on “Body Heat,” an LP that Jones produced with the jazz bassist Ray Brown, a longtime collaborator. The title track, sung by Leon Ware and Bruce Fisher, was later sampled by Tupac Shakur for “How Do U Want It.”

Jones first worked with Jackson on “The Wiz” and agreed to produce “Off the Wall,” his next solo LP. “Don’t Stop,” its opening track and first single, is a dazzling statement by the 20-year-old Jackson, a tingly swirl of disco with percussion that was contributed by, among others, Sheila E. This song announced Jackson’s arrival as a grown-up solo star and reinforced Jones’s hitmaker bona fides.

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In the 1980s, Jones was one of the ruling masters of mainstream pop, and could still spot radio-perfect voices. For this ultra-middle-of-the-road ballad on Jones’s album “The Dude,” he plucked James Ingram, who had sung on the song’s demo for a $50 fee. With his sweet, soulful baritone, Ingram would become one of the defining singers of R&B in the ’80s. He died in 2019 at 66.

One of Jones’s greatest moments as a producer came in spite of himself. He butted heads with Jackson on “Billie Jean,” the breakthrough hit from “Thriller.” The track opens with nearly 30 seconds of a sizzling drum and bass groove, which Jones felt was too long. But Jackson insisted on keeping it, and prevailed. “When Michael Jackson tells you, ‘That’s what makes me want to dance,’” Jones later recalled, “well, the rest of us just have to shut up.”

For the ultimate charity single, Jones was the ideal captain — conducting an ensemble of dozens of stars, and managing a complex session as producer (with Michael Omartian). Video of the sessions shows Jones leading the chorus sections, directing soloists to their microphone positions and working with Stevie Wonder to guide Bob Dylan through his lines.

At age 56, Jones reinvented himself yet again as a recording artist for the New Jack Swing era with the album “Back on the Block,” featuring a deep bench of supporting guests from Ella Fitzgerald to Ice-T. Though the album includes some cringe-worthy rapping by Jones (“I’ve been away for a long time/I’m not only back but I’m here to rhyme”) it also featured spunky R&B-pop radio hits like “I’ll Be Good to You.” At the Grammys in 1991, Jones was showered with six awards, including album of the year.

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Quincy Jones, Giant of American Music, Dies at 91

As a producer, he made the best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” He was also a prolific arranger and composer of film music.

Listen to this article · 17:42 min Learn more

By Ben Ratliff

Leer en español

Quincy Jones, one of the most powerful forces in American popular music for more than half a century, died on Sunday night in his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 91.

His death was confirmed in a statement by his publicist, Arnold Robinson, who did not specify the cause.

Mr. Jones began his career as a jazz trumpeter and was later in great demand as an arranger, writing for the big bands of Count Basie and others; as a composer of film music; and as a record producer. But he may have made his most lasting mark by doing what some believe to be equally important in the ground-level history of an art form: the work of connecting.

Beyond his hands-on work with score paper, he organized, charmed, persuaded, hired and validated. Starting in the late 1950s, he took social and professional mobility to a new level in Black popular art, eventually creating the conditions for a great deal of music to flow between styles, outlets and markets. And all of that could be said of him even if he had not produced Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the best-selling album of all time.

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Mr. Jones’s music has been sampled and reused hundreds of times, through all stages of hip-hop and for the theme to the “Austin Powers” films (his “Soul Bossa Nova,” from 1962). He has the third-highest total of Grammy Awards won by a single person — he was nominated 80 times and won 28. (Beyoncé’s 32 wins is the highest total; Georg Solti is second with 31.) He was given honorary degrees by Harvard, Princeton, Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, the Berklee School of Music and many other institutions, as well as a National Medal of Arts and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master fellowship.

His success — as his colleague in arranging, Benny Carter, is said to have remarked — may have overshadowed his talent.

ImageQuincy Jones, wearing a black suit, stands onstage in front of screens showing images of him.
Mr. Jones at his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013 in Los Angeles.Credit...Danny Moloshok/Invision, via Associated Press

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Jones led his own bands and was the arranger of plush, confident recordings like Dinah Washington’s “The Swingin’ Miss ‘D’” (1957), Betty Carter’s “Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant” (1955), and Ray Charles’s “Genius + Soul = Jazz” (1961). He arranged and conducted several collaborations between Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, including what is widely regarded as one of Sinatra’s greatest records, “Sinatra at the Sands” (1966).

He composed the soundtracks to “The Pawnbroker” (1964), “In Cold Blood” (1967) and “The Color Purple” (1985), among many other movies; his film and television work expertly mixed 20th-century classical, jazz, funk and Afro-Cuban, street, studio and conservatory. And the three albums he produced for Michael Jackson between 1979 and 1987 — “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad” — arguably remade the pop business with their success, by appealing profoundly to both Black and white audiences at a time when mainstream radio playlists were becoming increasingly segregated.

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  1. Quincy Jones poses for a portrait while wearing a coat and a scarf.
    2013
    Quincy Jones took social and professional mobility to a new level in Black popular art.
    Damon Winter/The New York Times
  2. Quincy Jones in front of a large jazz band during a performance onstage.
    1960
    Touring in Europe with The Quincy Jones Big Band.
    Franz Hubmann/Imagno, via Getty Images
  3. Early 1970s
    With Roberta Flack
    David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty Images
  4. 1974
    Composing music at his home studio.
    George Brich/Associated Press
  5. 1984
    With Michael Jackson at the Grammy Awards.
    Doug Pizac/Associated Press
  6. 1987
    Recording "Stop, Don't Pass Go" with Stevie Wonder.
    Bettmann, via Getty Images
  7. 1995
    With Oprah Winfrey at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Jones was the first Black recipient of the academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
    Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc, via Getty Images
  8. 2018
    At a ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood. 
    Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated Press

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, to Quincy Sr. — a carpenter who worked for local gangsters — and Sarah (Wells) Jones, a musically talented Boston University graduate. At one point in the late 1930s, Quincy and his brother, Lloyd, were separated from their mother, who had developed a schizophrenic disorder, and taken by their father to Louisville, Ky., where they were put in the care of their maternal grandmother, a former enslaved worker.

By 1943, Quincy Sr. had moved with his sons to Bremerton, Wash., where he found work in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. They were eventually joined by his second wife, Elvera, and her three children, and four years later the family moved to Seattle. Once there, Quincy Sr. and Elvera had three more children; of the eight, Quincy Jr. and Lloyd perceived themselves to be the least favored by their stepmother and were often left to fend for themselves.

But the young Quincy was hungry to learn, and eventually to leave. At 11, he and his brother broke into a recreation center looking for food; there was a spinet piano in a supervisor’s room in the back, and as he later told the story in the BBC documentary “The Many Lives of Q” (2008), “God’s whispers” made him move toward it and touch it.

He went on to join his school band and choir, learning several brass, reed and percussion instruments, and music became his focus.

At 13, he persuaded the trumpeter Clark Terry, who was in Seattle for a month while touring with Count Basie’s band, to give him lessons after the band’s late set and before his school day began.

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At 14, he met the 16-year-old Ray Charles, then known as R.C. Robinson, who had come west from Florida; they became close, and both worked for Bumps Blackwell, a local bandleader. At 15, Quincy gave Lionel Hampton an original composition and was hired for his touring band on the spot, only to be dismissed the next day by Hampton’s wife and manager, Gladys; she admonished him to go back to school.

After graduating from Garfield High School in Seattle, he attended Seattle University for one semester, then accepted a scholarship to attend the Schillinger House in Boston, now known as Berklee College of Music.

In 1951, Hampton’s band came calling again. This time, Mr. Jones joined and stayed for two years, as a trumpeter and occasional arranger. He wrote music quickly — including his first complete and credited composition, “Kingfish”— and got it sounding good quickly, through preternatural skills of charm and organization.

Image
A bearded man sitting at a piano with his legs crossed.
Mr. Jones circa 1974.Credit...A&M Records/ Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

During that time he settled down with his high school girlfriend, Jeri Caldwell, and had a daughter, Jolie, in 1953, although the couple did not marry until 1957. (She was white, and the early days of their relationship and child-rearing met much disapproval. It was the first of Mr. Jones’s three marriages, all interracial.)

By the end of 1953, still only 20 and with a young daughter, he left Hampton’s band to settle in New York and work as a freelance arranger for Count Basie and the saxophonist James Moody, among others.

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Mr. Jones’s true education was only beginning. In 1956, he was hired as musical director, arranger and trumpeter in the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s band, which traveled under the auspices of the State Department for three months through Europe and the Middle East and then took a second trip to South America.

Mr. Jones recorded the first album under his own name, “This Is How I Feel About Jazz,” in 1956. A year later, he moved to Paris to work for Barclay Records and stayed in Europe on and off for five years as the label’s staff arranger and conductor. He took advantage of the opportunity to write for strings — because, in his view, a Black arranger was much less likely to be given the chance to do so in America — and studied music theory with Nadia Boulanger.

In 1958, Mr. Jones signed with Mercury Records. For his albums “The Birth of a Band!” and “The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones,” both released in 1959, he assembled a big band including Mr. Terry and other first-tier jazz musicians. Mr. Jones’s vision for this band grew out of the tight and smooth sound world of the 1950s Count Basie Orchestra.

Offered the job of assembling a jazz band to lead the orchestra in a musical — “Free and Easy,” about the post-abolition South, based on the work of the Black American writers Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen and with a score by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer — Mr. Jones used many of the players from his working ensemble. The idea, as he explained in “Q,” his 2001 memoir, was for the group to “work the kinks out of the show” in Europe before it moved on to London and, potentially, Broadway.

Hobbled by a problematic script and an 11th-hour change in director, “Free and Easy” opened at the Alhambra Theater in Paris in January 1960 and closed within a few weeks.

Wanting to keep his band together at all costs, Mr. Jones kept 30 people on the payroll and assembled concerts around Europe for 10 months; deep in debt at the end of the tour, he sold publishing rights for half of his songs to get his retinue home. (He would later buy back those rights at a much higher price.)

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Back in New York, the band dissolved, as did Mr. Jones’s first marriage — although, given his acknowledged chronic infidelity, that might have been some time coming. “It got so out of control,” he wrote in his memoir, “that at one point I was in love with and dating Marpessa Dawn, the leading lovely from ‘Black Orpheus’; a Chinese beauty; a French actress; Hazel Scott, the gifted, cosmopolitan ex-wife of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; and Juliette Gréco, the Queen of French Existentialism, all at the same time.”

Mr. Jones took the job of musical director at Mercury in 1961, assembling its jazz roster: He signed Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Shirley Horn and others. But this was a moment when pop was taking over; jazz’s margins, and perhaps its audience, too, were in steep decline.

He changed his focus accordingly. His first pop success was with the singer Lesley Gore, who was only 16 when he came into possession of her demo tape. “She had a mellow, distinctive voice and sang in tune, which a lot of grown-up rock ’n’ roll singers couldn’t do, so I signed her,” Mr. Jones wrote. He helped make the song “It’s My Party” (1963) into a No. 1 hit for Ms. Gore, rushing acetates to radio stations just before another version of the song, sung by the Crystals and produced by Phil Spector, which remains unreleased.

Mr. Jones ascended at Mercury, in 1964 becoming the first Black vice president of a white-owned record label. (He also won his first Grammy Award that year, for his arrangement of Count Basie’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”) He kept the position for less than a year, until he scored “The Pawnbroker” — one of his greatest achievements as a composer — and moved to Los Angeles to work in films and television.

His most frenetic years, professionally and personally, began in the late 1960s and stretched to 1974. He married Ulla Andersson, a 19-year-old Swedish model, in 1967 and had two children with her, Martina and Quincy III; they divorced in 1974. His dozens of film-score credits in those years included “The Deadly Affair,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “In Cold Blood,” “Mirage,” “For Love of Ivy” and “The Getaway.” And he composed theme songs and scored episodes for “Sanford and Son,” “Ironside” and two different shows starring Bill Cosby. He also produced the 1973 television tribute “Duke Ellington … We Love You Madly.”

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Quincy Jones stands with two other men near a piano, next to another man sitting on the bench.
Mr. Jones with Duke Ellington, seated, during a recording session in 1973.Credit...David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty Images

At the same time, Mr. Jones was making large-ensemble jazz-funk records as a leader, including “Walking in Space” (1969), whose title track won a Grammy for best instrumental jazz performance by a large group. He soon moved toward a more purely commercial kind of funk and R&B with “Body Heat” (1974).

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He was working on “Mellow Madness,” a follow-up to “Body Heat,” when he suffered a brain aneurysm in 1974, resulting in two operations. After the first, his friends, not expecting him to live, organized a memorial concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The concert went on as planned, with a roster that included Cannonball Adderley, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles. Mr. Jones attended, under strict orders from his neurosurgeon not to get excited.

“It felt like I was watching my own funeral,” he later wrote.

For a few years Mr. Jones slowed down, comparatively. He married the actress Peggy Lipton and had two daughters with her: Kidada Jones, an actress, model and fashion designer, and the film and television actress Rashida Jones.

He produced hit records by the Brothers Johnson, who had sung on “Mellow Madness”; contributed music to the celebrated mini-series “Roots” in 1977; and in 1978 served as musical supervisor for Sidney Lumet’s film version of the Broadway musical “The Wiz,” working with Michael Jackson for the first time. That led to their collaborations on the albums “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad,” whose combined certified American unit-sales amount to 46 million, and whose worldwide figures are said to be more than double that.

As a joint venture with Warner Bros. Records, Mr. Jones started his own label, Qwest, in 1980. The label’s first release was the singer and guitarist George Benson’s “Give Me the Night,” which won three Grammys; otherwise, its quirky discography — the list includes not just stars like Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne and the R&B singer James Ingram, but also the post-punk band New Order, the gospel singer Andraé Crouch and the experimental jazz saxophonist Sonny Simmons — proved, if it needed proving, that Mr. Jones was not concerned only with the bottom line.

Image
A group of men stand together, as one holds sheet music in his hand.
Clockwise from left, Lionel Richie, Daryl Hall, Mr. Jones, Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder recording “We Are The World” in 1985.Credit...Associated Press

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His profile was raised even higher in 1985, when he produced, arranged and conducted a supergroup of more than 40 singers — including Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder — under the banner name USA for Africa, in “We Are the World,” a fund-raising single for famine relief.

The recording, with an accompanying video, was an international hit, becoming the industry’s first multiplatinum release, raising millions of dollars in donations and winning four Grammys, including “Song of the Year.” (The making of that record was the subject of a 2024 Netflix documentary, “The Greatest Night in Pop.”)

Shortly after that, Mr. Jones served as associate producer of Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple.” He also wrote the score, in less than two months.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jones’s third marriage failed, he became dependent on the sleeping pill Halcion, and he was not making good on plans for a follow-up to “Bad.” In 1986, he fled to one of Marlon Brando’s vacation spots — “a cluster of islands he’d owned in Tahiti since filming ‘Mutiny on the Bounty,’” as he described it in “Q.” He spent a month recovering, overcame his Halcion addiction and bounced back.

The 1989 album “Back on the Block” served as his official return, with a guest roster that typified his cross-generational, cross-stylistic dream of Black American music: Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ice-T, Luther Vandross, Barry White. The album won six Grammys, including album of the year, and Mr. Jones was named nonclassical producer of the year.

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The documentary feature “Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones,” which told his story through the recollections of his colleagues, was released in 1990. That same year, his record label became part of a larger multimedia entity, Quincy Jones Entertainment, which produced the sitcoms “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and “In the House” as well as the sketch show “Mad TV.” The business eventually branched out into publishing: He helped start the hip-hop magazine Vibe, and published Spin and Blaze with Robert Miller.

Image
Quincy Jones, in a light-blue suit coat, stands before a group of young men holding instruments.
Mr. Jones with students at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1991.Credit...Alain Benainous/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

In 1991, Mr. Jones produced a concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland — of which he, in typical factotum spirit, had become a co-producer — reuniting Miles Davis with the arrangements that Gil Evans had written years earlier for the albums “Sketches of Spain” and “Porgy and Bess.” It was there that he met the actress Nastassja Kinski, with whom he lived for four years, a union that produced his seventh child, Kenya Julia Miambi Sarah Jones, who became a model and is known professionally as Kenya Kinski-Jones.

By that time Mr. Jones’s life and work had become entwined with hip-hop, with or without his direct input. At his death in 1996, Tupac Shakur had sampled, for his own No. 1 hit “How Do U Want It,” a piece of Mr. Jones’s “Body Heat” — a track that has also been sampled by Das EFX, Mobb Deep and Tyrese, among others — and was dating Mr. Jones’s daughter Kidada.

According to his publicist, Mr. Jones is survived by a brother, Richard; two sisters, Margie Jay and Theresa Frank; and seven children: Jolie, Kidada, Kenya, Martina, Rachel, Rashida and Quincy III.

In his final decades, Mr. Jones dedicated much of his time to charity work through his Listen Up! Foundation; established a Quincy Jones professorship of African American music at Harvard University; produced “Keep On Keepin’ On,” a 2014 film about the teacher-student relationship between the 89-year-old Clark Terry, Mr. Jones’s old mentor, and Justin Kauflin, a young blind jazz pianist; and released the album “Soul Bossa Nostra,” reprising songs he’d produced in the past, with appearances by Snoop Dogg, T-Pain and Amy Winehouse, who contributed a louche version of “It’s My Party” — her last commercial release before her death in 2011.

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Mr. Jones stayed in the public eye. In 2018, he made headlines when he gave wide-ranging interviews to New York and GQ magazines that contained surprising comments about Michael Jackson and other subjects.

In 2017, he helped launch a video platform, Qwest TV, offering high-definition streams of jazz concerts and documentaries, and in 2022 he appeared on the album “Dawn FM” by the Weeknd, performing a monologue on the track “A Tale by Quincy.”

But even his not-fully-realized back-burner projects tell a story of their own, a kind of secondary biography of the obsessions and connections of a constantly busy man. Among them were a musical about Sammy Davis Jr.; a Cirque du Soleil show on the history of Black American music, from its African roots; a film about Brazilian carnivals; a film version of Ralph Ellison’s unfinished novel “Juneteenth”; and a film on the life of Alexander Pushkin, the Russian poet who was said to be of African origin.

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