Quincy Jones

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. (March 14, 1933 – November 3, 2024) was an American record producer, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer. 

Over the course of his career he received several accolades including 28 Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award and a Tony Award as well as nominations for seven Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards.

Jones came to prominence in the 1950s as a jazz arranger and conductor before producing pop hit records for Lesley Gore in the early 1960s (including "It's My Party") and serving as an arranger and conductor for several collaborations between the jazz artists Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. Jones produced three of the most successful albums by pop star Michael Jackson: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987). In 1985, Jones produced and conducted the charity song "We Are the World", which raised funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia.

Jones composed numerous films scores including for The Pawnbroker (1965), In the Heat of the Night (1967), In Cold Blood (1967), The Italian Job (1969), The Wiz (1978), and The Color Purple (1985). He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series for the miniseries Roots (1977). He received a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical as a producer for the revival of The Color Purple (2016).

Throughout career he was the recipient of numerous honorary awards including the Grammy Legend Award in 1992, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1995, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, the National Medal of the Arts in 2011, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2014, and the Academy Honorary Award in 2024. He was named one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time.

Early life

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born in the South Side of Chicago on March 14, 1933, the elder of two sons to Sara Frances (née Wells; 1904–1999), a bank officer and apartment complex manager, and Quincy Delight Jones (1895–1971), a semi-professional baseball player and carpenter from Charleston, South Carolina. Quincy Jr.'s paternal grandmother was an ex-slave from Louisville, and he later discovered that his paternal grandfather was Welsh.

Jones said, "He had a baby with my great-grandmother [a slave], and my grandmother was born there [on a plantation in Kentucky]. We traced this all the way back to the Laniers, the same family as Tennessee Williams." Learning that the Lanier immigrant ancestors were French Huguenots who had court musicians among their ancestors, Jones attributed some of his musicianship to them.

For the 2006 PBS television program African American Lives, Jones had his DNA tested, and genealogists researched his family history again. His DNA revealed he is mostly African, but also has 34% European ancestry on both sides of his family.

Research showed that he has English, French, Italian, and Welsh ancestry through his father. His mother's side is of West and Central African descent, specifically the Tikar people of Cameroon. His mother also had European ancestry, including Lanier male ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, making him eligible for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Among his ancestors is Elizabeth Washington Lewis, a sister of president George Washington.

Jones's family moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. Jones had a younger brother, Lloyd, who was an engineer for the Seattle television station KOMO-TV until his death in 1998. Jones was introduced to music by his mother, who always sang religious songs, and next-door neighbor Lucy Jackson. When Jones was five or six, Jackson played stride piano next door, and he would listen through the walls. Jackson recalled that after he heard her one-day, she could not get him off her piano.

When Jones was young, his mother had a schizophrenic breakdown and was sent to a mental institution. His father divorced her and married Elvera Jones, who already had three children of her own: Waymond, Theresa, and Katherine. Elvera and Quincy Sr. later had three children together: Jeanette, Margie, and Richard. The family moved to Bremerton, Washington, in 1943. Jones's father took a wartime job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

After the war, the family moved to Seattle, where Jones attended Garfield High School and developed his skills as a trumpeter and arranger. His classmates included Charles Taylor, who played saxophone and whose mother, Evelyn Bundy, was one of Seattle's first society jazz bandleaders. Jones and Taylor began playing music together, and at the age of fourteen, they played with a National Reserve band. Jones said he acquired more experience with music growing up in a smaller city due to the lack of competition.

Jones cited Ray Charles as an early inspiration for his own music career, noting that Charles overcame his blindness to achieve his musical goals. Jones credited his father's sturdy work ethic with giving him the means to proceed, and his loving nature with holding the family together. Jones cited his father's rhyming motto: "Once a task is just begun, never leave until it's done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all."

Jones earned a scholarship to Seattle University in 1951. After one semester, he transferred to what is now the Berklee College of Music in Boston on another scholarship. There, he played at Izzy Ort's Bar & Grille with Bunny Campbell and Preston Sandiford, whom he cited as important influences.

Career

1953–1959: Career beginnings with jazz music

In 1953, at age 20, Jones traveled with jazz bandleader Lionel Hampton for a European tour of the Hampton orchestra. He said the tour changed his view of racism in the United States, "It gave you some sense of perspective on past, present, and future. It took the myopic conflict between just black and white in the United States and put it on another level because you saw the turmoil between the Armenians and the Turks, and the Cypriots and the Greeks, and the Swedes and the Danes, and the Koreans and the Japanese. Everybody had these hassles, and you saw it was a basic part of human nature, these conflicts. It opened my soul; it opened my mind.

In early 1956, Jones accepted a temporary job at CBS's Stage Show hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey that was broadcast live from Studio 50 in New York City (known today as the Ed Sullivan Theater). On January 28, February 4, 11 and 18, as well as on March 17 and 24, Jones played second trumpet in the studio band that supported 21-year-old Elvis Presley in his first six television appearances. Presley sang "Heartbreak Hotel", which became his first No. 1 record and the Billboard magazine Pop Record of the year. Soon after, as a trumpeter and musical director for Dizzy Gillespie, Jones went on tour of the Middle East and South America sponsored by the United States Information Agency. After returning, he signed a contract with ABC-Paramount and started his recording career as the leader of his band. In 1957, he moved to Paris, where he studied composition and theory with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen and performed at the Paris Olympia. He became music director at Barclay, a French record company and the licensee for Mercury in France.

In the 1950s, Jones toured Europe with several jazz orchestras. As musical director of Harold Arlen's jazz musical Free and Easy, he took to the road again. With musicians from the Arlen show, he formed his big band, The Jones Boys, with eighteen musicians. The band included double bass player Eddie Jones and trumpeter Reunald Jones. None of the three were related. The band toured North America and Europe, and the concerts met enthusiastic audiences and sparkling reviews, but the earnings failed to support a band of this size. Poor budget planning resulted in an economic disaster. The band dissolved, leaving Jones in a financial crisis. "We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That's when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two." Irving Green, head of Mercury, helped Jones with a personal loan and a job as musical director of the company's New York division. He worked with Doug Moody, founder of Mystic Records.

Quincy Jones first worked with Frank Sinatra in 1958 when invited by Princess Grace to arrange a benefit concert at the Monaco Sporting Club. Six years later, Sinatra hired him to arrange and conduct Sinatra's second album with Count Basie, It Might as Well Be Swing (1964). Jones conducted and arranged Sinatra's live album with the Basie Band, Sinatra at the Sands (1966). Jones was also the arranger/conductor when Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Johnny Carson performed with the Basie orchestra in June 1965 in St. Louis, Missouri, in a benefit for Dismas House. The fund-raiser was broadcast to movie theaters around the country and eventually released on VHS. Later that year, Jones was the arranger/conductor when Sinatra and Basie appeared on The Hollywood Palace TV show on October 16, 1965. Nineteen years later, Sinatra and Jones teamed up for 1984's L.A. Is My Lady. Jones said,

Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.

1978–1989: Exploration into pop music

In 1978, he produced the soundtrack for The Wiz, the musical adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, which starred Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.

In 1982, he produced Jackson's Thriller, the bestselling album in the history of the music industry. While working on the film The Wiz, Michael Jackson asked Jones to recommend some producers for his upcoming solo album. Jones offered some names but eventually offered to produce the record himself. Jackson accepted and the resulting record, Off the Wall, sold about 20 million copies. This made Jones the most powerful record producer in the industry at that time. Jones and Jackson's next collaboration, Thriller, sold 65 million copies and became the highest-selling album of all time. The rise of MTV and the advent of music videos as promotional tools also contributed to Thriller's sales. Jones worked on Jackson's album Bad, which sold 45 million copies, and was the last time they worked with each other. Audio interviews with Jones are included in the 2001 special editions of Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad.

His 1981 album The Dude yielded the hits "Ai No Corrida" (a remake of a song by Chaz Jankel), "Just Once", and "One Hundred Ways", both sung by James Ingram. Marking Jones's debut as a film producer, 1985's The Color Purple received 11 Oscar nominations that year, including one for Jones's score. Jones, Thomas Newman, and Alan Silvestri are the only composers besides John Williams to have written scores for a Steven Spielberg-directed theatrical feature film. Additionally, through this picture, Jones is credited with introducing Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey to film audiences around the world.

After the 1985 American Music Awards ceremony, Jones used his influence to draw most of the major American recording artists of the day into a studio to record the song "We Are the World" to raise money for the victims of famine in Ethiopia. When people marveled at his ability to make the collaboration work, Jones explained that he had taped a sign on the entrance reading "Check Your Ego at the Door". He was also quoted as saying, "We don't want to make a hunger record in tuxedos", requiring all participants to wear casual clothing in the studio. In 1986, Jones started off Qwest Entertainment to produce theatrical feature films, through Qwest Film and Television. He launched a home video label, Qwest Home Video, in order to manage the home video titles made by the studio. Qwest Entertainment continued to operate their pre-existing subsidiaries like Qwest Records, Quincy Jones Productions and Qwest Music Publishing.

Activism

Jones's social activism began in the 1960s with his support of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Jones was one of the founders of the Institute for Black American Music (IBAM), whose events aim to raise enough funds for the creation of a national library of African-American art and music. Jones was also one of the founders of the Black Arts Festival in his hometown of Chicago. In the 1970s, Jones formed the Quincy Jones Workshops. Meeting at the Los Angeles Landmark Variety Arts Center, the workshops educated and honed the skills of inner-city youth in musicianship, acting, and songwriting. Among its alumni were Alton McClain, who had a hit song with Alton McClain and Destiny, and Mark Wilkins, who co-wrote the hit song "Havin' a Love Attack" with Mandrill and became National Promotion Director for Mystic Records.

For many years, Jones worked closely with Bono of U2 on a number of philanthropic causes. He was the founder of the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, a nonprofit organization that built more than 100 homes in South Africa and which aims to connect youths with technology, education, culture, and music. One of the organization's programs is an intercultural exchange between underprivileged youths from Los Angeles and South Africa.

In 2004, Jones helped launch the We Are the Future (WAF) project, which gives children in poor and conflict-ridden areas a chance to live their childhoods and develop a sense of hope. The program is the result of a strategic partnership between the Global Forum, the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, and Hani Masri, with the support of the World Bank, UN agencies, and major companies. The project was launched with a concert in Rome, Italy, in front of an audience of half a million people.

Jones supported a number of other charities, including the NAACP, GLAAD, Peace Games, AmfAR, and the Maybach Foundation. He served on the advisory board of HealthCorps. In July 2007, he announced his endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. With the election of Barack Obama, Jones said that his next conversation "with President Obama [will be] to beg for a secretary of arts." This prompted the circulation of an internet petition, asking Obama to create such a Cabinet-level position in his administration.

In 2001, Jones became an honorary member of the board of directors of the Jazz Foundation of America. He worked with the foundation to save the homes and lives of America's elderly jazz and blues musicians, including those who survived Hurricane Katrina. Jones was a spokesperson for the Global Down Syndrome Foundation, co-founded by his friend John Sie, which annually awards the Quincy Jones Exceptional Advocacy Award. He was also involved in the Linda Crnic Institute, improving the lives of people with down syndrome through advanced biomedical research.

Personal life

Marriages and family

Spouses:

• Jeri Caldwell (m. 1957; div. 1966)​
• Ulla Andersson, (m. 1967; div. 1974)​
• Peggy Lipton (m. 1974; div. 1990)​
• Nastassja Kinski (1992–1995)

Children -7, including 

• Quincy III, 
• Kidada, 
• Rashida, 
• Kenya

​Relatives Richard A. Jones (half-brother)

Jones was married three times and had seven children with five different women. He was married to Jeri Caldwell from 1957 to 1966, and they had a daughter named Jolie.

He had a brief affair with Carol Reynolds, and they had a daughter named Rachel.

He was later married to Swedish actress Ulla Andersson from 1967 to 1974, and they had a daughter named Martina and a son named Quincy, who also became a music producer.

The day after his divorce from Andersson, Jones married American actress Peggy Lipton. They had two daughters, Kidada, who was born before they were married, and Rashida, both of whom became actresses. Jones and Lipton divorced in 1990. 

He later dated and lived with German actress Nastassja Kinski from 1991 to 1995, and they had a daughter named Kenya, who became a fashion model.

In an interview with New York Magazine Jones stated that he dated Ivanka Trump.

In 1994, rapper Tupac Shakur criticized Jones for having relationships with white women, prompting Jones's daughter Rashida to pen a scathing open letter in response, which was published in The Source. Jones's daughter Kidada developed a romantic relationship with Shakur and had been living with him for four months at the time of his death, and they were engaged.

Death and legacy

On November 3, 2024, Jones died at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles at the age of 91. His publicist confirmed his death. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.

Celebrities and public figures paid their tributes online such as Michael Caine, Colman Domingo, Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Barack Obama, Will Smith and rapper LL Cool J. Other musicians that have paid tribute include David Guetta, Elton John, Darius Rucker, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Nile Rodgers, Kelly Rowland, Ice-T, Lenny Kravitz and Victoria Monét. Singer The Weeknd said on X that he was a kind person.

Brazilian musicians Simone, Ivan Lins and Milton Nascimento and percussionist Paulinho da Costa were close friends and partners in Jones's most recent works. Japanese film composer Mamoru Fujisawa, better known as Joe Hisaishi, formulated his alias as a kanji adaptation of "Quincy Jones".

Filmography

Film scores and soundtracks

• The Pawnbroker (Mercury, 1965)
• Mirage (Mercury, 1965)
• The Slender Thread (Mercury, 1965)
• Walk, Don't Run (Mainstream, 1966)
• "Hey Landlord Theme" (1966–67) in Hey Landlord TV series
• The Deadly Affair (Verve, 1967)
• Enter Laughing (Liberty, 1967)
• Banning (1967)
• In the Heat of the Night (United Artists, 1967)
• In Cold Blood (Colgems, 1967)
• A Dandy in Aspic (1968)
• The Counterfeit Killer (1968)
• Jigsaw (1968)
• For Love of Ivy (ABC, 1968)
• The Hell with Heroes (1968)
• The Split (1968)
• Mackenna's Gold (RCA Victor, 1969)
• The Italian Job (Paramount, 1969)
• The Lost Man (Uni, 1969)
• Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Bell, 1969)
• John and Mary (A&M, 1969)
• Original Sound Track: Cactus Flower (Bell, 1969) from Cactus Flower (1969)
• Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970)
• The Out-of-Towners (1970)
• Original Motion Picture Score: They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (United Artists, 1970) from They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970)
• Brother John (1971)
• The Anderson Tapes (1971)
• Honky (1971)
• "Sanford and Son Theme" in Sanford and Son
  – included in You've Got It Bad Girl (A&M, 1973)
• Dollars (Reprise, 1972) from Dollars (1971)
• The Hot Rock (Prophesy, 1972)
• The New Centurions (1972)
• "Love Theme From The Getaway" (A&M, 1973) in The Getaway (1972)
  – included in You've Got It Bad Girl (A&M, 1973)
• Roots: The Saga of an American Family (A&M, 1977) from Roots (1977)
• The Wiz original soundtrack (MCA, 1978) from The Wiz (1978)
• The Color Purple: Music From the Motion Picture (Quest, 1986) from The Color Purple (1985)
• Lola (2024)

Acting credits

• Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones  [d] (1990) – Himself
• Fantasia 2000 (1999) – Himself (segment "Rhapsody in Blue")
• Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) – Himself
• Sandy Wexler (2017) – Himself
• Quincy (2018) – Himself
• The Black Godfather (2019) – Himself
• Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth (2020) – Himself