Quincy Jones, famously called “Q” and the man who worked with musicians ranging from Count Basie to Frank Sinatra and redefined pop music with his collaborations with Michael Jackson, died at age 91 on Sunday at his home in Bel Air, California, United States surrounded by his children, siblings and other family members.
“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” the Jones family said in the statement. “And although 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. 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, were shared with the world through all that he created. Through his music and his boundless love, Quincy Jones’ heart will beat for eternity.” A statement by his publicist read.
There was little Jones did not do in a music career of more than 65 years. He was a trumpeter, bandleader, arranger, composer, producer and winner of 28 Grammy Awards.
A studio workaholic and a virtuoso at handling delicate egos, he shaped recordings by jazz greats such as Miles Davis, produced Sinatra, and put together the superstar ensemble that recorded the 1985 fundraiser “We Are the World,” the biggest hit song of its time.
Quincy Delight Jones Jr. also was a prolific writer of movie scores and co-produced the film “The Color Purple,” as well as the 1990s television show “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” which launched the career of Will Smith.
In 1971, Jones became the first Black musical director for the Academy Awards television broadcast. Later this month, Hollywood’s film academy will celebrate his career with an honorary Oscar to be presented at its annual Governors Awards.
Jones’ circle of friends included some of the best-known figures of the 20th century. He dined with Pablo Picasso, met Pope John Paul II, helped Nelson Mandela celebrate his 90th birthday and once retreated to Marlon Brando’s South Pacific island to recover from a breakdown.
Everything he did was stamped with his universal and undeniable hipness. U2 frontman Bono called Jones “the coolest person I’ve ever met.”
Jones’ most lasting achievements were in collaboration with Jackson. They made three landmark albums – “Off the Wall” in 1979, “Thriller” in 1982, and “Bad” in 1987 – that changed the landscape of American popular music. “Thriller” sold as many as 70 million copies, with six of the nine songs on the album becoming top 10 singles.
Quincy Jones was born March 14, 1933, in Chicago. As a boy, he aspired to be a gangster like those he saw in his rough neighborhood. He was 7 when his mother was taken to a mental institution. His father, a carpenter, remarried and moved the family to Bremerton in Washington state, where young Quincy pursued a life of petty crime.
Jones said his interest in music bloomed in Bremerton, when he and some friends found a piano after sneaking into the community center in the segregated wartime housing project where they lived.
He experimented with different instruments in the school band before settling on the trumpet and by 13 was playing jazz, popular music and rhythm-and-blues in nightclubs. In Seattle at age 14, Jones met 16-year-old Ray
Charles, not yet famous, who taught him to arrange and compose music.
Basie and trumpeter Clark Terry also would be mentors to the young Jones and he won a scholarship to what would become the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He gave it up, however, to go on the road with Lionel Hampton’s band as a teenage trumpet player in the early 1950s.
“Music was the one thing I could control,” Jones wrote in his autobiography. “It was the one world that offered me freedom … I didn’t have to search for answers. The answers lay no further than the bell of my trumpet and my scrawled, penciled scores. Music made me full, strong, popular, self-reliant and cool.”
In the late 1950s he went on U.S. government-sponsored tours around the world with a band organized by bebop jazz pioneer Dizzy Gillespie. Jones then led his own band through Europe. He was deeply in debt in the early 1960s when he took a job at Mercury Records in New York, becoming one of the first Black executives at a white-owned record company.
There, Jones ventured out of the jazz genre and produced his first hit single, “It’s My Party,” a Lesley Gore song that topped the U.S. pop chart in 1964.
Jazz purists called him a sell-out for making pop music but Jones later told Rolling Stone: “The underlying motivation for any artist, be it Stravinsky or Miles Davis, is to make the kind of music they want and still have everyone buy it.”
