Quincy Jones Obituary | Quincy Jones

From the 1980s, Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91, was best known for his work as a producer and arranger with Michael Jackson, not least because his efforts on Jackson's album Thriller helped make it one of the best-selling albums to make pop history. But the superstardom that surrounded his work with Jackson tended to obscure the fact that Jones' skills had many more layers.

He worked with jazz stars such as Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie, became a friend and collaborator of Frank Sinatra, and developed a flourishing career composing soundtracks for film and television. Under his own name, he found success in styles ranging from big band jazz and swing to pop, soul and funk. He became an influential executive in the music industry, a successful entrepreneur in film and television production and founded the music magazine VIBE.

He was born in Chicago to Quincy Jones Sr., a carpenter and semi-professional baseball player, and his wife Sarah (née Wells), a building manager. His parents divorced, Quincy Sr. remarried, and the family moved to Bremerton, Washington, and then to Seattle during World War II. Quincy Jr. began playing the trumpet and singing in a gospel quartet at age 12, and when he met teenager Ray Charles, who also lives in the Seattle area, Charles encouraged him to take an interest in arranging. A course at Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1951 prepared Jones for his first professional job with bandleader Lionel Hampton.

His experience touring with the Hampton band was an eye-opener. “You couldn't stay in white hotels, and for me, coming from Seattle, a lot of that was like a slap in the face,” he said. “Back then, all the black bands had white bus drivers so they could eat because you weren’t allowed to go to white restaurants. Even in Philadelphia there were segregated hotels.” Jones left Hampton in 1953 after accompanying the band on a European tour and meeting a notable cast of musicians, including trumpeters Clifford Brown and Art Farmer.

He set out to make a living writing arrangements for jazz greats like Basie and Tommy Dorsey. Although Jones took over as musical director for Gillespie's ensemble in 1956, he was aware that the days of big bands were numbered and that rock and roll was coming. “Funnily enough, Lionel Hampton was one of the bands who were serious about rock 'n' roll sensibilities before we even knew what the word meant,” Jones said.

In 1957 and 1958 Jones settled in France and Scandinavia. He continued to study composition—particularly with Nadia Boulanger, mentor to Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, and others—and took a job at Barclay Disques, the Paris-based subsidiary of Mercury Records. During his stay in Europe, he founded his own star-studded big band and toured Europe and the USA for two years. He wrote material for Count Basie and worked as an arranger and music director on recording sessions for singers such as Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan in the late 1950s and early '60s.

In 1964, Jones won his first Grammy for his arrangement of Count Basie's song I Can't Stop Loving You. He also produced four million-selling singles for Lesley Gore, including the US chart-topper and UK Top 10 hit It's My Party (1963). His hectic career was accompanied by an equally eventful personal life. In his memoir Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (2001), he described how he once dated five women at the same time.

His growing profile was boosted by collaborations with Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Andy Williams. Jones' collaboration with Sinatra produced the albums It Might As Well Be Swing (1964) and Sinatra at the Sands (1966), both with Basie's band. Jones and Sinatra became close friends, with Jones later writing that Sinatra was “hip, upright and straightforward and, above all, a monster musician.”

Jones' track record gave him access to the lucrative fields of film and television and he became the first black composer to gain acceptance in Hollywood. In the late '60s and '70s he was commissioned to write music for more than 30 films and hundreds of television shows. His better-known film projects include In Cold Blood (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Italian Job (1969) and The Getaway (1972). The theme of “Ironside” is his best-known work for the small screen, but his compositions for “The Bill Cosby Show,” “Sanford and Son” and his Emmy-winning work for the miniseries “Roots” have enjoyed continued popularity.

As the '70s progressed, Jones demonstrated his flair for keeping up with prevailing musical trends by delving into funk and disco music. His 1974 album Body Heat featured the Brothers Johnson as a rhythm section, and Jones went on to produce bestselling Brothers Johnson albums.

Although Jones underwent surgery to treat twin brain aneurysms in 1974, he continued to work at a breakneck pace. He produced chart-topping albums for disco queen Donna Summer and soul diva Aretha Franklin and found another musical soul mate in guitarist George Benson. Their collaboration on Give Me the Night (1980) – the debut release on Jones' Qwest label – was another milestone in her career: the album reached No. 3 on the US album charts, while the title track was a No. 4 single.

Meanwhile, Jones was scoring hits under his own name. He had a US top 30 hit with “Stuff Like That” (1978) and had a top 10 album with “The Dude” in 1981, which became the top 30 hit “Ai No Corrida” (#4 in the UK) and the Top 20 hits “Just” spawned Once and One Hundred Ways, both with James Ingram. In 1998, the hit film “Austin Powers” ​​sparked a revival of Quincy’s 1962 hip-shaker “Soul Bossa Nova”; It was also used as the theme for the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France.

Jones first met the then 12-year-old Michael Jackson at Davis Jr.'s house, but it was not until Jones was working on the soundtrack for the film The Wiz (1978), starring Jackson and Diana Ross, that he was invited to produce a Jackson solo Album. This was the 20 million selling Off the Wall (1979). Their collaboration continued with Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987), with the trio selling a total of 100 million copies. In between, Jones was also a natural choice to produce the 1985 charity single “We Are the World,” co-written by Jackson and Lionel Richie and performed by the all-star band USA For Africa to benefit famine victims in Ethiopia became.

Jones has been a key figure in helping musicians take control of the business side of their work. Like most other musicians, in the early years of his career he had become accustomed to having his royalties and copyrights appropriated by unscrupulous publishers or record companies. “When you write a song, releasing it is 50% of it,” Jones explained. “They would say, 'I want 50% of your creation,' so that means you get 25%. That was normal.” He saw the light of day when he took a job as an A&R man at Mercury Records in New York in 1961. Within two years, he was named vice president, making him the first high-ranking black executive at a major record label. “I had lost so much money having my band (the Jones Boys) in Europe that I had to go to a record company. So I said, 'I'd better pay attention to the other side because it's a music business.'”

After moving from Mercury to A&M Records, he founded Qwest, which became home to artists as diverse as New Order, Milt Jackson, the Winans and Tevin Campbell. Qwest also did excellent business with the soundtracks for Malcolm X (1992) and the rap generation film Boyz N the Hood (1991).

Jones grew into the role of entertainment mogul and co-produced Steven Spielberg's 1985 film The Color Purple and produced its soundtrack. In 1990 he founded Quincy Jones Entertainment with Time Warner Inc.; In 1991, he helped create the NBC television series The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which launched Will Smith to superstardom; and in 1993 he founded VIBE. He led a consortium of businessmen that formed Qwest Broadcasting, which bought television stations in Atlanta and New Orleans.

Jones won an Emmy, 28 Grammys and three Special Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Legend Award in 1992, received the Songwriters Hall of Fame's Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. He was showered with honorary doctorates, Time Magazine declared him one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century and in 1990 he was appointed Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and promoted to Commander in 2001.

He was celebrated in the film “Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones” (1990) and the documentary “Quincy” (2018), directed by his daughter Rashida.

Three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter, Jolie, by first daughter Jeri Caldwell; a daughter, Martina, and a son, Quincy, the second to Ulla Andersson; two daughters, Rashida and Kikada, the third to Peggy Lipton; and a daughter, Kenya, from a relationship with Nastassja Kinski and a daughter, Rachel, with Carol Reynolds.