Quincy Jones, who expanded the American songbook as a musician, composer and producer and formed a few of the greatest stars and most memorable songs within the second half of the twentieth century, has died. He was 91.
Extensively thought of one of the influential forces in fashionable American music, Jones died Sunday at his Bel-Air house surrounded by his kids, siblings and shut household, in response to his publicist, Arnold Robinson. No reason for loss of life was disclosed.
“[A]lthough this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him,” Jones’ household mentioned in an announcement to The Occasions. “He is truly one of a kind and we will miss him dearly; we take comfort and immense pride in knowing that the love and joy, that were the essence of his being, was shared with the world through all that he created. Through his music and his boundless love, Quincy Jones’ heart will beat for eternity.”
The arc of Jones’ lengthy profession stretched from smoky jazz golf equipment, the place he collaborated with innovators equivalent to Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, to his Los Angeles energy base, the place, like a titan, he watched over his musical empire from a mansion atop Bel-Air.
Willie Nelson, left, Quincy Jones and Bruce Springsteen evaluate the music earlier than recording “We Are the World.”
(Netflix)
Throughout his profession, Jones helped mildew Michael Jackson right into a mega-star by producing a trilogy of albums that made the pop singer arguably the best-known musician on this planet, raised tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for Ethiopian famine victims by producing the bestselling tune “We Are the World,” and gained 28 Grammy Awards, greater than any artist moreover Beyoncé and George Solti.
If some stars reached a profession cruising altitude the place they have been recognized by only one identify — Prince, Madonna, Sting — Jones boiled it all the way down to a single letter: Q.
Harvard historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. mentioned he considered Jones’ affect and profession milestones as being on par with American innovators and large thinkers equivalent to Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Invoice Gates.
“We’re talking about the people who define an era in the broadest possible way,” Gates advised Smithsonian journal in 2008. “Quincy has a lifeline into the collective consciousness of the American public.”
Oprah Winfrey, who labored with Jones when he helped produce and rating the music for the 1985 film “The Color Purple,” described him as a pressure of nature, not like something she’d encountered.
“Quincy Jones on a bad day does more than most people do in a lifetime,” she mentioned in “The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey and Passions.”
The late Davis put it one other method: “Certain paperboys can go in any yard with any dog and they won’t get bit. He just has it.”
Director Steven Spielberg, in an announcement to The Occasions on Monday, mentioned that to those that worth Jones’ contributions to artwork, society and the human race, “he was the world … we are his children.”
When he was younger and amid the legends of the day, Jones mentioned he would “sit down, shut up and listen,” silently absorbing classes he realized he couldn’t presumably get anyplace else. However fame and success in the end launched any reluctance to talk out, and appeared to loosen his ego as effectively.
Requested by The Occasions in 2011 to check himself to Kanye West (now generally known as Ye), Jones appeared indignant.
“Did [West] write for a symphony orchestra? Does he write for a jazz orchestra? Come on, man … I’m not putting him down or making a judgment or anything, but we come from two different sides of the planet.”
In testomony to the respect Jones commanded, when Barack Obama was exploring a presidential bid, certainly one of his first stops in Southern California was the producer’s Bel-Air property.
Taking within the house’s king-of-the-universe views, Obama listened whereas Jones advised tales of jamming with legends equivalent to Gillespie or the surge of energy he felt working the soundboard as one mega-star after one other stepped ahead to sing a verse for “We Are the World.”
“All of us who were lucky enough to be in his circle were given nicknames by Q,” mentioned Spielberg, who directed “The Color Purple” and produced the 2023 remake. “Mine was ‘Carl,’ because in 1980 when we met, my answering machine had a voice message where you heard me doing a terrible impression of [scientist] Carl Sagan. He never called me by my first name again. He was deeply committed to family. Everyone close to him felt special and blessed just to listen and learn and laugh. Just yesterday, like he had for the past 33 years, he sent flowers to my wife Kate for her birthday. We will miss him, but there is so much of him surrounding us to keep him close.”
“The Color Purple” and “Euphoria” actor Colman Domingo, in a tribute on X, recalled his first time assembly Jones: “He asked, where are you from? Philly I replied, his eyes twinkled and he talked about the Uptown Theater. I was so thrilled to meet Mr. American Music himself. I literally kneeled because he was a King. Thank you Mr. Quincy Jones for giving us all the sound.”
“You were a father and example at a time when I truly needed a father and example,” wrote rapper and actor LL Cool J on Instagram. “Mentor. Role model. King. 👑You gave me opportunities and shared wisdom. Music would not be music without you. My condolences to the entire family. I love you. Rest in the sweetest music eternally. #ripquincyjones one of one”
Two-time Oscar winner Michael Caine, who shared Jones’ birthday and starred within the Jones-scored “The Italian Job” in 1969, remembered him as his “celestial twin.”
“[He] was a titan in the musical world. He was a wonderful and unique human being, lucky to have known him,” Caine wrote on X.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born March 14, 1933, in Chicago. His father, Quincy Jones Sr., was a semiprofessional baseball participant and a carpenter. His mom, Sarah Frances, was a financial institution officer and an residence supervisor. His youthful brother, Lloyd, died in 1998.
As a youth, Jones was uncovered to Black roots and spiritual music and early jazz piano. His mom was an avid singer of spirituals, and a next-door neighbor, Lucy Jackson, helped Jones study to faucet out boogie-woogie on the keyboard.
Michael Jackson holds his eight awards as he poses with Quincy Jones on the Grammys in 1984.
(Doug Pizac / Related Press)
When he was 10, Jones’ mom was dedicated to a psychological establishment. The impression was profound and Jones mentioned he was left with painful recollections of the journeys to the psychiatric hospital, uncertain precisely why his mom couldn’t come house with him.
Along with his mom institutionalized, Jones mentioned, he started to run the streets. It was a tricky, beaten-down neighborhood on the south aspect of Chicago and gangsters managed each block. At some point when Jones was strolling house, a gaggle of road toughs pinned him to a fence, plunged a knife blade into certainly one of his palms and stabbed him within the temple with an ice decide.
That helped persuade Jones’ father, who had divorced and remarried, that it was time to get out of Chicago.
In the hunt for a greater job and a safer atmosphere, Jones’ father moved his newly blended household to Bremerton, Wash., in 1943 and located work at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. When the struggle ended, the household moved to Seattle.
The upheaval and household turbulence formed Jones. “If I had a good family,” he as soon as joked, “I might have been a terrible musician.”
When he was 14, he befriended an adolescent named Ray Charles. The friendship, which lasted a lifetime, opened a brand new world for Jones.
In Charles, Jones discovered an rising prodigy, a musician who performed a mix of blues, gospel and R&B he’d by no means heard. The 2 began taking part in collectively, and Charles — blind since he was 7 — urged Jones to pursue arranging and composing.
“I met Ray Charles at 14 and he was 16,” Jones recalled “But he was like a hundred years older than me.”
After highschool, Jones attended Seattle College and earned a scholarship to what’s now the Berklee Faculty of Music in Boston. Within the early Fifties he joined Lionel Hampton’s huge band as a trumpeter and arranger and later toured South America and the Center East with Gillespie’s huge band.
Jones’ visibility escalated and, barely into his mid-20s, he was quickly arranging and recording for Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Rely Basie, Duke Ellington and, in fact, Charles.
Within the late ’50s, Jones relocated to Paris, the place he studied composition with the extremely regarded trainer Nadia Boulanger and composer Olivier Messiaen. However a European tour main his personal huge band within the early ’60s bumped into monetary issues and got here to an unceremonious finish.
“We had the best jazz band on the planet,” Jones advised Musician journal, ”and but we have been actually ravenous. That’s after I found that there was music, and there was the music enterprise.”
Quincy Jones poses for a portrait throughout the Toronto Movie Pageant in 2018.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision/AP)
One other door opened when Mercury Information provided Jones a place as musical director of the corporate’s New York division. In 1964, he was promoted to vice chairman of Mercury Information, the primary Black individual to carry an government place at a significant U.S. report firm.
Jones’ successes continued. Within the mid-’60s, he produced 4 million-selling singles and 10 High 40 hits for Lesley Gore, together with “It’s My Party.” He additionally organized Frank Sinatra’s iconic “Fly Me to the Moon.”
In 1964, he agreed to compose the music for director Sidney Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker.” It was the primary of greater than 30 movies that Jones would rating, a listing that included “The Deadly Affair,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!” and “The Getaway.”
Whereas the roles got here shortly, the undertow of racism within the business was all the time there, tugging at him.
When Jones was requested to write down the soundtrack for “In Cold Blood,” he mentioned Truman Capote, who wrote the bestselling guide the movie was based mostly on, tried to dam him from engaged on the movie.
“He said, ‘I just don’t understand why you want a colored man’s music in a film with no Negroes,’” Jones advised the San Francisco Chronicle in a 2008 interview. “I knew it was going to be hard for a Black guy to break into movies.”
The musical rating for “In Cold Blood,” although, earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1967, the primary of seven.
Jones was equally productive for tv, composing the theme music for “Sanford and Son,” “The Bill Cosby Show,” “Banacek” and “Ironside.”
His busy schedule additionally included the founding of his personal firm, Qwest Productions, and stints offering preparations for Peggy Lee, Vaughan, Billy Eckstine and Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra and his personal bands.
After producing the soundtrack for the 1978 movie “The Wiz” — which featured Diana Ross and Michael Jackson — Jones was approached by Jackson, who puzzled if he would produce his subsequent album.
Jackson’s report label initially stood in the way in which, frightened that Jones was a jazz man. Jackson pushed again, insisting he wished to work with Jones.
“Everybody said, ‘You can’t make Michael any bigger than he was in the Jackson 5,’” Jones recalled. “I said, ‘We’ll see.’”
The album, “Off the Wall,” was a important success, however the follow-up, “Thriller,” launched in 1982, turned the bestselling album of all time and earned eight Grammy Awards. Instantly, Jackson’s profession was kicked into the stratosphere, and Jones was thought to be the excessive priest of pop music.
5 years later, Jackson launched “Bad,” the third and remaining collaboration between the 2. It yielded 5 No. 1 hits.
Jackson, Jones mentioned, was the hardest-working performer he’d ever seen. To completely harness the emotional may that Jackson appeared to own, Jones mentioned he remodeled the recording studio right into a live performance stage by dimming the lights and urging Jackson to bounce whereas he recorded, as if a complete viewers have been bearing witness. Many years later, Jones was awarded $9.4 million after a Los Angeles jury decided he’d been shortchanged hundreds of thousands in royalties by Jackson’s property.
After the 1985 American Music Awards, Jones assembled a star-studded staff of musicians, from Ross to Bruce Springsteen, to report “We Are the World.” The tune turned one of many bestselling singles of all time and raised almost $70 million to help victims of the famine in Ethiopia.
However the workload, the stress and the burden of a crumbling marriage had taken a toll, and Jones broke.
He postponed all ongoing tasks, canceled his scheduled appearances and flew to Tahiti. Alone.
“I stayed for 31 days,” he advised The Occasions in 1989. “It was the most heavy 31 days of my life. I went all the way down. I just wandered from island to island. I was really in trouble.”
As he put the items again collectively, Jones mentioned he felt oddly renewed, as if he’d undergone a religious cleaning. “Sometimes you need God to just slap you and say, ‘Let’s take a look and see what’s going on here.’”
Again in L.A., he briskly resumed his profession. He fashioned Quincy Jones Leisure, a partnership with Time Warner, produced NBC’s “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” staged an inauguration live performance for President Clinton and commenced recording “The Q Series,” an bold anthology of Black American music. He additionally fashioned Qwest Broadcasting, which then was the biggest minority-owned broadcasting firm within the U.S.
In 1996, he produced the 68th Academy Awards telecast. Three years later, U2 lead singer Bono, singer-songwriter Bob Geldof and Jones met with Pope John Paul II as a part of an effort to erase the debt load shouldered by Third World nations. And in 2008, he was named a creative advisor to the 2008 Summer time Olympics in Beijing, a submit some urged him to reject in protest over China’s dismal human rights report.
The awards and honors bestowed on Jones have been almost mind-bending. He was nominated for a Grammy 80 occasions, successful 28. He obtained eight Academy Award nominations. He was the primary musician whom France honored as each Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame and he obtained Kennedy Middle Honors.
Jones’ Quincy Jones Basis distributed hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in Los Angeles and overseas to advance humanitarian causes and encourage arts training. Quincy Jones Elementary Faculty in South L.A. was named in his honor. When he attended the ribbon-cutting in 2011, he mentioned it introduced again recollections of when he first arrived in L.A.
Late in life, Jones mirrored on his mortality, telling The Occasions that he had deleted the names of 188 mates and associates from his iPhone in a single yr. All lifeless.
“You start out playing in bands and doing duets,” he mentioned. “And then you worry that in the end it’s all going to be a solo.”
Jones was married thrice, the longest to actress Peggy Lipton. He’s survived by seven kids, together with actor Rashida Jones.
Marble is a former Occasions editor. Occasions employees author Nardine Saad and former Occasions jazz critic Don Heckman contributed to this story (Heckman died in 2020).