Quincy Jones

Over more than eighty years in the music business, Quincy Jones built a singular legacy as one of American music’s true polymaths. From his start arranging charts in the early 1950s onward, he moved fluidly among roles as bandleader, featured performer, supporting musician, composer, producer, scorer of motion pictures, and head of a record company. The breadth of his collaborations—spanning Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Lesley Gore, Michael Jackson, Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Paul Simon, and Aretha Franklin—underscored how far his reach extended. He received a record 80 Grammy nominations and took home 28 trophies, among them Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Large Group or Soloist with Large Group for “Walking in Space” in 1969, Producer of the Year in 1981, and Album of the Year honors for Michael Jackson’s Thriller in 1983 and his own Back on the Block in 1990. Beyond the studio he produced feature films, helped develop television programs, and authored several books, one of which was the 2001 memoir Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, he remained active well into his ninth decade, contributing the track “Keep Reachin’” to the 2018 documentary Quincy: A Life Beyond Measure.

Born Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. in Chicago, Illinois, on March 14, 1933, he relocated with his family to Seattle, Washington, while still a child. There he cultivated a passion for music, taking up the trumpet in his early teens and performing vocals with a neighborhood gospel ensemble. Upon finishing high school in 1950 he earned a scholarship to Schillinger House in Boston, later renamed the Berklee School of Music. After one year he headed to New York City, where he began writing arrangements for Count Basie, Cannonball Adderley, Tommy Dorsey, Dinah Washington, and others. His first major performing opportunity arrived in 1953 when Lionel Hampton added him to the brass section of his orchestra alongside Art Farmer and Clifford Brown. Three years later Dizzy Gillespie brought Jones into his group, and later that same year selected him to direct an all-star international big band assembled for a State Department tour. Also in 1956 Jones issued his debut album under his own name, This Is How I Feel About Jazz, on ABC-Paramount.

In 1957 he settled in Paris to study composition and orchestration with Nadia Boulanger. While living in France he joined the staff of Barclay Records, producing and arranging dates for Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour as well as visiting Americans Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan. His work caught the attention of Mercury Records, then affiliated with Barclay, and in 1961 he was appointed a vice-president—the first African-American to hold such a position at a major American label. One of his earliest pop breakthroughs came when he produced and arranged Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party,” signaling a decisive move beyond jazz. He simultaneously freelanced, crafting several notable arrangements for Ray Charles on Atlantic. In 1963 he entered another arena by scoring Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, the first of thirty-three feature films for which he would compose music.

Work with Count Basie in 1964 led to arranging and conducting duties on Frank Sinatra’s It Might as Well Be Swing, recorded with Basie’s orchestra; Jones later reunited with the pair for the live album Sinatra at the Sands and, in 1984, produced and arranged Sinatra’s final studio effort, L.A. Is My Lady. Although occupied with composing, producing, and arranging through the remainder of the 1960s, he returned to the front of the stage in 1969 with Walking in Space. The record reframed his big-band roots inside the emerging fusion aesthetic while absorbing contemporary rock, pop, and R&B textures. Its title track earned a Grammy, and the album’s success relaunched Jones’s career as a recording artist in his own right. Around the same time he began collaborating more closely with pop figures, producing Aretha Franklin and scoring string arrangements for Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Some longtime jazz listeners charged him with abandoning the idiom, yet Jones maintained that his primary loyalty was to African-American musical traditions rather than any single genre. In 1991 he persuaded Miles Davis to revisit the Gil Evans charts from Miles Ahead, Sketches of Spain, and Porgy and Bess at the Montreux Jazz Festival; Jones organized the concert and conducted the orchestra, one of Davis’s final major appearances before his death several months later.

A cerebral aneurysm in 1974 nearly proved fatal. After recovering, Jones deliberately reduced his workload to devote more time to family. The projects he did accept during the late 1970s and early 1980s were often high-profile. He produced major hits for the Brothers Johnson and for Rufus & Chaka Khan, while his own albums—Body Heat, Sounds…And Stuff Like That!!, and The Dude—became star-studded affairs that yielded a Producer of the Year Grammy for The Dude. His most visible mainstream triumphs arrived through his partnership with Michael Jackson. Jones helmed Jackson’s breakthrough solo album Off the Wall in 1979 and the 1982 follow-up Thriller, which became the best-selling album in history. He remained involved for Bad in 1987, the USA for Africa benefit single “We Are the World” (co-written by Jackson and Lionel Richie), and a spoken-word album in which Jackson narrated the story of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Jones’s own 1989 release, Back on the Block, reached the pop Top Ten and collected five Grammys, including Album of the Year.

Having scaled the heights of the record industry, Jones shifted from scoring films to producing them beginning with the 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, directed by Steven Spielberg. In 1991 he moved into television with the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which introduced Will Smith as a lead actor. His production company subsequently developed additional series such as In the House and Mad TV. He organized a large-scale concert for President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration and received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 1995 Academy Awards. The following year he performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival to mark fifty years in music; the event was filmed and later issued on DVD.

Throughout the rest of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century Jones concentrated on his publishing interests, completed his autobiography, and served informally as a cultural ambassador for the United States. In 2004 he helped initiate the We Are the Future project, which aids children living in conflict zones worldwide. His first album in fifteen years, Q: Soul Bossa Nostra, appeared in 2010 and again featured an array of guest vocalists, among them Amy Winehouse and Usher. Three years later he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Ahmet Ertegun Award. He continued to work with younger artists including Emily Bear, Nikki Yanofsky, and Terrace Martin, and released the Chaka Khan collaboration “Keep Reachin’” for the 2018 documentary about his life. Quincy Jones died at his home in Bel Air, California, on November 3, 2024, at the age of 91.