Quincy Jones, the multi-talented music titan of which enormous legacy ranging from producing Michael Jackson’s landmark ‘Thriller’ album to writing award-winning film and television scores and collaborating with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and hundreds of other artists, has died at the age of 91.
Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson, says he died Sunday evening at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family.
“Tonight, it is with full but broken hearts that we share the news of the passing of our father and brother Quincy Jones,” the family said in a statement. “And while this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the amazing life he lived and know there will never be another like him.”
Jones rose from working with gangs on the South Side of Chicago to the top echelons of show business, becoming one of the first black executives to thrive in Hollywood and gain a major reputation. extraordinary music catalogue that contains some of the richest moments of American rhythm and song. For years, you were unlikely to find a music lover who didn’t own at least one record with his name on it, or a leader in the entertainment industry and beyond who didn’t have some connection to him.
Jones socialized with presidents and foreign leaders, movie stars and musicians, philanthropists and business leaders. He toured with Count Basie and Lionel Hampton, arranged records for Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, composed the soundtracks for “Roots” and “In the Heat of the Night,” organized President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural celebration and oversaw the all- star recording of “We Are the World,” the 1985 charity record for famine relief in Africa.
Lionel Richie, who co-wrote “We Are the World” and was one of the singers, would call Jones “the master orchestrator.”
In a career that began when records were still played on vinyl at 78 rpm, the greatest credit probably goes to his productions with Jackson: ‘Off the Wall’, ‘Thriller’ and ‘Bad’ were albums that stood out in style and appeal were virtually universal. Jones’ versatility and imagination helped unleash Jackson’s explosive talents as he transformed from child star to the “King of Pop.” On classic songs like “Billie Jean” and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” Jones and Jackson created a global soundscape from disco, funk, rock, pop, R&B and jazz and African chants. For “Thriller,” some of the most memorable touches came from Jones, who recruited Eddie Van Halen for a guitar solo on the genre-melting “Beat It” and brought in Vincent Price for a creepy voiceover on the title track.
“Thriller” sold more than 20 million copies in 1983 alone and competed with the Eagles’ ‘Greatest Hits 1971-1975’ as the best-selling album of all time.
“If an album doesn’t do well, everyone says ‘it was the producer’s fault’; so if it goes well, it should be your ‘fault,’ too,” Jones said in an interview with the Library of Congress in 2016. “The numbers don’t just appear all at once. The producer must have the skills, experience and ability to see the vision through to completion.”
The list of awards and accolades spans 18 pages in his 2001 autobiography “Q,” including 27 Grammys at the time (now 28), an honorary Academy Award (now two) and an Emmy for “Roots.” He also received the French Legion d’Honneur, the Rudolph Valentino Award from the Republic of Italy, and a Kennedy Center tribute for his contributions to American culture. He was the subject of a 1990 documentary, “Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones” and a 2018 film by daughter Rashida Jones. His memoirs made him a bestselling author.
Born in Chicago in 1933, Jones cited the hymns his mother sang in the house as the first music he could remember. But he looked back sadly on his childhood, once telling Oprah Winfrey, “There are two kinds of people: those who have nurturing parents or caregivers, and those who don’t. There is nothing in between.” Jones’ mother suffered from emotional problems and was eventually institutionalized, a loss that made the world seem “meaningless” to Quincy. He spent much of his time in Chicago on the streets, with gangs, stealing and fighting.
“They nailed my hand to a fence with a switchblade, man,” he told the AP in 2018, showing a scar from his childhood.
Music saved him. As a boy, he learned that a Chicago neighbor owned a piano and soon found himself playing it constantly. His father moved to Washington State when Quincy was ten and his world turned into a community recreation center. Jones and some friends had broken into the kitchen and treated themselves to a lemon meringue pie when Jones noticed a small room nearby with a stage. There was a piano on the stage.
“I went there, paused, stared, and then tinkered with it for a moment,” he wrote in his autobiography. “That’s where I started to find peace. I was eleven. I knew this was it for me. Forever.”
Within a few years he was playing the trumpet and befriended a young blind musician named Ray Charles, who became a lifelong friend. He was gifted enough to win a scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, but dropped out when Hampton invited him to tour with his band. Jones started working as a freelance composer, conductor, arranger and producer. As a teenager he supported Billie Holiday. In his mid-twenties he toured with his own band.
“We had the best jazz band in the world, and yet we were literally starving,” Jones later told Musician magazine. “Then I discovered that there was music, and that there was a music business. If I was going to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.”
As a music manager, he overcame racial barriers in the early 1960s to become vice president at Mercury Records. In 1971, he became the first black music director at the Academy Awards. The first film he produced, ‘The Color Purple’, received eleven Oscar nominations in 1986. (But to his great disappointment, no wins). In partnership with Time Warner, he created Quincy Jones Entertainment, which includes the pop culture magazine Vibe and Qwest Broadcasting. The company was sold for $270 million in 1999.
“My philosophy as a businessman has always had the same roots as my personal credo: take talented people on their own terms and treat them fairly and with respect, no matter who they are or where they come from,” Jones wrote in his autobiography. .
He was comfortable with virtually any form of American music, whether setting Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” to a snappy, swinging rhythm and wistful flute or his production of Charles’ soulful “In the Heat of the Night” opened in a lustful voice. tenor sax solo. He worked with jazz giants (Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington), rappers (Snoop Dogg, LL Cool J), crooners (Sinatra, Tony Bennett), pop singers (Lesley Gore) and rhythm and blues stars (Chaka Khan, rapper and singer Queen Latifah).
“We are the World” alone featured Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen. He co-wrote hits for Jackson – “PYT (Pretty Young Thing” – and Donna Summer – “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger) – and had songs sampled by Tupac Shakur, Kanye West and other rappers. He even composed the theme song for the sitcom ‘Sanford and Son’.
Jones was an enabler and creator of stars. He gave Will Smith a major break in the hit TV show “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” which Jones produced, and introduced Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg to moviegoers through “The Color Purple.” From the 1960s onwards he composed more than 35 film scores, including for ‘The Pawnbroker’, ‘In the Heat of the Night’ and ‘In Cold Blood’.
He called scoring “a multifaceted process, an abstract combination of science and soul.”
Jones’ work on the soundtrack for “The Wiz” led to his collaboration with Jackson, who starred in the 1978 film. In an essay published in Time magazine after Jackson’s death in 2009, Jones recalled that the singer carried pieces of paper containing thoughts from famous thinkers. When Jones asked about the origin of a passage, Jackson replied “Socrates,” but pronounced it “SO-crayts.” Jones corrected him: “Michael, they’re SOCK-ra-tees.”
“And the look he gave me then prompted me to say, because I was impressed by everything I saw in him during the rehearsal process, ‘I would love to have a go at producing your album.'” Jones recalled. “And he went back and told the people at Epic Records, and they said, ‘No way – Quincy is too jazzy.’ Michael persisted, and he and his managers went back and said, ‘Quincy is producing the album.’ And we went on to make ‘Off the Wall’. Ironically, that was one of Black’s best-selling albums at the time, and that album saved all the jobs of the people who said I was the wrong one. That’s the way it works.”
Tensions arose after Jackson’s death. In 2013, Jones sued Jackson’s estateclaiming he was owed millions in royalties and production costs for some of the superstar’s biggest hits. In a 2018 interview with New York magazine, he called Jackson “as Machiavellian as they come” and claimed to have copied material from others.
Jones was addicted to work and play, and sometimes suffered for it. He nearly died of a brain aneurysm in 1974 and became deeply depressed in the 1980s after “The Color Purple” was snubbed by Academy Awards voters; he has never received a competitive Oscar. Jones, a father of seven children by five mothers, described himself as a “dog” who had countless lovers around the world. He was married three times, his wives included the actor Peggy Lipton.
“For me, loving a woman is one of the most natural, blissful, life-enhancing – and dare I say, religious – actions in the world,” he wrote.
He was not an activist in his early years, but changed after attending the funeral of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. attended and later befriended Reverend Jesse Jackson. Jones was committed to philanthropy, saying, “The best and only useful aspect of fame and celebrity is having a platform to help others.”
His goals included fighting HIV and AIDS, educating children, and providing for the poor around the world. He founded the Quincy Jones Listen Up! Foundation to connect young people with music, culture and technology, and said he has been driven throughout his life “by a spirit of adventure and a criminal level of optimism.”
“Life is like a dream, said the Spanish poet and philosopher Federico Garcia Lorca,” Jones wrote in his memoirs. “Mine was in Technicolor, with full Dolby sound via THX amplification before they knew what these systems were.”
Along with Rashida, Jones is survived by daughters Jolie Jones Levine, Rachel Jones, Martina Jones, Kidada Jones and Kenya Kinski-Jones; son Quincy Jones III; brother Richard Jones and sisters Theresa Frank and Margie Jay.
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AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton and former AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen contributed to this report from Los Angeles.
