From Elvis to Donna to Stevie: How hit legend Quincy Jones created superstars and changed pop history | Quincy Jones

OOver the course of 91 years, Quincy Jones has done just about everything you could do in the entertainment industry. He was a musician, arranger, composer, solo artist, record label executive, mogul, entrepreneur and producer of not just music but films and television – and, as captured in Chris Heath's extraordinary, headline-grabbing 2018 profile piece, Quincy Jones Has One Story about it, he knew everyone. “The ghetto Gump,” as he called himself and referred to Forrest, was the thread that connected Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis to Dr. Dre and the Weeknd connected; a musician who had performed with Elvis Presley and Amy Winehouse, Count Basie and Bono, Nat King Cole and Young Thug; the man who worked on Sinatra At the Sands and Harry Styles' Harry's House.

It's a resume like no other. How did he achieve it? He was clearly driven, perhaps the result of a difficult childhood. Born on Chicago's gang-ridden South Side during the Great Depression, Jones wandered into “the wrong neighborhood” at the age of seven, was stabbed in the hand with a switchblade and attacked with an ice pick. His mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Jones lived with his grandmother in Kentucky for some time, living in such poverty that he claimed they survived by eating rats. Then his father moved the family to Washington and remarried to a woman who Jones said was physically abusive.

Jones was also extremely talented while still in college, when he was asked to leave to work with vibraphonist and former Benny Goodman sideman Lionel Hampton. Hampton had formed his own orchestra, a big band skilled enough to survive the end of the swing era and master the rise of bebop and rhythm and blues with flying colors: a lesson in staying open-minded and engaging As time goes on, the suspects stayed with Jones.

When he moved to New York and began working as a freelance arranger, Jones' approach was admirably Catholic: his client list ranged from big band luminaries like Count Basie and Gene Krupa to stars of the jazz new wave – Clifford Brown and Cannonball Adderley among them – to rhythm and blues artist Big Maybelle, whose original version of Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On Jones arranged and produced.

His ability to move between genres may well have brought with it a degree of pragmatism. By the late '50s he had become a recording artist himself, leading bands with impressive musicians – a session for his second album included Charles Mingus, Milt Jackson, Art Farmer and Herbie Mann – but then he formed his own 18-piece band Als Sie in 1959 Performing as a big band in Europe, they achieved both critical acclaim and poverty. Determined to “learn the difference between music and the music business,” he took a job at Mercury Records, where his breakthrough came with Lesley Gore's 1963 teen pop anthem “It's My Party,” which was in a hurry was released to top a version of the same song that Phil Spector had recorded with the Crystals.

On the one hand, the youthful soap opera of this record could be viewed as a contradiction to the sophisticated and complex music Jones had released on his own recent albums. These included “The Quintessence” – home to an astonishing, breakneck version of Mingus' “Straight, No Chaser” – and “Big Band Bossa Nova”, which began with Jones' evergreen composition “Soul Bossa Nova”, now primarily used as a theme of the Austin Powers films.

On the other hand, perhaps one could tell that they were the work of the same man: after all, beneath the cheesy melodrama of the lyrics there was a distinctly Latin American touch in the rhythm of “It's My Party,” an elegance in the punchy horn arrangement. Plus, no one else in the music industry seemed to manage so easily between recording hit pop singles for teenagers, arranging and conducting the Count Basie Orchestra for a collaborative album with Frank Sinatra (1964's It Might As Well Be Swing), from publishing progressive jazz albums and marketing to a parallel career as a film composer.

The final aspect of Jones' career began with the soundtrack to Sidney Lumet's 1964 film The Pawnbroker and culminated with his work on the 1967 neo-noir crime film In Cold Blood. He faced both the objections of Columbia Pictures, who wanted Leonard Bernstein, and the racism of “In Cold Blood” author Truman Capote, who wanted someone who wasn't black to provide a range of sad, harrowing and often atonal music that a well-deserved Oscar nomination – he was the first African-American composer to be shortlisted.

Meanwhile, as the '60s turned into the '70s, his own albums began to lose their roots in pure jazz and instead offered a purist, frenzied cocktail of soul and funk with jazz harmonies and improvisations as well as atmospheric, slightly psychedelic orchestrations Blues guitar instruments juxtaposed with TV themes and stunning, lengthy reworkings of current hits: 1971's Smackwater Jack had its 10-minute version of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?, 1973's You've Got It Bad Girl had its magnificent reinterpretation by Summer In the City by Lovin' Spoonful.

Their line-up lists gradually became denser, as jazz musicians appeared alongside star singers and crack session players: 1974's Body Heat featured Herbie Hancock and Bob James alongside members of the Funk Brothers, the Tonto's synthesizer pioneers associated with Stevie Wonder Expanding Headband, Billy Preston, Minnie Riperton and Al Jarreau. This approach reached its peak in 1978 with “Sounds… And Stuff Like That!” – home to the wildly funky Stuff Like That, which featured Chaka Khan collaborating with Ashford and Simpson on vocals – and 1981's platinum-selling, triple Grammy-winning album The Dude, which spawned a string of hit singles including the fabulously sophisticated Post- Disco Funk by Razzamatazz could be the choice.

By the time The Dude was released, Jones had already begun contacting Michael Jackson. They met while working together on The Wiz, an African-American retelling of The Wizard of Oz. The three albums they made together would change pop history, and while Jackson's prodigious talent was clearly the star of the show Jones' fingerprints can be found all over the finished products.

It was Jones who hired former Heatwave keyboardist Rod Temperton as a songwriter – he contributed six tracks to “Off The Wall” and “Thriller”, including “Rock With You” and the title tracks of both albums – and Jones who knew how he approached Vincent Price for a suitably creepy monologue. On “Off The Wall” you could hear his jazz background seeping through into the sound of “I Can't Help It” and “She's Out of My Life” (a song Jones originally intended for Frank Sinatra) and his distaste recognize being limited by genre in the decision to place “Girlfriend” – a cover of a Paul McCartney-penned soft rock track from Wings' poorly received album London Town – in the middle of a supposedly disco album.

Thriller, meanwhile, carried a clear trace of Jones' pragmatism. If Jackson wanted to be the biggest star in the world, as he had claimed, his album had to have the broadest possible appeal, hence the duet with Paul McCartney and Eddie Van Halen's appearance on Beat It.

After his collaboration with Michael Jackson ended with the release of “Bad” in 1987 (later a dispute over royalties arose that ended in court and Jones bluntly accused Jackson of using Billie Jean's bass line from another of his productions, Donna Summers). Having stolen “State of Independence,” Jones continued to do extraordinary things: perhaps not on the scale of producing the best-selling album in the history of the music industry, but things that were assumed only he could do.

Jones somehow convinced the ailing Miles Davis to do the one thing he had always refused to do and revisit the music from his classic collaboration with Gil Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival, just weeks before his death in 1991. He was probably the only person who could record an album with a supporting cast that included Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Barry White and Ice-T. There have been extremely successful forays into television and film production. Jones was 84 when Chris Heath met him and said he had never been busier in his life: 10 films, six albums, four Broadway shows, a TV biopic, a documentary, all in the works.

He achieved so much that any posthumous tribute gives the impression that it only scratches the surface. Perhaps it's best to say that Quincy Jones could – and did – do anything. One can hardly imagine a more impressive epitaph for an artist.